With the Introduction of Nigel Biggar’s book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning out of the way, I am now ready to go through his book, chapter by chapter and trace his fundamental arguments concerning British Imperialism. In this post, I’m tackling chapter 1.
Chapter 1: Motives, Good and Bad
The first chapter in Nigel Biggar’s book deals with the motivations of the British Empire. He begins with the way in which “anti-colonialists” have characterized the British Empire’s motivations. Not only do they characterize it as a “single, unitary enterprise with a coherent essence,” they then “…characterize that supposed essence in terms of domination, despotism, oppression, racism, white supremacism, exploitation, theft or unconstrained violence. In this way they imply that its driving motivations were lust for power, delight in domination, racial contempt and greed” (20).
As should come as no surprise, Biggar disagrees with that characterization of British Imperialism. First off, as opposed, for example to the Nazis, there was no one single motivation for the British Empire. The Nazis wanted revenge for the Treaty of Versailles and to reestablish Germany as the main European superpower; and that was fueled by the Nazis hatred of Bolshevism, capitalism, and the Jews—the Nazi goal was to eradicate those things. By contrast, there were a host of contributing factors that led to what eventually became the British Empire. In this chapter, Biggar provides a birds-eye view of those contributing factors.
In a nutshell, those contributing factors included Britain’s involvement in worldwide trade, its early conflict with Spain, the then major imperialist (and Catholic) superpower in the world, and the later humanitarian attempt to end slavery. Those were the major things that led Britain to eventually become the major world superpower in the 18th-19th and early 20th centuries. It was not a singular mindset that said, “White power! Let’s get rich off the backs of black and brown people!” As Biggar readily acknowledges, within the period of British imperialism, there certainly were instances of injustice, atrocities, and racism, obviously. But the key thing to acknowledge was that those things were not the motivating factors in the rise of the British Empire.
Throughout most of the chapter, Biggar highlights the particulars regarding Britian’s involvement in India, Africa, and the Middle East. The East India Company began with Queen Elizabeth I’s royal charter in 1600, which gave the company a monopoly on English trade with all countries east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan. In 1612, the Mughal emperor in India allowed the EIC to establish a trading post in India. Over time, when the Mughals lost power, the EIC developed a private armed force to protect its trading interests, and eventually, in 1755, the Royal Navy was sent to bolster those forces.
That is how Britian got involved in India—not through conquest, but by establishing trading partners. Again, Biggar acknowledges that during Britain’s time in India, there were obvious instances of injustice, racism, and atrocities. But Britian’s involvement in India was not motivated by a desire to dominate and oppress non-white people. In fact, Biggar points out that it was men like John Malcolm, Warren Hastings, and Sir William Jones who took such an interest in Indian culture and history that they ended up being the prime movers to preserve that cultural heritage—things like reviving Sanskrit, sponsoring an English translation of the Bhagavad Gita, and establishing the Calcutta Asiatic Society.
One extra tidbit Biggar gives in his book is something I never knew about. Being an America, I know my Revolutionary War history—in particular that it was General Cornwallis who formally surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown in 1781. What I didn’t know was that after that, Cornwallis was appointed to oversee British interests in the EIC, where he addressed corruption in the EIC, worked to protect Indian workers from exploitation, streamlined the legal system, and oversaw the translation of various Muslim and Hindu texts into English.
When it came to British involvement in Africa, after Britain abolished the slave trade throughout the empire in 1807, and then slavery completely in 1834, British Christians and humanitarians convinced the British government to work toward abolishing the slave trade in the various countries in Africa that had practiced slavery long before Britian had taken part of in the early 1600s. This was one of the motivating factors of Christian missionaries like David Livingstone in the late 1800s and the Quakers who established the Aborigines Protection Society (that became the Anti-Slavery Society in 1909 and is now known as Anti-Slavery International).
Biggar also discusses Britain’s involvement in Egypt. Again, its political and military involvement came after the initial involvement involving trade and commerce that began in the 1870s. By that time, the Ottoman Empire had become corrupt and bloated, and Egypt was on the verge of bankruptcy due to mismanagement. Initially, the British politicians who went to Egypt had the intention of working with the Egyptian leaders for the betterment, not just of British commercial interests, but of Egypt as a whole. After all, if the Egyptian economy collapsed, Britain’s commercial interests would collapse as well.
In 1882, though, there was an attempted military coup, and that is what brought British forces to Egypt to help the Ottomans put down the coup. Interestingly, after it was put down, “…the Ottoman sultan offered Gladstone [William Gladstone was prime minister of Britain at the time] the exclusive control and administration of Egypt [but] he refused it” (34). Basically, Britian didn’t want control of Egypt. Still, the forces stayed there to try to reestablish stability and reform things so that the Egyptians could run the country on their own. It turned out that the British occupation lasted longer than they had hoped. Still, Biggar quotes a number of Egyptian nationalists from that time that lauded Britian’s involvement to bring about a stable society.
When the Ottoman Empire allied with Germany in WWI, Britain declared Egypt a “protectorate” in 1914, but soon after that, in 1922, it reestablished Egypt’s status as an independent kingdom. Britian retained its influence in Egypt until 1956.
After that, Biggar discusses Britian’s involvement in Palestine. In particular, he focuses on what would eventually become the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Going back to 1917, Biggar basically notes how the Balfour Declaration, however well-intended it was to provide Jews a homeland, ended up being a “colossal blunder.” Despite wanting to establish some kind of Jewish state in some way or another, Biggar states, “the British government had radically underestimated the incendiary friction that was likely to result when town-dwelling Jews from Eastern Europe suddenly found themselves rubbing shoulders with Arab peasants” (38). Simply put, they underestimated everything: political, cultural, and religious points of conflict. In fact, from 1917 to 1947, when Britain handed over the situation to the United Nations and evacuated Palestine, they simply could not make any kind of proposed two-state solution work because both the Arabs and the Jews were constantly at each other’s throats. Interestingly enough, when the UN formally voted in favor of a two-state solution in 1947, Britian abstained.
Biggar ends Chapter 1 by elaborating a bit on the British involvement in places like Iraq after the fallout of WWI, and namely after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Basically, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, all its former lands were left without any kind of government or administration anymore. Besides, the Turkish rule of the Ottomans by that point had become hopelessly corrupted anyway. The European powers, including Britain, stepped in to try to help establish various nation-states throughout Mesopotamia, just as they were doing in post-WWI Europe. In any case, Britain attempted to work with Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, the sharif of Mecca, to build an Arab state in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. The eventual result of that was the establishment of Iraq and Jordan.
Although Biggar doesn’t discuss it, I’ll add that Britain and America’s involvement in many of the countries of the Middle East after WWII was motivated by a desire to try to curb the tide of Soviet expansion and aggression. And for all the faults of Britain and America, I am willing to bet no one in their right mind would prefer living in the USSR. The USSR, as well as the other Communist regimes of the 20th century, was one of the most murderous, barbaric, and horrific regimes in history. Read Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and you will be convinced of the existence of Satan. The Soviet Gulag wasn’t just horrific and inhumane, it was the definition of evil. Therefore, intervening in the Middle East to stop the spread of that anti-Christ-like evil was the good and moral thing to do.
Conclusion
To be clear, Biggar’s “main thesis” in Chapter 1 is not to argue that the British Empire was wholly good all the time. Biggar is not arguing that no corruption or horrible actions ever happened in India, Africa, Egypt, Palestine, or elsewhere in the Middle East. What Biggar attempts to show in Chapter 1 is, contrary to the current narrative of the current “anti-colonialist” movement, Britian was not primarily motivated by some kind of singular, racist, greedy desire to dominate and exploit non-white people. He writes, “There was no essential motive or set of motives that drove the British Empire. The reasons why the British built an empire were many and various. They differed between trader, migrant, soldier, missionary, entrepreneur, financier, government official, and statesman” (44).
Most of the motives that led to British expansionism, Biggar argues, were fundamentally innocent, from wanting a better life for oneself, to exploring the world, to fighting oppression, and other things. Although in the course of any empire there can and will be instances of corruption and injustice, Biggar convincingly shows that the expansion of the British Empire was not a matter of greedy white supremacists lusting to dominate and exploit people of other races.
I’ll just add one additional thing when it comes to trade. I imagine some will point to British trade and commerce and claim that that was unbridled capitalistic greed, which is inherently exploitative, etc. That shows a very uncritical understanding of things. Trade is fundamentally the exchanging of goods and services, and that is not intrinsically bad. When countries enter into trade deals, not only are they often for the benefit of both countries, but they also serve as a detriment to war. You don’t go to war with a country with whom you have a shared interest. Simply put, there is a difference between trade and unbridled greed.
Unfortunately, from what I’ve learned over the past few years is that many of these current “anti-colonialists” (I’ll just call them far-left progressives) hold to essentially a Marxist worldview, where capitalism is the root of all evil. They hold to an extremely uncritical caricature of capitalism, and then expand that uncritical view to “empire,” and use further caricatures to lambast, not all empires throughout history, but really just Britain and America. They may cry “racism,” “white supremacy,” and “oppression,” but at root, it is a decrying of capitalism—and they think if they can topple capitalism, then all racism and oppression will go away. It is Marxism 101. To be clear, I do not think they’re all card-carrying Marxists. But I do think many people who have gotten caught up in these kinds of protests and condemnations of Britain (and America) do not realize they are parroting fundamental Marxist talking points.
In any case, when it comes to the core accusation leveled at the British Empire here in Chapter 1, Biggar shows it to be an uncritical and false caricature that is not rooted in historical reality. Again, that does not mean everything the British Empire did was good—that is obviously false. In the course of 350+ years, there is going to be plenty of bad things that deserve criticism and condemnation. But the caricature that the British Empire was motivated by a white supremacist desire to dominate and exploit black and brown people is just that—a caricature and a false narrative.
