“Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning” by Nigel Biggar—A Book Analysis (Part 1)

Earlier this year at Regent College, where I got my first MA in 1995-1997, there was a fairly heated dust-up concerning the British scholar (and Regent alum) Nigel Biggar. The Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford, he had been invited to give a lecture about the British Empire and the morality of colonialism. In 2023, Biggar had written Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning about the very topic of the morality (or immorality) of British colonialism, and the lecture was obviously going to explore that topic. To the point, a number of Regent alumni strongly objected to Biggar’s lecture on the grounds that the mere presence of Biggar at Regent would bring severe harm to the indigenous people of Canada who had suffered under the residential schools. Biggar, they claimed, was a “residential school denier” who denied the proven history of abuse and trauma that the indigenous people had suffered in those schools. By inviting him to give a lecture, they claimed Regent College’s reputation would be severely damaged. The end result is that Regent did, in fact, cancel the lecture.

Now, I had never heard of Biggar. I only occasionally check out the Regent Alumni page on Facebook, and even less occasionally ever take part in any discussion on the page. But this controversy caught my eye, so I did a little digging, read a few articles on Biggar, and looked at his book’s Amazon page. Overall, it seemed his book was just arguing that, despite the clear sins that happened during the time of the British Empire, there were also many good things that happened as well. The book argued that the British Empire did much to promote human flourishing around the world. It seemed to me that was quite obvious and non-controversial. With almost every nation or empire, there are going to be positives and negatives.

For some reason, though, Biggar was decried loudly on the Regent Alumni page as promoting things like white supremacy. So, I got involved in one of the discussions and made three points: (1) based on what I looked at, I couldn’t see anywhere where Biggar denied that horrible things happened at the Canadian residential schools; (2) his book didn’t even seem to be about that specific issue, but rather was evaluating the morality of the British Empire as a whole; and (3) there was the element of free speech involved—what harm could there be in open discussion about the overall morality of the British Empire?

Some of the responses were baffling to me. I was accused of “siding with the oppressors” and being the equivalent of a frat boy taking a selfie at the Anne Frank Museum while making a “jacking off” motion. Over and over again, the Biggar detractors kept bringing up the Canadian Residential schools, and over and over again I said, “I can’t find anything where he denies bad things happened.” The whole thing was rather frustrating. So, I decided to go on Amazon and actually buy Biggar’s book. What follows over the next few posts will be my in-depth book analysis of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. I want to find out whether or not the accusations leveled at Biggar are true. I want to share these posts, not only with my blog audience, but also with the Regent Alumni page.

There are eight chapters in the book, as well as conclusion/epilogue/postscript sections. I intend to cover them all. That means this book analysis series might end up going for a number of blog posts. We’ll see. Today, I just want to touch upon the Introduction.

Introduction
In his introduction, Biggar talks about how he stumbled into the writing of the book. In 2015-2016, in response to the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign at Oxford, he wrote a defense of Cecil Rhodes. Then in 2017, he wrote a column in which he applauded Bruce Gilley’s article “The Case for Colonialism,” that essentially argued that, despite clear things that were shameful in the history of the British Empire, British people could still be proud about many of the good things in the British Empire. The blow back from those things shocked him.

Biggar then gives more details of the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign at Oxford. It was a campaign to get a certain statue of Cecil Rhodes removed from campus. Rhodes was a British politician in the late 19^th century who served as Prime Minister in the British colony in South Africa and helped establish the territory of Rhodesia. One more thing—if you’ve ever heard of a “Rhodes scholar,” this was the guy for which that was named.

What happened at Oxford, though, was that a group of activist students demanded his statue be torn down because he, according to them, was South Africa’s equivalent of Hitler. They pointed to a certain damning quote as proof of how racist he, and the entire British colonialist enterprise, had been: “I prefer land to n****ers…the natives are like children. They are just emerging from barbarism…one should kill as many n****ers as possible.” The only problem with that quote is that it wasn’t real. It was cobbled together from three different sources, one which was taken from a novel, and the other two which had been ripped out of their contexts…and part of the third was simply made up.

The reality, Biggar explains, is that not only did Rhodes not say that quote, not only did he never call for genocide, but during his time in South Africa, he consistently argued that black Africans were no different than the British and worked to support many things that benefited black Africans, like voting rights, newspapers and scholarships. Yes, he thought that British culture was more advanced in many regards, but he was not the monster that the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign were claiming.

Biggar holds up this incident as being one example of a larger movement these days that seeks to tear down the legacy and history of the West. The main target, Biggar claims, is that of British colonialism—it’s all about white supremacy, racism, slavery, colonial arrogance, and disdain for any culture that isn’t white, European. It’s all bad, and the West needs to be brought to reckoning. It is this recent “anti-colonialist” sentiment that Biggar takes issue with in his book.

The main problem with this “anti-colonialist” view, as Biggar calls them, is two-fold: (1) their criticism of “empire” and “colonialism” never goes beyond that of the European empires; there is never any criticism or condemnation of other world empires who have engaged in colonialism and are guilty of many of the same things; and (2) their arguments are hopelessly simplistic and black-and-white (and often flat out not true)—real history is complicated and messy.

Related to that is the way in which we in the present judge those people in the past. The fact is, Biggar argues, is that “some moral truths that are obvious to us were just not obvious to our ancestors” (9). He then gives an example of slavery. Throughout most of human history, slavery has been a reality throughout the world in some form or another. The institution of slavery was just taken for granted—the moral issue came down to how slaves were treated, not whether or not there should be that institution at all. Therefore, although we in the modern West have come to the realization that the very institution of slavery is immoral, we cannot condemn those living thousands of years ago in a vastly different culture, dealing with completely different challenges and realities for not having come to our modern realizations. As Biggar states, “We should forgive our ancestors for not perceiving some moral truths quite clearly as we do, just as we shall surely need forgiveness from our grandchildren for our own moral dullness” (9).

From there, Biggar lays out the way in which he is going to address the issue of a “moral reckoning” for British imperialism and colonialism. First, Biggar says that as a Christian ethicist, his analysis will be rooted in the conviction that all human beings are basically equal. That being said, there are a few caveats. First, that does not mean that all cultures are equal. A culture that cannot read or write is inferior to a literate culture in that technical respect. A culture that knows the earth is round it superior to a culture that thinks the world is flat in that intellectual respect. And a culture that sees human sacrifice as immoral is superior in that moral respect to a culture that practices human sacrifice. Basically, even though human beings are equal in the eyes of God, there still are objective truths and realities against we can assess and judge different cultures. C.S. Lewis says something similar in Mere Christianity when talking about morality, and how not all moralities and cultures are equal—Christian morality is superior to Nazi morality, for example.

The tricky part is when it comes to assessing the morality/immorality of government policies, for government policies are going to affect people in different ways. Therefore, Biggar argues that whether or not a policy is morally right or wrong is not dependent on its effects or consequences. It depends on the motives and intentions of those making that policy. Sometimes, a policy that aims to achieve a morally good thing might fail to achieve that morally well-intended goal. Sometimes a policy ends up having tragic unintended consequences. That failure doesn’t make the policy immoral. That failure simply is just a reality of life sometimes. When that happens, “…the fitting response is not blame, but compassion” (12).

With that, Biggar then provides the reader with an overview of the eight chapters he covers in his book. He states that each chapter deals with a specific “set of moral questions that the history of empire raises”:

• Chapter 1: Was imperial endeavour driven primarily by greed and the lust to dominate?
• Chapter 2: Should we speak of ‘colonialism and slavery’ in the same breath, as if they were the same thing?
• Chapter 3: Was the British Empire essentially racist?
• Chapter 4: How far was the British Empire based on the conquest of land?
• Chapter 5: Did the British Empire involve genocide?
• Chapter 6: Was the British Empire driven fundamentally by the motive of economic exploitation?
• Chapter 7: Since colonial government was not democratic, did that make it illegitimate?
• Chapter 8: Was the British Empire essentially violent, and was its violence pervasively racist and terroristic?

That is what Biggar states in his introduction and that is the “road map” he takes in his book. We will see where the trip takes us, but I find nothing in Biggar’s Introduction that is offensive or hateful. The most shocking thing was finding out how the activist students at Oxford purposely distorted and made-up that horrible quote and attributed it to Rhodes. That kind of deception should be a big red flag for anyone. In addition, Biggar’s comment on how to judge a particular policy is noteworthy and worth looking into some more. In any case, that is how Biggar introduces his book. Based on the introduction alone, I think the book will be a challenging and interesting read.