The Truth about Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism, Alan Lester (ed.), Hurst, £25.

If the ‘find function’ on my computer can be trusted, the name of Nigel Biggar appears 376 times in Alan Lester’s edited volume, The Truth about Empire. Sixteen historians have assembled to present their ‘Real Histories of British Colonialism’ in 14 chapters, all adhering to the same structure. The offending pages of Biggar’s controversial book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, are pored over, quibbled, disputed, denounced. Errors are identified: sometimes pedantic, sometimes substantial, sometimes not really errors at all. All this comes on the heels of the second edition of Biggar’s Colonialism, which devotes a new postscript, of 70 lavish pages, to a no-holds-barred response to his critics. One wonders how long the next edition of Colonialism will have to be if it wishes to answer all the charges made in Lester’s Anti-Biggar. Blast and counterblast. We have a Historikerstreit on our hands.

Like the original Historikerstreit, which occupied West German letters in the 1980s about how to incorporate the Nazi period into German historiography, this one turns on the question of how a country should relate to its past. Like the original Historikerstreit, it has much more to do with present politics than serious historical inquiry. Perhaps personality-politics also enters the field of view: there is certainly no love lost between the two sides. Lester and Biggar had a head-to-head last year in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. Some of Biggar’s comments about Lester are scathing: ‘it may be that Professor Lester is unfamiliar with epistemic moral failure – and unforgiving of it – because he has never recognised it in himself’. The feelings are mutual: Lester, apparently, was among the first to rate Colonialism on Amazon, giving it a cold one out of five stars. Lester evidently thinks that Biggar, an ethicist and theologian by training, is a force for ill in the world of colonial historiography ­– which is why he has marshalled a legion of his fellow-historians to drive him out of it.

Both sides of this debate lay it on thick when presenting what’s at stake. For Biggar, the whole debate is about the ‘perception and self-confidence of the British today’; by incessantly talking down Britain’s imperial past, Lester and his ilk are an ‘ally – no doubt inadvertent – of Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia and the Chinese Communist Party’. Lester, for his part, has cast himself as a brave voice of dissent against a ‘government backed culture war’ (one which the new British government says it will abandon). It remains to be seen whether their contributions to the public discourse will have their desired impact: academics seldom change the world, especially nothing as intimate as national identity and historical feeling. But in an age where so much intellectual discourse is cramped and stale, debates like these are to be welcomed. They are, if nothing else, quite good fun.

In the tradition of Oxford Anglicans, Nigel Biggar saw the light in Rome. It was there in 2017, sipping an americano in Trastevere, that he pulled out an article by Bruce Gilley in Third World Quarterly named ‘The Case for Colonialism’, read it, and read it again. Gilley’s article had become something of a cause-célèbre for academic freedom: its publication resulted in the resignations of 15 members of the journal’s board, and it was eventually retracted altogether in the face of death threats. Biggar praises Gilley for having ‘dared to give bold voice to unfashionable things that I had long thought but (largely) suppressed’: so moved was he by this show of intellectual courage that he wrote for The Times in his defence. Then ‘all hell broke loose, as I found myself plunged into the “culture war” over colonialism’. The aura of unintentionality, of victimhood, retains its force: ‘thus did I stumble, blindly, into the Imperial History Wars’.

‘Plunged’, ‘stumble’, ‘blindly’: the professor is hard at work to surrender his control over events. There is little ‘stumbling’ afoot in Colonialism, which marches towards its conclusions and picks plenty of fights along the way. And how ‘suppressed’ were Biggar’s thoughts about empire prior to 2017, anyway? By then Biggar had already dipped his toe into the imperial ‘culture wars’ during the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ debate at Oriel College, Oxford, where he had previously served as chaplain. He had already been thinking hard along imperial themes as co-convenor of the ‘Ethics and Empire’ project. It is entirely plausible that Biggar had not foreseen the vitriol in the empire debate when he decided to participate in it; but he was not dragooned into it, like an unworldly monk reluctant to take up the sword. Nor is he a political tabula rasa or a culture-wars honest-broker, a mantle that he occasionally tries to take up for himself on such spurious grounds as having voted Remain (‘just’) in 2016, and having once been a subscriber to the Guardian. Biggar is a culture warrior. Instead of evading that label, he ought to wear it with pride: he would surely agree, after all, that culture is worth fighting for.

All this is frustrating because Biggar’s great virtue in Colonialism is that he generally puts his cards on the table. Aside from these rare lapses into passive-voice, he tends to be honest about what he’s doing. Colonialism is an explicitly political work: ‘not a history of the British Empire but a moral assessment of it’. Biggar makes no attempt to deny that it matters who is making that ‘moral assessment’, and that, in this case, it is being made by a Christian, a conservative, and – crucially – a stout supporter of an interventionist foreign policy.

Colonialism isn’t Biggar’s first rodeo. He is no stranger to controversy. He passionately defended the Iraq War on humanitarian grounds – one reference to the savagery of Saddam Hussein’s regime even finds its way into Colonialism – and justified the war well after the bulk of established opinion had abandoned the cause. This is the politics at play in Colonialism. The moral lessons of Iraq, as Biggar sees them – for example, that ‘the letter of international law’ need not always be followed – obviously informs his moral judgements about the 19th century. Part of Colonialism is devoted to a scrap with the Oxford archaeologist Dan Hicks, concerning the Benin Expedition of 1897. Biggar seems genuinely appalled by Hicks’s ‘nonchalant’ admission that human sacrifice might have occurred in Benin, but that (in the language of 2003) it was wrong for Britain to cynically exploit a ‘“human rightist” justification for unprovoked regime change’. Both sides, in other words, appear to treat this episode in imperial history as a proxy for a debate about Iraq. Biggar’s ‘neoconservatism’, if people still call it that, also helps us to understand why he feels there to be so much at stake. An over-critical attitude towards Britain’s imperial past may run the risk of diminishing the country’s capacity to be a force for good in the world today: it may make us more skittish about resorting to force. One must defend the empire, Biggar argues, to prevent what the historian Elie Kedourie called ‘the canker of imaginary guilt’ from crippling ‘the self-confidence of the British… in their role as important pillars of the international order’.

Given that these are the closing words of Colonialism, it’s astonishing how few of Biggar’s critics have understood his underlying intellectual project. He’s hardly subtle about it. In Lester’s Anti-Biggar, the professor is generally painted as a kind of Brexity Little Englander, suffering from an irrational bout of ‘imperial nostalgia’. Their cause isn’t helped by their failure to recognise what type of politics they’re arguing against – probably more Tony Blair than Nigel Farage – nor by their attempts to substitute for this set of political values a medley of unconvincing psychological speculations.

To put my own cards on the table, for a moment, I actually have more sympathy with the underlying neoconservative politics of Colonialism than I do with the book itself, finding it difficult to disagree with Kenan Malik’s judgement that ‘where it proves impossible’ for Biggar ‘to locate a nugget of good’ in the empire, ‘he seeks instead to find exonerating circumstances for the bad’. At the same time, though, Biggar’s work speaks to his personal courage and integrity. Lester whines that ‘the pressure to “cancel” academic research on colonialism now seems to come mainly from the populist right wing of the culture war’: but as far as I am aware, no publishers scrapped plans to publish The Truth about Empire, as Bloomsbury did with Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning.

Like those on the other side, Biggar often refuses to understand what lies behind his opponents’ arguments. It is doubtless true that some ‘anti-colonial’ historians ‘go with the flow’ because a certain type of politics is ‘fashionable’ and ‘opens doors to posts, promotions, and grants’. It may even be the case that some academics in these fields are rabid political activists. There are others, though – Lester himself is among them, as other contributors to this volume certainly are – who are serious and competent historians, forming their opinions on the basis of evidence. It is never wise to ascribe all criticism to ulterior motives: aside from anything else, such an attitude dulls the impact of pointing out such motives when they really do rear their head.

The original Historikerstreit spawned an enormous literature as a subject of historical study in its own right, and perhaps this one will, too. Future historians, when they turn a scholarly eye to the intellectual debates that engulfed Britain in the first half of the 2020s, will be puzzled by the general incoherence of this one, and frustrated by how little each side seems to understand what motivates the other. They will, however, be grateful that Biggar has added to his book a lengthy appendix responding to his critics point-by-point. I confess that I think this was a poor move, both strategically and intellectually. The original edition of Colonialism was already heavy on academic squabbling, much of it buried away in the endnotes. Little in this postscript is new; most of it is rebarbative. Biggar never qualifies his arguments in any substantial way: he backpedals on a single, superficial claim (pertaining to a quotation attributed to Cecil Rhodes) in the light of new evidence supplied by Lester, and doubles down on all the rest. There may be something to be said, when entering (or ‘stumbling into’) the culture war, for letting one’s work speak for itself: for saying, like Chaucer at the close of Troilus and Cresyde, ‘go litel boke, go, litel myn tragedye’. In any case, the postscript was never going to settle the matter, and the gunfire keeps on roaring. ‘The professor’, Tim Stanley wrote in his review of Colonialism, is ‘spoiling for a fight, and I fear he’s going to get one.’

Edited volumes are unwieldy things. It’s hard to make so many people with different perspectives sing from the same hymn-sheet. One of the best chapters of the Anti-Biggar, by Richard Huzzey, offers a compelling critique of the ‘History Reclaimed’ group, to which Biggar belongs. He sanely asserts that ‘historians are not the only stakeholders in what history means to present society’: this is an important thing for the academic historians to concede in their debate with the non-historian Biggar. But the Anti-Biggar is still marketed as ‘recentring the views of historians’, as though historians – the ‘grown-ups in the room’, so to speak – ought to have a monopoly on determining how the past be interpreted today, and as though they speak in unison.

This is the course charted by Sathnam Sanghera in his introduction to the volume. It reads as a rushed rehashing of his own forays into the imperial culture wars, a bingo card of all the mindless clichés of what I have elsewhere called the ‘imperial miasma’ genre. ‘Imperial nostalgia’ is here, of course, and so too is an oblique reference to Michael Gove having enough of experts. Rishi Sunak comes under fire for criticising efforts to ‘unpick our history’, ‘seemingly not comprehending that “unpicking” history is exactly what all historians do’. This fatuous line is a favourite of Sanghera’s; he seemingly does not comprehend that ‘unpicking’ has two distinct meanings. The first is a synonym for ‘analyse’; the second involves some kind of value judgement, ‘to analyse in order to find faults’. It is the historian’s task to do the first of these jobs; historians ought to resist the temptation to do the second.

In the final chapter of the Anti-Biggar, Margot Finn tries to ‘unpick’ Colonialism in the second sense. She rummages around the book in search of methodological faults, never quite finding a smoking gun. Some of her criticisms are petty: it hardly matters that Biggar neglects ‘photography, film, media, and material culture’. Likewise, by judging his book according to the criteria of academic historiography, rather than as a work of politics and moral philosophy, Finn rather misses the point. As Huzzey rightly says, academic historiography is not the only way for one to meaningfully engage with the past; clearly Biggar, by his own admission, is playing a different game, as befits his training as an ethicist and theologian. Finn’s sticklerism might also have been more compelling if it didn’t appear in a book that commences with praise for the work of Jenny Bulstrode, for whose cause Lester has been a passionate advocate.

It will suffice to say that Finn’s high standards for historical research would, if applied to some of her fellow contributors, leave the book slenderer. While some chapters are learned and insightful, others fall short of the mark. In her essay on the slave-trade, Bronwen Everill quibbles aspects of Biggar’s discussion of that subject without ever successfully ‘unpicking’ his central claim, that ‘for the second half of its life, anti-slavery, not slavery, was at the heart of imperial policy’. One comes away from her chapter feeling more certain that this was indeed the case, perhaps with the odd caveat here and there. Some of her reasoning doesn’t cut the mustard. She sets out to debunk the apparent myth that ‘everyone had slavery’: ‘No’, she says, ‘wealthy people’ had slavery. Of course everyone already knew this; and there is something circular about saying that the only people who committed a certain vice were those who had the means to do so. Similar special pleading occurs in Andrea Major’s chapter on sati. ‘Despite only affecting a tiny proportion of British India’, she tells us, ‘sati has received disproportionate attention in western depictions of India, both at the time and since.’ This amounts to saying: what about all those widows who weren’t burnt alive. It is not clear what the ‘proportionate’ attention would have looked like.

Both Everill and Major complain that non-British bad behaviour – slavery in the former case, sati in the latter – was cynically exploited by the British to justify imperialism. Everill laments that the campaign to eradicate slavery from the world allowed Britain to ‘create a role for itself in the 19th-century world as a moral policeman’ (2003 wafts into the air once more). One is tempted to ask: ‘if you were transported to, say, 1840 – not 1500, when all this might have been nipped in the bud, but 1840 – what would you do?’ In her final lines, Everill criticises the notion that the British Empire ‘used its force for good’: ‘the better question is, what if they hadn’t needed to use it at all?’ I am not convinced that this is the better question. In fact, it strikes me as a pie-in-the-sky question, brought up solely to duck out of a difficult one. What do you do, in 1840? Biggar has an answer: ‘be moral policeman’. Whether one agrees or disagrees, at least he shows some curiosity about, some eagerness to grapple with, the difficult moral questions that history provokes.

Much like the original Historikerstreit, the spectre of Nazi Germany is never too far away. It is a constant presence in Biggar’s book as a foil to the British Empire: not unreasonably, since if one is to play the fool’s game of drawing up a ‘balance sheet’ for the British Empire, the fact that it defeated Hitler merits a solid place in the credit column. It may even be the case – Biggar gestures at this here and there – that the sins of empire, such as they are, were absolved between 1939 and 1945 by Britain’s blood, toil, tears, and sweat. But Lester was quite right to say to Biggar, in their protracted back-and-forth last year, that ‘it is not enough to defend the British Empire on the grounds that it was not as bad as the Nazis’. Saul Dubow, in his excellent and measured chapter on South Africa, likewise suggests that Biggar’s invocations of Nazi crimes set the bar for Britain far too low. Godwin’s Law springs to mind. Surely nobody serious would ever even compare the British Empire’s wrongdoings to Nazi Germany in the first place?

The reader’s sense for dramatic irony may now be tingling. In his chapter, Liam Liburd defends comparisons between the British Empire and Nazi Germany and criticises negative reactions against them as ‘hysterical’. He cites, as one example, Andrew Roberts’s reaction to Kehinde Andrews making such a comparison: at a discussion of Churchill’s racial attitudes, Roberts dismissed Andrews’ rhetoric as ‘puerile invective more befitting the playground than the seminar hall’. Now, what exactly did Andrews say to elicit such a reaction? Here is the quotation, verbatim: ‘The British Empire was far worse than the Nazis.’ Liburd fudges this as an innocuous ‘comparison’: Roberts was ‘particularly horrified by any suggestion that Churchill’s views should be considered within the context of the same history of race and racism as Nazism’. As we can see, however, Andrews was going a lot further than this.

Liburd never quotes this comment of Andrews’, and one can see why: he is careful, throughout the article, to talk about the abstract process of ‘comparison’ without saying how the judgement was in the end weighed up. It is expedient for him to do so because most people – including contributors to this volume – would regard as unacceptable the claim, which Andrews makes as explicitly as possible, that the British Empire was worse than Nazi Germany. This claim, it seems to me, is coyly laundered in Liburd’s essay. Critics of Biggar, who say he’s stacking the deck in his favour when he brings the Nazis into the discussion, may be correct: but in setting their arguments side-by-side with Liburd’s, they aren’t making life any easier for themselves.

What can we see through all this mudslinging? There is so much talking past each other, especially on the Anti-Biggar side, that one sometimes feels like banging one’s head against the wall. To give one example from Biggar’s postscript, the historian Dane Kennedy said of Colonialism: ‘this is not historical analysis; it is solipsistic advocacy’; to which Biggar responds, ‘Well of course it is not historical analysis; it is ethical evaluation.’ Three authors in the Anti-Biggar – Adele Perry, Sean Carleton, and Omeasoo Wahpasiw – criticise Biggar for engaging in ‘politics and not history’. Now, their own article rails against the ‘power, privilege, and profit Britain amassed during the age of empire of which many Britons are continuing beneficiaries’; refers to Canada’s ‘colonial project’ in the present tense; and bizarrely insists (Lester’s aims for ‘accessibility’ notwithstanding) upon referring to North America as ‘Turtle Island’. But Biggar, not they, is engaging in ‘politics and not history’: to which he would, unlike them, presumably respond ‘I know’.

One can disagree with Biggar on this or that point – as indeed I do, and as a handful of the contributors to the Anti-Biggar do for good reason – but at least he’s upfront about what he’s up to. He has the ‘anti-colonial’ historians bang to rights on his point that they use morally-laden language without realising it, and then criticise Biggar when he consciously does the same. The historians’ guild assembled to expel this moral theologian from what they felt to be their home turf, but they’re not sending their best. We get the Historikerstreit we deserve.