Matthew Parris and Nigel Biggar
Nigel Biggar is a theologian, ethicist and author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. He speaks to The Spectator’s columnist Matthew Parris about the legacy of the British Empire.
MATTHEW PARRIS: Nigel, you’ve been in the news recently over your view on colonialism, which is, I think, basically that British colonialism is not all bad. Is that right?
NIGEL BIGGAR: Yes, I’ve become a bit more assertive in my view, since I first got into trouble five years ago. I published an article in the Times saying that we British can find cause for pride and shame in our past. I thought, who on earth can disagree with that? I actually thought it was rather an anodyne point of view, but that was enough to get me in trouble. Since then, I’m a bit more robust. Certainly the British Empire does not live down to its currently prevalent caricature as being a litany of slavery and racism and exploitation. There was nothing in the empire that approximated to Nazism. But more than that, it was from the early 1800s onwards increasingly humanitarian and dominated by liberal motives. So I become more positive: not just ‘it wasn’t all bad’.
MP: I’m a child of empire. I was born in South Africa when it was still a dominion. I was raised partly in Cyprus when it was still a colony. We were fighting Greek Cypriot terrorists then. And then I went on to spend all my boyhood and youth in what was then Rhodesia and I was sent to a multi-racial school in Swaziland. The whole experience leaves me quite torn. I see your argument. I see many good things that empire did achieve. All the places where I lived as a boy have gone from bad to worse since leaving the empire. But I also have direct experience of our attitudes as colonialists. When I went to school in Rhodesia, I saw at first hand the attitudes of white settlers in that part of Africa, and they were horrible. Their attitude towards Africans was that they were not, in their view, entirely human, or at least were human beings entitled to far less than we were. I saw Ian Smith and the white settlers, and I grew to dislike very intensely the attitudes towards people of colour that colonialism had imbued all us colonialists with. At the same time, I can see there were many good things that were done. But I just ask you to reflect on the way white people, in the countries Britain has ruled, saw the people that they ruled – the attitudes that they had.
‘The Empire was from the 1800s on increasingly humanitarian and dominated by liberal motives’
NB: Matthew, you’re quite right. I’ve read a number of novels by people who lived in East Africa: Elspeth Huxley, Gerald Hanley. In the novels, these are white people bringing their own experience into these stories they’ve created, but they themselves portray what I feel to be disgusting. Yes, contempt, disdain, sometimes just a brutally rude attitude of some whites to the blacks. So what do I do with that? Well, I mean, the first thing I do is just to put this in context and to say that I do find that disgusting. But racial prejudice was not the preserve of whites. For example, Gerald Hanley, who was actually Irish-born, ended up in British uniform in Somaliland in the 1940s and he recounts the difficulty he had trying to persuade Somali troops in British uniform to accept a Bantu African as an NCO because the Somalis regarded the Bantu as a natural slave. That is just to say that racial prejudice is a pretty universal human phenomenon. I’d also say the disgusting racial contempt that you experienced and I’ve read about was common among settlers, not so common among missionaries, and less common among colonial officials. Then there is also a contrast between back home and the empire. When Gandhi came to England, he, according to his own witness, encountered nothing but kindness. In South Africa, in Durban, he was chucked out of the first-class carriage. And then last year I read the obituary of Desmond Tutu…
MP: I was at school with his son.
NB: Well, the obituary says it was when Tutu came to London that he first experienced what it was like to be in a non-racist society because the policemen were polite. He didn’t have to stand in a separate queue or be the last in the queue. I don’t want to diminish your point at all about racism; I just think it was more complex and more varied than we think.
MP: We’re both right about those attitudes, incidentally. Complete side point: the Scots were the worst.
NB: You’re speaking to a Scot. Thank you for that.
MP: The Scots in Africa were more racist. It’s interesting why this should be thought of as a shame on the English in particular.
NB: I’m glad you said that, actually, because one of the reasons I wrote this book stems from the Scottish independence referendum in 2014. As an Anglo-Scot – Scottish father, English mother born in Scotland, educated both sides of the border – I’m viscerally anti-independence. I noticed that for some Scots independence is a kind of cathartic cleansing of Scotland from the evils of Britain, which equals empire, which equals wickedness. And whatever the reasons for Scottish independence might be, that one is a false one because the empire wasn’t simply evil and Scots were deeply involved in it, for better and for worse.
*****
MP: I’ve noticed in your writing a particular emphasis on questions of human rights, of politics, constitutional questions, the rule of law and all those things where I think you’re on very strong ground. I think you’re on less strong ground on the economic case. It is quite true, when my family were in Rhodesia for instance, that at the behest of our British masters back in London, there was a good African education system. We administered the country well, though we had taken the best land for white farmers and pushed the Africans on to the not so good land. But we took our responsibilities as a colonial administrative power seriously. And I think our administrators were like their counterparts in Britain: good civil servants. But in the meantime, we were, as it were, raping the country for its economic resources: the profits that went to the big tobacco companies where the Africans laboured on the farms and the profits that went from diamond mining and gold mining. All these natural resources were being extracted and sent away from the peoples who occupied the land and into the pockets of imperial commercial organisations. Now, think of the Chinese. We know that the Chinese are, as they would put it, ‘investing’ in Africa. They are probably bribing politicians. They are probably strong-arming politicians. They’re not particularly popular with the African people and they are leaching Africa of its natural resources. We don’t approve of that. Now instead see us British as the 19th-century equivalent of the Chinese.
‘I accept that particularly in southern Africa whites took the best land and blacks were relegated to poor land’
NB: On the issue of land, I accept that particularly in southern Africa whites took the best land and blacks were often relegated to poor land. Lest anyone think that was always the case, it wasn’t. There were different stories in North America and Australia. But let’s stick with South Africa for the moment. I can see that in terms of the extraction of profit. I’m willing to be persuaded about that. I’m a capitalist and I do expect that companies should retain some profit for the sake of reinvestment, etc. I think there is a problem where the profits are not to some extent reinvested in the country and the people that do the work. I’m certainly willing to accept there were cases of that. I’m not an economist, so I have to rely on what I’ve read. I took advice from the imperial historian John Darwin, from the development economist Paul Collier and from the historian of colonial economics Tirthankar Roy. I said: ‘Well, what’s an authoritative book to read about colonial economics?’ and they recommended David Fieldhouse. Fieldhouse, first of all, says that the Marxist or the neo-Marxist view that colonial economics were raping and exploiting and draining of resources in general doesn’t stand up well against data, generally speaking. He quotes a Swiss economist, Rudolf von Albertini, who’s done the most comprehensive survey of data. He concludes that it is not generally appropriate to think of colonial economics in terms of plunder. So moving from Africa to India, I would say that the empire’s commitment to free trade, which reigned roughly from the 1840s to 1919, meant that, yes, manufactured cloth from England could out-compete artisanal cloth in India, and that caused some decline in cottage industries there. On the other hand, it meant that industrialists like Tata could come to Manchester, observe manufacturing processes, take back expertise to India and build cotton and steel factories that then competed with Manchester.
MP: It’s a side story and one that’s seldom told that there was always irritation in Whitehall and Westminster that the profits were going to companies, in many cases international companies like De Beers, and that the cost of administering our colonies was being borne by the British taxpayer. That’s why Cecil Rhodes was never very popular in London. I was educated in then Southern Rhodesia to see Rhodes as a fairly unambiguously heroic figure. On the other hand, he was not all that popular back at home in London. And people have said that Britain’s gradual occupation of large parts of southern Africa happened in a ‘fit of absence of mind’. It wasn’t really led by any kind of moral or civilising mission, but often led by British opportunists and the government following behind. Then there’s the Marxist view, which was that empire was just a particularly clever weapon of international capitalism. What’s your view?
NB: The Marxist conspiracy theory just doesn’t fit the data. My view is that there was an absence of a single mind. There were many minds so the motives for empire were multiple. Trade was a basic one. What’s wrong with that? Then you’ve got, in terms of migration to New England, religious refugees. You’ve also got people from Scotland and Ireland fleeing famine. Then you’ve got war and strategic considerations. A lot of bits of the empire like Cape Colony fell into Britain’s lap at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, or there-abouts. And then in the 19th century, you do have a genuine humanitarian idealism and mission, whether it’s abolishing slavery or human sacrifice. And then, yes, you’ve got greed and you’ve got the sheer love of lording it over the other people.
MP: If I could just interrupt, though, for a moment. Marxism does not require a single presiding intellect to blame. Marxism says that where there is money, plunder to be gained, people will go for it. That’s all Marxism says.
NB: OK, so plenty of people want to make money. I have no objection to that as such, although in some cases, Rhodes included, some people make money without many scruples. There’s certainly that, but there was also a lot more: that wasn’t the only motive and it’s not true that colonial government was always in hock to capitalists. Often colonial government tried to protect native industries against foreign investors and companies. So the Marxists are right with regard to one set of motives, but they’re not right to think that was the whole central driving story. Just on Rhodes: I should just say, although I’ve defended Rhodes so that his statue may remain standing in Oxford, if I’m going to raise a statue to the empire, it wouldn’t be Rhodes, because he was a very morally ambiguous character. The only reason I’ve defended the statue remaining standing is that so much has been projected on to him about the evils of empire. If it were to fall, it would mean the triumph of a very distorted view of history.
*****
MP: Have you been surprised, Nigel, at the ferocity, the dislike that has descended on you for expressing what appear to you to be fairly moderate opinions?
NB: Astonished. I’m naturally quite a cautious person. I think carefully. I’m not of the extreme right as I’m now being painted. Contrary to what one young Irish academic is reported to have said, I’m not funded by Breitbart. What most of all astonished me to begin with was that when I began to write about the British Empire, colleagues in Oxford or elsewhere didn’t invite any kind of conversation. What they did was to respond with abuse and aggression. I’m thinking particularly of Priyamvada Gopal in Cambridge, and I put this on record because I have the screenshot of the tweet, her response right at the beginning. She began the process that led to three online denunciations in the space of a week. In December 2017, she tweeted: ‘OMG, oh my God, this is serious shit. WE MUST SHUT THIS DOWN.’ The immediate reaction on her part was a kind of hysterical repression. And in my experience since? I’ve had very little, as it were, rational pushback. I have had a lot of abuse. There was an article published by Richard Drayton in 2019 in a book called Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain, in which I was, rather flatteringly in a certain sense, presented as a kind of icon into the meaning of Brexit. Because Brexit, as we know, is all about ‘imperial nostalgia’. But it was a concatenation of misrepresentation and slurs and misunderstanding from an academic who ought to be trained to treat what other people say carefully. I lost the co-operation of one of the most eminent historians of empire, John Darwin, with whom I had co-conceived a research project, Ethics and Empire. Four days after the first of three online denunciations were published in December 2017, he abruptly resigned for personal reasons.
MP: You think he took fright?
‘I have had to meet junior research fellows in Oxford in secret because they didn’t want to be seen with me’
NB: I’m certain he took fright, yes. And it puzzled me that a senior secure academic should be so easily scared off. There’s a lot of fear among academics that I’ve seen among my own colleagues in Oxford, particularly if they’re junior – fear for their careers. I’ve had to meet junior research fellows in Oxford in secret because they didn’t want to be seen in public with me. Some people fear with more or less reason that their careers would be punished if they even associated with people with ‘extreme’ views like mine. I find that shocking.
MP: And there was a serious attempt to bury your book. You lost your first publisher, didn’t you?
NB: That’s correct. I was commissioned by Bloomsbury to write a book on colonialism. I delivered the manuscript at the end of 2020. My commissioning editor said it was one of the most important books he’d come across in some time. It went into copy editing, produced a cover. In March, Bloomsbury cancelled it. I was devastated at the prospect that my book would not get published. I was also just dismayed because I thought to myself: ‘If every publisher in Britain behaved that way, freedom of speech in this country would be severely damaged.’ And I know publishers have commercial necessities, but surely publishers also have civic duties.
MP: Yeah, but this won’t have been that they worried about the commercial prospects of the book – had it become very controversial, it would probably have sold more copies. It will have been pressure from other employees, won’t it, within the publisher?
NB: You’re right. My commissioning editor was not responsible for this mess. Word has it that it was junior colleagues who protested. But, here again, I don’t understand – it’s the same in universities when students protest about some speaker being allowed to speak or students start to accuse Neil Thin at Edinburgh of racism just because he wanted David Hume’s name to stay on the ugly tower there. I don’t understand why grown-up university leaders are so easily manipulated by pressure from below. I don’t quite understand what the costs of resistance would be, but they don’t resist.
MP: Do you remember that Greek statesman who whispered into the ear of his colleague, because the crowd was just cheering what he said: ‘Have I said something foolish?’ When you look at some of the people who are supporting you and some of the sources of your support, do you worry that, as it were, the wrong people are cheering?
NB: Yes, I’m aware that some people whose general views I would not approve of support me. My view is that there’s no stopping that. Also, I’ve armed myself with the response to the first time someone says to me: ‘But how did you dare step on that platform because of so and so’s association with this or whatever.’ My response is, provided you’re not a Nazi or a Stalinist or a mass murderer, I’ll sit and talk to you. I mean, Matthew, I’m talking to you without doing due diligence. I have no idea what crimes you’ve committed, what abuse you’ve committed. I’m here to talk about something we both are interested in. I’m not tainted by association with you, whatever you’ve done. Maybe politically, that’s naive, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
MP: And the whole Brexit thing: your writing has nothing to do with Brexit as far as I can tell. It doesn’t make you a Brexiteer, does it, to believe that there is good in empire?
NB: One big fly in Richard Drayton’s ointment is I voted Remain. I mean, I do have some Brexit sympathies, and I want Brexit to succeed as best it can now we’ve done it. But I’m not a cardboard cutout right-wing little Englander who wants the past to return. And I make quite clear at the end of my book, Britain’s imperial moment has finished, for good and for ill, for ever. It’s just that I want us not to throw the liberal humanitarian baby out of the imperial bath water. There were traditions and commitments there that were admirable, and I want us to continue to pursue those.
*****
MP: There’s one argument I have sometimes found myself using in defence of empire, and that is this: if we British hadn’t occupied these countries and ruled them as colonies, someone else would have and they would probably have been worse than us – the Belgians, for instance, and what they did in the Congo.
NB: I think we can certainly say that whatever we did, it was better than what some people did do. Maybe there was also a power out there that could have done even better than we did. We made mistakes. We committed crimes. But the centre, London, was driven to a significant extent by Christian, liberal humanitarian concerns.
MP: There really is no defence of early 20th- century Australian treatment of the Aboriginal people, is there?
NB: No.
MP: We just have to say that it was appalling.
‘When you look at some of the people who are supporting you, do you worry that the wrong people are cheering?’
NB: Yeah. By the way, one of people’s complaints about me is that I’m not a historian, I’m just a theologian, to which my response is: I’m a moral theologian, I’m an ethicist. I deal in ethics. And my book is an ethical account of empire. And on that, I’m qualified.
MP: I wouldn’t dispute any of what you’ve just said, but it does strike me that I was brought up as a child to feel proud of Britain’s past, proud of empire, proud of many things that people in generations before me had done that had actually nothing to do with me at all. If we are entitled to feel pride about what our forebears have done, would you agree that we are obliged to feel shame also at what our forebears have done?
NB: Absolutely. I mean, I’m a Christian. I’m into sin. I look back at our imperial history and there are moments that fill me with great shame. But in a sense, that’s human life. There’s parts of my own life I feel shameful about. And I think we should feel there are parts we certainly should feel shameful about and disappointed our forebears didn’t do better – and they instruct us to do better in the future. But also there are things about our imperial past: the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. European slavery was absolutely dreadful. But Britain was among the first to abolish it.
MP: I, too, am proud of our record in leading the field in abolishing slavery. But then I think of the way the slave market in Zanzibar carried on to the life of my own grandmother. There was still a slave market in Zanzibar, the accounts of slaves arriving at the port of Zanzibar from the mainland, and because they were ill or sick, being tipped into the sea because there was a head wage payment on all the slaves who came into the market. It fills me with shame.
NB: It fills me with horror. The British Empire was not all-powerful, and in some parts of the world, for some reason, we had to bring our influence to bear. Gradually – we couldn’t simply make it happen. Zanzibar was one of those places.
MP: It’s very nice to meet you, Nigel.
NB: Yes, thanks a lot.
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