Empirical evidence

A brilliant and important book is Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning by Nigel Biggar and despite it being a long read it is well worth your reading time.

Half (well, thereabouts!) of the hardback I read was mostly footnotes, a bibliography, acknowledgements and an index so do not feel put off my its physical, tome like appearance. Its narrative, insights, perspectives and actual factual accuracies will be a figurative salve to your reading experience and will aid, potentially, a more measured and ethical approach to and around the British Empire, slavery, reparations and the legacies of historical events throughout time and other empires.

The book, with its ethical lense of history, also acts as a reality check against the many recent (and some longer term) anti-colonialist movements (and reparation efforts) and the knee-jerk, reactionary fuel that seems to keeps and bolsters the attention (and, or patriarchic capitalist) economy in its consumers, the hyper-alert, rarely seeming to think calmly, or be well balanced with wider context and detail, especially around the historical, broad and sweeping, global events and social-economic realities of old times, going for clicks and constantly seeking a headline to stand out in the endless white noise . . . or hashtag moment for the oft-reductionist, time poor, unchanging absolutists of a binary consciousness that seems unable to cultivate and nurture nuance and different views over a lifetime.

Anyway, aside from that rant, some passages from the book really stood out for me and have been quoted below my ramblings as my (digital) library, recording my having read the title, has its own, separate set and they might contribute to you also, you know, actually reading the book yourself.

[…] Yet surely every people judges a foreign people by its own standards, and surely sometimes a people recognises foreigners as superior in certain respects – and is quite correct to do so. Many native people, observing European culture, recognised its superiority in terms of writing, technology, agriculture and medicine. That is why they wanted schools where their children could learn from it, so that future generations might share in its benefits. And those natives who chose to convert to Christianity presumably found something attractive in its world-view that was lacking in their inherited religion. Since it really is possible for one culture to be superior What would have been racist is the European view that there was since native people sometimes agreed with Europeans that the latter’s culture was superior in certain respects, it can hardly have been racist for Europeans to suppose it.⁴⁴

When a revolutionary elite among Irish nationalists decided to launch their famous Easter Rising in central Dublin in April 1916, they did so not as an expression of widespread popular opposition to Ireland’s connection with Britain and its Empire, but in a violent attempt to disrupt growing contentment with it. This contentment was not stupid; it recognised that most of Ireland’s historic grievances had been addressed.¹²² In 1829 the Catholic Emancipation Act had ended the legal exclusion of Catholics from public office. By the close of the century Protestant control of government in Ireland was loosening its grip.¹²³ In 1901, when Catholics comprised 74 per cent of the population as a whole, at least three of the leading judges were Catholic, as were 43 per cent of barristers, 27 per cent of resident magistrates, 31 percent of district inspectors and 74 percent of police.¹²⁴ In 1903 the Wyndham Act had addressed the chronic vulnerability of tenant farmers by providing them with government funds to purchase land from their landlords, allowing a majority of them to become land-owners. Further, Ireland was enjoying a cultural renaissance; and while its per capita national product was less than two-thirds that of the rest of the United Kingdom, it was higher than that of Norway, Sweden, Italy and Finland, and only per percent behind that of France.¹²⁵ Notwithstanding this, judging by the memoirs of one of the rebels of 1916, Desmond FitzGerald, the revolutionaries were disturbed that ‘[t]he Irish people recognised themselves as part of England’ and, according to the revolutionaries’ own “mystical” doctrine . . . that an elect few would ultimately leaven the whole country, they decided that ‘extreme action must be taken’.¹²⁶

The rising resulted in 450 lethal and 2,614 wounded casualties – the majority of whom were civilians – together with the destruction of much of Dublin’s city centre.¹²⁷ Understandably, citizens who had found themselves embroiled in the heart of the fighting around the General Post Office tended to be hostile to the rebels, and in the judgement of a leading constitutional nationalist, John Dillon, the Easter Rising was ‘the first rebellion that ever took place in Ireland where you [the British government] had the majority on your side’.¹²⁸ Had it not been for General Sir John Maxwell's draconian decisions, after the fighting was over, to have armed troops conduct mass arrests, to hold courts-martial of the suspected ringleaders without access to defence counsel and then to execute the convicts,¹²⁹ Ireland might have continued on its peaceful, constitutional way to a form of home rule within the British Empire, rather than lurch into more widespread revolutionary violence in 1919 and thence to a more radical form of independence.

Nationalists seldom represent all of the actual people, usually acting instead in the name of an ideal people; and sometimes in the name of the latter, they terrorise and kill the former.

As the Baghdad-born historian Elie Kedourie once put it, These [national] movements are ostensibly directed against the foreigner, the outsider, but they are also the manifestation of a species of civil strife between the generations; nationalist movements are children’s crusades; their very names are manifestoes against old age.¹³⁸

Besides, if the intention is to right grave historic wrongs, why should slavery be the sole focus? The plight of medieval serfs or early industrial workers dwelling in urban slums may have been better than that of slaves toiling in the West Indies, but not very much better.⁵ Moreover, why should British slavery be the focus? If the historic injustice of slavery is to be rectified, then it needs to be done fairly and across the board. If the British are to be presented with a bill for compensation, then so should the descendants of the inland African chiefs who sold other Africans to the slave-traders, as well as the descendants of the Arab slave-traders who sold the slaves to the Europeans on the coast.⁶ They all profited too. They all profited too. And the British themselves should seek compensation from the descendants of the Barbary corsairs, who raided Cornwall in the 1600s and carted off whole villages into slavery on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa. If the British, then the Americans, too, since, in its early years, the United States spent a fifth of its entire national budget in tribute to the pirate states of Algiers and Tripoli, in order to stop their raids on its ships and enslavement of their crews. Yesterday’s oppressors were often the day before yesterday’s victims. In a letter published in The Times some years ago, a former British diplomat recounted a conversation he had had shortly after Nigeria’s independence with one of the country’s new rulers. The ruler was pressing the case for Britain to compensate the Nigerians for decades of colonial oppression. After listening intently, the diplomat's turn to reply came. ‘I entirely agree,’ he said. ‘And you shall have your compensation – just as soon as we get ours from the Romans.’⁷

So the British Empire did good as well as evil. But did it do more good than evil? Several of those who advocate reparations for colonial evils think that it did more evil than good – but they assume so, without arguing their case.⁴⁴ They do not argue their case, I surmise, because they are uneasily aware that it cannot be easily argued. Nor can the counter-case. This is because the goods and evils that the empire caused, intentionally or not, are of such different kinds that they cannot be measured against one another. They are incommensurable. How much chalk is worth so much cheese? How much racism is worth so much immunisation against disease? How many unjustly killed people are worth the blessings of imperially imposed peace? How much humanitarian anti-slavery would make up for the evils of slavery? To ask these questions is immediately to expose their absurdity. Such varied good and evils cannot be sensibly reduced to a common currency and then weighed against each other, so that we can conclude that one set was more evil than another. Here, as often elsewhere, a utilitarian calculation cannot be conducted rationally.⁴⁵

Given that all kinds of human rule produce a mixture of good and evil – even the Nazis built autobahns in Germany and the Fascists made the trains run on time in Italy – does it follow, therefore, that the moral difference between them is only a matter of degree, and that we cannot judge any of them to be, all things considered, wrong?

However, as my moral analysis of the British Empire has shown, it is entirely inappropriate to liken it to Nazism. Nor was it essentially racist or disproportionately violent. Nor, with due respect to Marxist critics, was it essentially exploitative. From the early decades of the nineteenth century its natural, innocent concerns to promote trade and maintain strategic advantage were increasingly supplemented and tempered by Christian humanitarianism, a commitment to public service and a liberal vision of political life. As Margery Perham wrote with regard to Africa:

No record can ever be made of all that was done, good, bad and indifferent, by Britain in her dozen or more African territories during the brief years of her tenure. The mosaic is too vast for its pattern to be seen at one time or from one viewpoint, and we are always brought back to the question of standards by which to judge Britain's record. There can be no doubt that, if the standard is to be the interests of the ruled, these have steadily counted for more as the period of empire continued. The existence of informed liberal opinion, the publicity of debate, the use of commissions of inquiry to probe every serious problem and grave event, all helped to this end. The African colonies, as the latest acquisitions, have greatly benefited from this progression in virtue.⁴⁷

Perham’s point about the important role played by liberal traditions and institutions of free speech and political criticism was amplified by Lewis Gann and Peter Duignan, when they observed that the imperial system in general had ‘a built-in capacity for self-criticism’: ‘Future historians will necessarily draw on the material accumulated by . . . commissions of inquiry, parliamentary debates, metropolitan blue books, and similar records which formed part of a self-corrective mechanism of a type unknown to earlier Matabele, Somali, or Arab conquerors; they played an important part in putting a stop to imperial abuses.’⁴⁸

Nigel Biggar Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning

Still . . .

. . . if it’s all too many words for you, Nigel Biggar’s book, Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt, is the one to read as it is much shorter, borrows a few passages from the Colonialism book and provides a decent insight into the broader colonial, slavery and reparation subjects.