This book is a shot in the “culture war” which has provided steady work for conservative commentators and “decolonising” radicals for years now. In his acknowledgments, Prof Nigel Biggar refers to the pressures he and his co-thinkers have felt, including shabby treatment by publishers, as “that hell”. I can sympathise with this, but cannot help noting that this is the last such indulgence of victimhood to be found in Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. From here on in, Biggar is at pains to tell those aggrieved by imperial land-grabbing, discrimination and repression to stiffen the lip, look on the bright side, stop feeling sorry for themselves, and realise that was all for the greater good. This points to a problem.
When Biggar first suggested an ethical audit of colonialism a number of historians (I was one of them) signed an open letter dissociating themselves from the project. Historians are wary of “moral reckonings”. Our interest is in working out why people behaved in various ways, why it made sense to them at the time.
People come to a subject like empire with powerful emotions and convictions. Many have family and community traditions that celebrate a long and painful struggle to overthrow colonial subjection. It would be quite wrong to expect anyone, as a price of admission to scholarship, to swallow a moral orientation that conflicts with their values of freedom and dignity. Exploring the conflicted past in a way that moves beyond caricature and crude binaries should never be confused with apology or justification.
The application of ethics to a historical reality might well have some worth in itself, if only as a curious version of the “trolley-bus problem”. You can have intellectual fun asking abstractly whether it could be justified to push a fat man in front of a trolley bus to save it from crashing into five people. Similarly, I suppose, you can wonder whether the Bengal Famine of 1943-1944 under British rule was a “necessary sacrifice” for the fight against fascism. It is a tasteless exercise, however. Real lives cannot simply be a matter of double-entry book-keeping. We can all agree that running marathons for charity is a ‘”good thing”, but none of that persuades us that Jimmy Savile was any less of a bad person.
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Colonialism might make an interesting if morally dubious case study if it was used to road-test various ethical theories. There are many to choose from: stoicism, the Sermon on the Mount, utilitarianism, the Kantian Categorical Imperative, and so on. One could weigh up their strengths and limitations. This is not Biggar’s approach, however. His aim is to defend colonialism, not to critique ethics, and he presents us instead with a simple dichotomy: between orderly if necessarily tough government on the one hand, horrible “anarchy” on the other.
Already the historian is dismayed. The state is not everything. What looks like anarchy is often self-regulation in various ways by pre-state, semi-state or sub-state societies: rough and ready, to be sure, but not intrinsically inferior. Biggar’s discussion of the Irish Famine is a case in point. It contains the usual talking points: the British administration had no desire to murder, the blight was a natural disaster, more food was imported than exported. Well and good. But the fact remains that by contemporary estimates there was not an absolute shortfall of food in Ireland. Potatoes failed, grain did not. The real problem was its distribution. People starved while horses and cattle thrived on oats. Firm government meant law, discipline, revolution averted and a million people dying of hunger. “Anarchy” might well have meant peasants holding back crops, violent class war, violation of property rights – and a much smaller body count. What price order?
Biggar is generous in the latitude he allows the imperial state. One footnote, in reference to the suppression of the southern Africa Ndebele warriors in 1893, defends burning of civilian villages and grain stores, shooting enemy soldiers in flight, even dynamiting caves where women and children were known to be hiding, as “justified by military necessity”, at least when it comes to collision between “very alien cultures… where there is no commonly recognised international law”. Such cold legalism and special pleading can never capture the moral sensitivities of atrociously cruel and unequal conflict.
Biggar goes to great lengths to defend his colonialists from the stigma of racism. His does this by narrowly defining it as a thoroughgoing biological determinism, which conveniently sits ill with Britain’s characteristic empiricism. He does not seem to realise that the same standard would also acquit many Nazi fellow-travellers and even party members.
Racism was always a “scavenger ideology” with consistency at a low premium. Colonialists typically reached for the nearest justification at hand, whether it be environmentalism, social evolution, historical circumstance and, yes, biological determinism, so long as the conclusion reached was the same: white Europeans were the human pinnacle. It is absurd to deny that this was the common sense of colonialism.
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Any historian who casts shade on colonial motives is accused of cynicism. What has happened to Lord Acton’s sensible (and Christian) dictum that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”? Dr Dazenove, writing of European empire in Africa in 1927, remarked that “power-crazy psychopaths are particularly numerous in the colonies… they belong to the large class of unbalanced individuals who seek out colonial life”. It shows precious little understanding of people and power to dismiss this kind of insight as merely “cynical”.
The truth is that colonialists were a melange of conscious motives and unconscious urges. They combined lofty ideals with sadism, self-sacrificing duty with avaricious greed, pious religiosity with sexual rapacity, honest rationalisation with sour prejudice, and always a large dose of bad faith.
It is unfashionable these days but perhaps the notion of “progress” would have been more helpful had Biggar taken it up. Naturally, colonialism contributed something to progress, here and there. Such is the rough course of history. But to fold this into an ethical apology is quite unwarranted. Writing about Britain in India, Karl Marx looked forward to a time when human progress might cease to resemble “that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain”. Biggar’s book, it seems to me, is an offering to that idol.
Dr Marc Mulholland is a tutor in modern history at St Catherine’s College, Oxford
