Nigel Biggar - Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2023

Copyright Nigel Biggar 2023

Cover design by Jo Thomson

Nigel Biggar asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008511630

Ebook Edition February 2023 ISBN: 9780008511654

Version: 2022-12-21

This scrupulous, fair-minded and scholarly analysis of the morality of colonialism offers welcome relief from the polemicists. It is vital reading both for historians and political theorists

VERNON BOGDANOR , Professor of Government, Kings College London and author of TheStrange Survival of Liberal Britain: Politics and Power before the First World War (2022)

In these days of academic group think, a vindictive cancel culture and a largely morally supine intelligentsia, few have the courage to wade in without fear or equivocation to tell uncomfortable truths that hysterical mobs scream down. With an open mind and indefatigable curiosity, in this brilliant and immensely readable book, Nigel Biggar looks with a clear eye at the good as well as the bad in unfairly traduced British Empire

RUTH DUDLEY EDWARDS , historian and author of The Seven: The Lives and Legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic (2016)

Nigel Biggar fearlessly goes where few other scholars now venture to tread: to defend the British Empire against its increasingly vitriolic detractors. He does not ignore the many blemishes on the face of British rule, but he demonstrates that there were profound differences between Britains empire and the totalitarian empires of Stalin and Hitler, against whom Britain fought all but alone in 1940 and 1941. Those who wish to accuse the Victorians of genocide who seek gulags in Kenya or Holocausts in the Raj will probably not risk being triggered by reading this book. But they really should. Not so much a history as a moral inquest into the colonial past, Biggars book simply cannot be ignored by anyone who wishes to hold a view on the subject

NIALL FERGUSON , Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author of Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)

If Nigel Biggar did not exist the world would have to invent him. Unapologetic and unafraid, Biggars willingness to scrutinise the moral issues of the day, and crucially, be scrutinised in return, is vital in a democratic society. History is not a chorus of pure voices but a cacophony of movements

AMANDA FOREMAN is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, writer and presenter of the BBC/Netflix documentary The Ascent of Woman, and author of A World on Fire: Britains Crucial Role in the American Civil War (2010)

This is a formidably well-researched assessment of the moral qualities of the British Empire that cuts clean through the distortions of the truth and the hysteria on which fashionable condemnation of the Empire depends. A mastery of the facts is combined with a lively historical imagination and the philosophical subtlety of a professor of moral theology to produce a book which is essential reading for anyone who wants to form a balanced judgement about the Empire

C. R. HALLPIKE , Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, McMaster University, Canada and author of Ethical Thought in Increasingly Complex Societies (2017) and Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society (2018)

Condemnations of colonialism, especially of the British variety, are two a penny these days. What is far rarer is a reasoned assessment of the British record of empire, conducted through a searching, historically informed, and evenly balanced analysis. This is what Nigel Biggar has given us, in a work of exemplary clarity and fairness. It is as necessary at the present time as it is persuasive

KRISHAN KUMAR , Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia, USA, and author of Visions of Empire (2017)

A hugely impressive ethical map of empire, based on an encyclopaedic reading of events and the literature around them. A very timely riposte to the ethically flawed and unhistorical campaign by Black Lives Matter and its apologists to conflate benevolent empire with slavery and, worse still, with Nazism

ZAREER MASANI , former BBC producer, historian, author of Macaulay: Liberal Imperialist (2013) and son of an Indian nationalist father

A view of history that one set of modern voices will find outrageous, another considers obvious and reasonable. Nigel Biggar offers here a persuasive assessment of the British empire as exhibiting good and bad, light and shade, selfish and unselfish motives. His moral analysis has enraged many academics and frightened some publishers. As a not-uncritical child of empire, I think his assessment is fair and accurate. Judge for yourself, but accept that it is important that this case should be put

MATTHEW PARRIS , columnist for The Times newspaper, born in Swaziland

It is a damning indictment of the state of freedom of speech in this country that a work of true scholarship as well-researched, rigorously argued and well written as Nigel Biggars Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning should have been nearly cancelled by a publisher. Any objective reader not blinded by woke prejudice will recognize that this important book is a serious and substantial contribution to one of the great debates of our times: whether we should be ashamed of our forefathers

ANDREW ROBERTS , the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Visiting Professor at the War Studies Department at Kings College London, and author of George III (2021)

A scrupulously honest reassessment of a controversial episode in world history, Colonialism is a refreshing addition to a historiography that has recently degenerated into a series of unexamined judgments and partisan narratives. With careful research, compelling arguments, and a text free from rhetoric, this impressive and very well-written book should further the debate on colonialism in a sensible way

TIRTHANKAR ROY , Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics and author of The Economic History of India 18571947 (2020) and The Economic History of Colonialism (2020)

The British Empire has recently become the focus of a divisive campaign to rewrite British and Western history as a story of slavery, racism and shame. This is too important an issue to be ignored. In this uncompromising and compelling book, Nigel Biggar contests damaging falsehoods and provides a searching discussion of the core ethical questions that arose from the complex experience of empire, and which still trouble us today