Colonialism: a Moral Reckoning contains a lot of history. If it does nothing else, I hope it will inform Britons, young and old, of the whole truth about our three-hundred-year career of imperial endeavour all over the world. For it tells not only of the tragic, lamentable and abhorrent elements, but also of the heroic, admirable, and humanitarian ones. It offers those who identify themselves as British cause, not only for shame, but also for pride.
So, readers will learn—if they really need to learn—about the 150 years of British involvement in slave-trading and slavery, justified by the racist belief that black Africans were naturally inferior.
But they will also be reminded that slavery was an ancient and universal institution, such that even slaves who escaped into the mountainous forests of Jamaica kept slaves of their own in the 1700s—as did freed slaves in the American south up until the eve of the civil war in 1860.
They will be reminded, too, that Britain was one of the earliest states in the history of the world to abolish the slave-trade and slavery within its territories, on the basis of a Christian and Enlightenment conviction of the basic equality of all human beings, regardless of race and relative cultural development.
Britain then used its imperial power for the next 150 years to suppress the slave-trade and slavery from Brazil, across Africa, as far as Malaysia. In the 1820s and 30s the slave trade department was the largest unit in Britain’s foreign office. And in the mid-1800s the Royal Navy devoted 13% of its total manpower to stopping the Atlantic trade alone.
And, yes, readers will read about Britain’s unjustified belligerency against the Qing Empire in the Opium Wars of the mid-1800s; about the bloody vengefulness of some British in suppressing the Indian Mutiny of 1857; and about the disproportionate use of force by General Dyer in 1919 when he kept his 50 Gurkha and Indian troops firing into what happened to be an unarmed crowd of 25,000 people in Amritsar for an unrelenting six to 15 minutes.
But they will also be reminded that the British Empire was at its most violent during the Second World War, when from May 1940 to June 1941 it offered the only military opposition—with the sole exception of Greece—to the massively murderous racist regime in Nazi Germany.
When Churchill decided to keep Britain and her empire at war with Germany after the fall of France in May 1940, he really did not do it for profit.
But Colonialism: a Moral Reckoning is not primarily about the past; it is about the present and the future. Or rather, it is about the past only because it is about the present and future.
Let me explain.
In May 2015 I published an article in the Scottish Review, offering a moral justification for Britain’s nuclear deterrent. In response, early the following year Michael Fallon, then Secretary of State for Defence, invited me into the Ministry of Defence to talk about Scottish nationalism and Trident.
As I was taking my leave, Michael asked me what I was planning on doing next, and I replied that I was thinking of writing about the British Empire. I have no idea what Michael thought, because his face betrayed nothing. But I do remember thinking to myself, ‘Oh my goodness, that must sound really eccentric’.
This was seven years ago, remember: long before the current ‘decolonising’ rash broke out.
But the connection was this. As an Anglo-Scot, I had had a unionist dog in the fight that was the 2014 referendum campaign on Scottish independence. During it, I had been struck by a remark by Jim Gallagher, one of the brains behind ‘Better Together’ movement, namely, that the nationalists had all the uplifting music, all the romance—whereas unionists seemed able only to talk in the monochrome, transactional terms of pounds and pence.
Ever since then, with due respect to Gordon Brown, I have been sceptical that further tinkering with constitutional structures would succeed in puncturing the demand for independence. That is because Scottish independence is a solution in dogged search of an adequate problem, a faith in dogmatic search of a rationale.
And that faith is generated by an exhilarating tale of a new-born Scotland cleansing itself of a clapped-out Britain, which has been discredited by its imperial abuse of hard power, and is embarrassing itself as it totters across the world stage like some sorry, faded actress (I paraphrase Tom Nairn).
The truth, however, is quite different. Britain today is generally wealthier, healthier, more secure, less class-conscious and less racist than it has ever been. It remains an important, if secondary, pillar of the liberal democratic West. And not many things would delight the West’s totalitarian enemies in Moscow and Beijing more that to witness the disintegration of the UK. Recalling the final days of the referendum campaign in September 2014, the then British ambassador to the UN has written: “My Russian opposite number sympathised with barely suppressed glee at the prospect of the UK dismembered and its permanent seat on the security council called into question. It was clear to me that Scottish independence would have had a devastating impact on the UK’s standing in the world, much greater than withdrawal from the EU ever would”.
Therefore, it is vital to the cause of keeping the UK together, sustaining the West, and so diminishing the appetite for independence among Scots, that the more admirable truth about Britain’s three hundred years of imperial engagement with the world be told. For only so will young, liberal, humanitarian Scots find the idea of Britain attractive, want to identify themselves with it, and think of themselves as British.
That is one way in which the story my book tells about Britain’s imperial, colonial past is important for her present and our future—and for the present and future of the West in general.
Another is this:
In 1976 the Baghdad-born Jewish historian, Elie Kedourie, published his book, the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth. in this he wrote: “No doubt, great powers do commit great crimes, but a great power is not always and necessarily in the wrong; and the canker of imaginary guilt even the greatest power can ill withstand”.
The guilt he had in mind was the conviction that the British had betrayed the Arabs in permitting Jewish immigration into Palestine after the First World War, since they had promised that Palestine would be part of a new Arab state.
Kedourie argues convincingly, I think, that Britain had in fact made no such promise and betrayed no one. Nevertheless, the canker of imaginary guilt had come to infect the British Foreign Office, to weaken British self-confidence, and to misshape British foreign policy.
Today, we are again succumbing to a fresh and more general guilt about our colonial past, which is determining the decisions and policies of our cultural institutions, weakening the soft international power of the Crown, and making us vulnerable to infinite claims of reparation for ancient wrongs.
(You should be aware that almost every one of the 15 chapters of Sir Hilary Beckles’ 2013 book, Britain’s Black Debt, takes care to open by quoting a member of a recent British Labour cabinet or shadow cabinet. Should Labour win the next general election, we can expect the demand for reparations to gain traction in government.)
By telling the whole truth about Britain’s imperial past, the good as well as the bad, my book contradicts the false equation of British colonialism with slavery and racism, in order to cure the British of the canker of imaginary guilt at a time when the liberal West needs to keep all of its pillars standing.
In his 1942 novel, The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil mused on the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of the First World War. He wrote: “However well founded an order may be, it always rests in part on a voluntary faith in it. Once this faith is used up, the collapse soon follows; epochs and empires crumble no differently from business concerns when they lose their credit”.
Colonialism: a Moral Reckoning aims to restore credit to Britain’s past, in order to inspire faith in Britain’s future. That is what it is really about.
Nigel Biggar is Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford University and the author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. You can listen to an interview with Nigel and the Editor on the Aspects of History Podcast.
