Nigel Biggar: the academic who dared to say Rhodes should stay
When the Oxford theologian wrote that the British Empire was not all bad, he faced a backlash. Here he defends his views to Andrew Billen
Five years ago Nigel Biggar feared that his 40-year career was about to meet a sudden and unpleasant end. Academia had cottoned on that the Oxford University theologian and priest thought that the British Empire had not been all bad. He aired this apparently anodyne thought in a column in The Times in November 2017. The article was Biggar’s third thought crime, the first being his resistance to a noisy (and ultimately unsuccessful) campaign to remove the imperialist Cecil Rhodes’s statue from an Oxford college wall. The second was a series of conferences he had held on Ethics and Empire, a project some academics thought should be strangled at birth. As Biggar puts it, all hell broke loose.
“I didn’t know what to expect and when you don’t know what to expect you fear everything. I feared complete loss of reputation,” Biggar says as we sit in his apartment overlooking Castle Mill Stream in Oxford. In the end academic freedom, at least at Oxford, prevailed. His Ethics and Empire course — “holed,” he says, “under the waterline for a year or so” — was relaunched in 2019 and survived. So did he.
Stand back now, however, for another explosion. Nigel Biggar’s book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning is about to be published. It almost didn’t make it. Commissioned by Bloomsbury after the 2017 rows, and well received on the manuscript’s delivery, JK Rowling’s publisher decided to delay publication indefinitely. It told Biggar that “public feeling” was “not currently favourable”.
“I was shocked. Being a man, I’m not always in touch with my emotions, but my wife tells me I was devastated,” he says. “Apart from the disappointment of not having my book published, I was just aghast at the thought that we in this country had come to this place. Suppose every publisher behaved as Bloomsbury did?” Bloomsbury did not comment when contacted.
Happily the book was taken up by William Collins. It is a fascinating read, informative, surprising and written with panache and clarity. Biggar is not a professional historian and the book is light on primary sources (if heavy on footnotes), but it comes with warm testimonials from academics and our own Matthew Parris, who judges Biggar’s assessment of the British Empire “fair and accurate”.
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Still, he expects to be attacked with a vehemence he will find hard to understand.
“You know, if you face someone who is saying things you disagree with or don’t like then you might show some curiosity as to why they think that. You’d ask questions and then you’d say, ‘Well, that doesn’t make sense because . . .’ But I’ve been really struck by how that’s not been the posture. The posture has been, on the part of some, and some people at major universities, from the get-go — it’s been the fist.”
Towards the end of Colonialism he compiles a tally of the evils of the British Empire. It includes “brutal” slavery, fatal epidemics, displacement of natives by settlers; settler abuse, famine and “elements of” racism. On the credit column lie, among other things, the empire’s pioneering renunciation of slavery, its promotion of free markets, creation of regional peace by imposing authority and developing public infrastructure, agriculture methods and modern medicine.
So, I ask, would the world have overall been better off without the British Empire?
“Not obviously. I mean, if it hadn’t been the British it would have been somebody else,” he replies. “Modernity was going to hit unmodern peoples in North America, South Africa and Australasia sooner or later.”
Biggar — born in Dumfries and Galloway 67 years ago, educated in Somerset, married but with no children — is tall, thin, quietly spoken and polite. You would not necessarily predict he was a man of courage, although by siding with the dean of his old college, Christ Church, during Martyn Percy’s long dispute with almost everyone else on its governing body, he certainly showed some of that (both men left Christ Church last year). Since he accuses his anticolonialist critics of “deeper, darker” motives, I feel entitled to interrogate his own, however.
If his critics are of the left, isn’t he a right-winger? He protests that he regards himself as centrist; until about five years ago, and its leftwards drift, he read The Guardian as well as The Times every day. He is, however, friendly with the eccentric right-wing Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. Indeed, when we meet he has newly returned from recording a series of lectures, Deconstructing Decolonisation, for the forthcoming Peterson Academy, being set up by Jordan’s daughter Mikhaila.
Is he a lobster, I ask, referencing Peterson’s famously bizarre role model for enfeebled modern man. “What’s a lobster? It’s got a carapace? Well, I am of a certain generation growing up in the shadow of the Second World War, where our parents lived in a world where people died a lot and people could not afford to emote a lot. I have a certain stoicism in the face of suffering.”
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One bias in his book is declared. He writes that at stake is not the “pedantic truth” but the self-confidence of the British today. So he has a political motive?
“We all have them, and I’m upfront about mine. Yes, there’s a political motive in that I do think Britain is an important global power. We’re not a superpower. We have global interests, we have global experience, we have significant both soft and hard power and we’re a liberal power at a time when Putin is doing what Putin is doing in Ukraine and President Xi is menacing Taiwan. So if you care about the global future of liberal democracy, then the self-confidence of liberal powers of the world is quite important.”
We may be liberal, but he does not dispute that Britain suffers from racism, nor that it existed abroad in empire days. “Less among colonial officials, more among settlers and businesspeople, but there was appalling racial prejudice,” he says. What he cannot perceive is the link between the two, because the “glorification” of empire ended long ago and the British establishment has been under assault since the Sixties.
Biggar’s constant pleas of mitigation (“less among colonial officials”) for imperial offences can grate. I take issue, for one thing, with the idea that the West’s conquests were justifiable simply because they obeyed western-made treaties. I say I’d be morally outraged if someone waving a legal document entered my back garden and started drilling for oil.
“But I think you need to put yourself back in the shoes of the white man dividing territory which often was not heavily populated. Initially the question was ‘is this actually occupied?’ So there’s some ambiguity as to whether this territory is virgin or not.”
Elsewhere Biggar implies that the slave trade can be excused by Britain’s lead in the antislavery movement. But if I renounce my living as a sex trafficker and join a campaign against it, does that place me in the clear?
“Well, no. With regard to past sins, there are plenty of past sins we cannot make up for.”
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Is slavery one of those? “Yes. I mean, the poor people who were enslaved are dead. There’s nothing we can do for them. I lament that Britons ever got involved in it but there’s no making up for it in that sense.”
Some of his analysis is so alarmingly out of kilter with received opinion it gives one pause. In Robert Hughes’s history The Fatal Shore, the Australian writer called the eradication of the first Tasmanians the “only true genocide in English colonial history”. That seems measured. Biggar insists, however, that although individuals may have killed with “genocidal intent”, the devastating aboriginal decline was for a variety of reasons “above all disease” and “far more tragedy than atrocity”. When I counter that the Australian historian Lyndall Ryan on the contrary estimates that more than 10,000 Aboriginals and Torres Straight Islanders were lost in more than 400 massacres, Biggar responds that she is “among historians who I think, from my reading, have exaggerated figures”.
And so to Cecil Rhodes, the mining magnate and coloniser of what is now Zimbabwe and Zambia, the onetime hero who dragged Biggar into the spotlight when he offered a qualified defence of the imperialist during the statue row. Rhodes, whom I thought I regarded thenceforth as irredeemable, emerges from Colonialism more nuanced. A quote from an 1894 speech on Africans is cited on page 3: “I don’t believe they are different from ourselves.” His previous ruling in 1877 that the British, “the finest race in the world”, should rehabilitate “the most despicable of human beings” is not quoted.
“There’s really,” Biggar tells me, “a distinction between biological, scientific racism, whereby you’ve got non-white skin, therefore you are a natural slave, and saying, ‘You haven’t got any O-levels, but we can help you with that.’ ”
The book has some curious omissions and near omissions. Despite the fuss over the toppling and removal of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol two years ago, there is no reference to the slave trader at all. (When I press him on the matter, Biggar concedes that if “non-white people really went past it and were offended by it, that would be a good reason to take it down”.) Robert Clive (of India) is mentioned just twice, even though his castle in Powys has been in the news for the National Trust’s “contextualisation” of the vast hall devoted to his Indian booty.
“How do I feel about that? I would think, OK, this was a result of an 18th-century practice, which was unscrupulous but was common and wasn’t the monopoly of the British. You went to war and you rewarded yourself by taking spoils. Everyone did it.”
He would not feel embarrassed walking in a Welsh castle past a tiger’s head finial torn off the throne of the king of Mysore? “I guess I’m a bit disinclined to feel embarrassed.”
Biggar well knows that in saying such things he is out of kilter with progressive principles of curation and certainly with the swelling support for the return of artefacts whence they came. He is even at odds with his own faith. Last week the Church of England committed to donating £100 million to compensate for its earnings from Queen Anne’s Bounty, a scheme predicated on the transatlantic slave trade.
“I just don’t buy it because, as I argue, yes, there was slavery, but there was then 150 years of antislavery based on partly Enlightenment and partly Christian views that we, as human beings of whatever race, are equal under God.”
He is not against spending £100 million to tackle current racial problems in the church or in Britain, but not on account of ancient investment policies. “I think the leadership of the church shares the prejudices of the British elite generally.”
I am so much less of an ethicist than Biggar that I cannot coherently argue for my hunch that the evil men do lives after them for a reason, and the reason is that some things can never be excused. But I have no quarrel with Biggar for disinterring also the good. Then we can survey it all. For instance, the historian David Olusoga, who was born in Nigeria, has strong views on what he calls “systematic and deliberate” looting of the Benin Bronzes by the British from the west African kingdom. So does Biggar, but he believes their “removal” legitimate. I would love to hear them debate on Times Radio. They would do it with civility, I am sure.
Biggar recalls that when Priya Gopal, a professor of postcolonial studies at Cambridge, read the description of his Ethics and Empire project, she tweeted: “We must shut this down.” But should any history be a Pandora’s box for ever sealed? If we dare open our imperial record, Colonialism will be among the tools we can use to examine it, and a sharp-edged one at that.
Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning is published by William Collins on February 2 at £25
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