Colonialism
A Moral Reckoning
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The Sunday Times Bestseller
A new assessment of the West’s colonial record
In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the ‘End of History’ – that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever.
Now however, with Russia rattling its sabre on the borders of Europe and China rising to challenge the post-1945 world order, the liberal West faces major threats.
These threats are not only external. Especially in the Anglosphere, the ‘decolonisation’ movement corrodes the West’s self-confidence by retelling the history of European and American colonial dominance as a litany of racism, exploitation, and massively murderous violence.
Nigel Biggar tests this indictment, addressing the crucial questions in eight chapters: Was the British Empire driven primarily by greed and the lust to dominate? Should we speak of ‘colonialism and slavery’ in the same breath, as if they were identical? Was the Empire essentially racist? How far was it based on the theft of land? Did it involve genocide? Was it driven fundamentally by the motive of economic exploitation? Was undemocratic colonial government necessarily illegitimate? and, Was the Empire essentially violent, and its violence pervasively racist and terroristic?
Biggar makes clear that, like any other long-standing state, the British Empire involved elements of injustice, sometimes appalling. On occasions it was culpably incompetent and presided over moments of dreadful tragedy.
Nevertheless, from the early 1800s the Empire was committed to abolishing the slave trade in the name of a Christian conviction of the basic equality of all human beings. It ended endemic inter-tribal warfare, opened local economies to the opportunities of global trade, moderated the impact of inescapable modernisation, established the rule of law and liberal institutions such as a free press, and spent itself in defeating the murderously racist Nazi and Japanese empires in the Second World War.
As encyclopaedic in historical breadth as it is penetrating in analytical depth, Colonialism offers a moral inquest into the colonial past, forensically contesting damaging falsehoods and thereby helping to rejuvenate faith in the West’s future.
About the author
NIGEL BIGGAR is Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, where he directs the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life. He holds a B.A. in Modern History from Oxford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Christian Theology & Ethics from the University of Chicago. Before assuming his professorship at Oxford, he occupied chairs in at the University of Leeds and at Trinity College, Dublin. He was appointed C.B.E. in the 2021 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.
His most recent publications include What’s Wrong with Rights? (Oxford, 2020), Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation (James Clarke/Wipf & Stock, 2014), and In Defence of War (Oxford, 2013).
Customer Reviews
Curate’s egg
4.5 stars
The author is British, an Anglican theologian and priest, who is Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Christ Church, Oxford. He has penned a number of titles on ethics, human rights, patriotism, and empire.
1989 was not the “end of history,” as suggested by those convinced the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured in perpetuity. The liberal democratic world order, such as it is, faces challenges both external and internal. Here, Biggar addresses a prominent internal one: the corrosion of Western self confidence by those who frame the history of European and American colonialism as dominated by racism, exploitation and genocide inflicted on client states for material gain of the oppressor. (Sound familiar?)
The book is part history and part rebuttal, like one might see in a court of law, of the almost pervasive anti-Western cultural narrative that exists today. The author’s thesis is that colonialism was not all bad. Indeed, many aspects of British colonialism in particular (the rule of law, courts, education systems) live on in the former colonies to their benefit. He discusses, almost in passing, the many deficiencies of non-white colonial powers, but concentrates on the British empire, where detailed analysis of the facts, rather than cherry-picking them, reveals a different story than Gen Z has been led to believe.
Biggar never denies mistakes were made, mistakes which impacted adversely, sometimes fatally, on subjects of the empire, and discusses a number of them. However, he makes a convincing, evidence-based case that systematic racism at an official level did not exist. Indeed, British interest and support saved Hinduism from extinction, and Britannia spent considerably more time and money shutting down the Atlantic slave trade than it made from it. Marxist and similar re-interpretations are at odds with available written records, and there’s no end of those. (The notes and references section makes up 40% of the book.)
The prose is clear for a lay reader, although Prof Biggar does repeat himself more than I thought necessary, for which I deducted half a star. I’m an old white guy though. Opinions on this book will differ depending on your wokeness index.