Colonialism

A Moral Reckoning

Nigel Biggar

Having read it

★★★★★

It does not exempt empire but it does help provide balance and clarity and puts into perspective many a view and attitude that often reduces many things to binaries and which does no justice to any cause or anyone; in fact, showing and explaining nuance of and around a subject does wonders for the soul and gives one a chance to better take stock and even focus better on the present; and one could even get inspired to then adapt, learn and grow from, through and around more views and opinions.

As Niall Ferguson is quoted as saying on the book’s cover, This book simply cannot be ignored by anyone who wishes to hold a view on the subject; it offers and shows that ethics matter and really help us to understand many historical events in a calm and more nuanced manner so as to see history in context and keep the present relevant so as to better figure out and practice meaningful progress, for all.

The book’s epilogue’s penultimate paragraph can end my review of a book that also helped me reconsider and reframe my (not particularly astute nor necessarily well-informed) opinions about the British Empire . . .

Yes, the British Empire contained evils and injustices, some of them very grave and some of them culpable – but so does the history of any long-standing state. It was not essentially racist, exploitative or wantonly violent. It showed itself capable of correcting its sins and errors, and of learning from them. And, over time, it became increasingly motivated by Christian humanitarianism and intent upon preparing colonised peoples for liberal self-government. Indeed, iron-ically, much of what anti-colonialists clamour for from their academic armchairs, colonial officials were often hard at work trying to build. So if colonial history gives those who of us who identify ourselves with Britain cause for lament and shame, it also gives us cause for admiration and pride.

A good passage

Sometimes individuals and governments can be well motivated to achieve an important good, and they can choose their means of getting there conscientiously, and yet, through the bad fortune of relentlessly adverse circumstances, they can still fail. Not all failure to do good or avoid evil is immoral and culpable. Some of it is honest and tragic. Where that is so, the fitting response is not blame, but compassion.

History contains an ocean of injustice, most of it unremedied and now lying beyond correction in this world. Even with respect to recent crimes, the attempt at human justice is haphazard and its achievement fragmentary. Those sober facts oblige realism. Yet human beings seem to have a deep instinct for justice that will not let us settle for less, obliges us to hope against hope and drives us to our knees. The resultant posture, situated between cynicism and utopianism, is well captured by Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous prayer: ‘God give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.’26

A second good passage

No culture has a moral right to be immune to change or even to survive.69 Feudal culture in Europe had no just claim to be preserved against agricultural improvement, industrialisation and urbanisation in themselves – as distinct from the sometimes brutal manner of their development. Not much more now remains of the culture of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century rural England than the walls of cottages, Morris dancing, and the folk songs that Percy Grainger and others assiduously recorded just before the singers died out in the early 1900s. And as for the Palaeolithic and Neolithic peoples of the British Isles, who were the cultural equivalents of some of the native peoples that Britons first encountered in North America, Africa and Australia, not much more remains of them than stone arrow-heads and burial mounds.70 That may be sad, but it was not unjust.

A third good passage

There is a self-obsessive quality to this attitude [of anti-colonialism]. While the rhetoric claims the mantle of the oppressed, the action ignores them. Thus highly privileged students and professors gather on the streets of Oxford to clamour for the downfall of the statue of a British imperialist who died in Cape Town well over a century ago. Meanwhile in today’s South Africa the African National Congress loots the state, triples unemployment, sharpens economic inequality and riots when its leader is sentenced to gaol for refusing to answer charges of corruption.21 And the Oxford protesters are silent. They fiddle in Oxford, while Africa burns. [Pascal] Bruckner captures this point, too:

[B]y erecting lack of love for oneself into a leading principle, we lie to ourselves about ourselves and close ourselves to others . . . In Western self-hatred, the Other has no place. It is a narcissistic relationship in which the African, the Indian, and Arab are brought in as extras.22

Remember Dan Hicks’ account of Benin: the wicked white colonialist fills the centre-stage, entirely obscuring black agency.23 And the white post-colonialist gets to play champion of the oppressed.