Cruel Britannia?
Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning
By Nigel Biggar
William Collins 480pp £25
Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner is an aphorism variously attributed to Spinoza, Madame de Staël and Tolstoy. But Biggar’s quest for understanding has not made him an uncritical admirer of Britain’s empire or any other one. He acknowledges that colonialism severely disrupted existing patterns of indigenous life. It was often achieved or maintained through violence and injustice. In the last analysis, all states maintain themselves by force or the threat of it. Government, imperial or domestic, has always involved light and shade, achievement and failure, good and evil. Biggar’s point is that it falsifies history to collect together everything bad about an institution and serve it up as if it were the whole.
Biggar makes three broad points by way of mitigation when it comes to the British Empire’s legacy. First, many of the worst things were not the result of ideology or calculated policy. They were abuses which were recognised as such and addressed, not always successfully. Second, the disruption brought benefits as well as suffering. Practices such as slavery, cannibalism, sati and human sacrifice, which were by any standards barbarous, were eliminated. The ground was laid for an economic and social transformation that lifted much of the world out of extremes of poverty. Third, the British brought not just disruption but also the rule of law, constitutional government, honest administration, economic development and modern educational and research facilities, all long before they would have been achieved without European intervention.
Biggar takes his agenda from the Empire’s critics. He deals in turn with each of the principal criticisms, starting with slavery and going on to address racism, cultural aggression, population displacement, economic exploitation, authoritarianism and political violence. He confronts the famous horror stories: the Opium Wars, the Benin expedition, the Amritsar massacre, the suppression of the Mau Mau in Kenya. In each case, he sets out the historical context, which is so often absent. He acknowledges the respects in which the charges are justified, but points out in what respects they are unjustified or exaggerated. There are a few places where Biggar may be accused of tendentious selection or special pleading. But in general, his approach is objective and he fairly addresses the contrary arguments.
A good example is the chapter on slavery, which touches on perhaps the most sensitive and controversial issue of all. Biggar does not for a moment seek to defend the Atlantic slave trade, and recognises that it was imperialism that made it possible. It created the markets for slaves, the fleets which transported them and the legal and administrative framework that kept them in subjection. But if imperialism made slavery possible, it also enabled its suppression when sentiment changed. For a society such as Britain’s, imbued with Christian moral teaching, the trade was defensible only on the footing that black people were not really human. It was the rejection of that notion which transformed English attitudes to slavery in the course of the 18th century. Domestic slavery was banned in common law in the 1770s. After a long campaign by evangelical Christians, the slave trade was criminalised by statute in 1807 and slavery itself abolished throughout the British Empire in 1834. The Foreign Office and the Royal Navy campaigned for its international suppression throughout the 19th century. Britain was decades ahead of the rest of Europe and the United States in recognising the moral case against slavery and taking active steps to suppress it. The size, reach and diplomatic and naval power of the British Empire were by far the most significant factors in the demise in less than a century of an institution that had subsisted across the world throughout history.
Unless we draw up a balance sheet of empire, we will never understand one of the most significant forces in the making of the modern world. Inevitably, it will be an incomplete balance sheet. There will be credits and debits, but no bottom line. This is because, as Biggar points out, the good and bad things about empire are incommensurate.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/cruel-britannia
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