In recent years the British Empire has been increasingly pilloried. It has been accused of committing genocide, running concentration camps, and being thoroughly racist and exploitative; one commentator has even gone so far as to claim that the British Empire was “‘far worse than the Nazis’”! (p. 357) Into this sea of vitriolic commentary wades Nigel Biggar. His goal? An objective moral assessment of the British Empire’s history.
Biggar has clearly done his homework: the bibliography runs to thirty-three pages. Biggar dives deeply into the nitty-gritty details in his extensive endnotes; altogether the endnotes run to 130 pages with some individual endnotes being several pages long.
Biggar’s verdict? While the British Empire was not without fault, its crimes have been greatly exaggerated and its virtues have been almost wholly ignored.
Near the beginning of the book Biggar makes this interesting and important point:
“[T]he controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present, not the past. An empire is a single state that contains a variety of peoples, one of which is dominant. As a form of political organisation, it has been around for millennia and has appeared on every continent. The Assyrians were doing empire in the Middle East over four thousand years ago. They were followed by the Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Persians. In the sixth century so the Carthaginians established a series of colonies around the Mediterranean. Then came the Athenians, followed by the Romans and after them the Byzantine rump. Empire first appeared in China in the third century BC and, despite periodic collapses, still survives today. From the seventh century AD Muslim Arabs invaded east as far as Afghanistan and west as far as central France. In the fifteenth century empire proved very popular: the Ottomans were doing it in Asia Minor, the Mughals in the Indian subcontinent, the Incas in South America and the Aztecs in Mesoamerica. Further north, a couple of centuries later, the Comanche extended their imperial sway over much of what is now Texas, while the Asante were expanding their control in West Africa. And in the 1820s King Shaka led the highly militarised Zulus in scattering other South African peoples to several of the four winds, conducting at least one exterminationist war.
Set in this global historical context, the emergence of European empires from the fifteenth century onwards is hardly remarkable. The Portuguese were first off the mark, followed by the Spanish, and then, in the sixteenth century, by the Dutch, the French and the English. The Scots attempted (in vain) to join their ranks in the 1690s and the Russians did so in the 1700s. What is remarkable, however, is that the contemporary controversy about empire shows no interest at all in any of the non-European empires, past or present. European empires are its sole concern, and of these, above all others, the English – or, as it became after the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, the British – one. The reason for this focus is that the real target of today's anti-imperialists or anti-colonialists is the West or, more precisely, the Anglo-American liberal world order that has prevailed since 1945.” (p. 3-4)
One of the serious charges levelled against the British Empire is its participation in the slave trade. Sadly, that charge is true; but it is, unfortunately, quite unremarkable: human societies all over the world have had slaves since prehistory. What is truly remarkable and unprecedented is that “the British abolished both the trade and the institution within the empire in the early 1800s. They then spent the subsequent century and a half exercising their imperial power in deploying the Royal Navy to stop slave ships crossing the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and in suppressing the Arab slave trade across Africa.” (p. 7)
Critics often portray the British as being contemptuous of foreigners and haughtily looking down upon foreign culture; that picture isn’t wholly accurate. Biggar writes:
“It would be quite misleading, however, to suppose that the agents of the EIC [East India Company] were all about making a profit for shareholders, amassing fortunes for themselves and intimidating Indian opponents. John Malcolm was not the only company man to take a serious interest in learning about his cultural environment. Warren Hastings, for example, achieved fluency in Bengali and had a decent working knowledge of Urdu and Persian. Fascinated by India's Hindu and Buddhist past, which had faded from sight during seven centuries of Muslim rule, he pioneered the revival of Sanskrit and sponsored the first ever English translation of the Bhagavad Gita. In 1784 he supported the prodigiously polyglot Sir William Jones in founding the Calcutta Asiatic Society, which became the centre of a cultural revival that would blossom into the Bengal Renaissance, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So great was Hastings' cultural enthusiasm that he once declared, 'In truth, I love India a little more than my own country.’
Post-colonialist disciples of Edward Said brush this aside as so much 'Orientalist’ cultural 'appropriation', which is designed to confirm Westerners' sense of their own superiority and to impress on those they rule a corresponding sense of inferiority. But this fails to do justice to the phenomenon. In general, when people encounter a foreign culture, they are bound to try and understand it in their own, familiar terms. In so doing, they become aware of elements that do not fit and at that point they recognise cultural difference, which might alarm and repel them, but equally might fascinate and attract them. In this particular case, Hastings clearly admired what he encountered. Besides, it is quite hard to see how his translation of the Bhagavad Gita served to entrench British domination. On the contrary, the comparative philology developed by William Jones undermined the Eurocentric assumption of the primacy of Graeco-Roman language and civiliation. According to Nirad Chaudhuri, in rescuing classical Sanskritic civilisation from oblivion, Hastings, Jones and other European Orientalists rendered a service to Indian and Asiatic nationalism which no native could ever have given. At one stroke it put the Indian nationalist on a par with his English ruler. It gave him the material out of which to build 'the historical myth' of a Hindu civilisation that was superior to Europe's.” (p. 26-7)
The view that the British Empire was built solely or primarily through militaristic oppression is quite ludicrous when one takes into account how vastly outnumbered the British were. “The number of Britons in India was always tiny. In 1830 there were no more than 36,400 white solders in the whole of the vast country. That had risen to only 65,000 by 1900, when the British population amounted to a mere 154,691 individuals out of a total of nearly 300 million.” (p. 27)
So how did the British establish their empire? By offering their subjects values they couldn’t get elsewhere such as the Rule of Law and efficient administration which was remarkably free from corruption. Also, “Indian entrepreneurs were able to import technology and know-how from Britain at the end of the nineteenth century and to establish native textile and steel industries that succeeded in outcompeting the imperial centre. In 1874 the Elphinstone College-educated Jamsetji Tata opened the first steam-powered cotton mills in Nagpur; and in 1907 his son, the Cambridge-educated Dorabji Tata, officially incorporated the Tata Iron and Steel Company in Bombay.” (p. 164) “‘Conversely there is no certainty that any of these colonial economies would have done much better had they remained independent: the record of the few non-colonial Third World countries outside Latin America during the modern period was unimpressive.’ Reynolds' general point is given sharp focus by a comparison of Ethiopia and Southern Rhodesia in 1960. Whereas the latter had been subject to European rule for seventy years, the former had retained its independence except for a brief period of Italian occupation in 1935-41. Yet, with only one sixth the size of the other's population, Rhodesia outperformed Ethiopia dramatically in terms of modern development[.]” (p. 165) “Recognising the good that colonial government did, native peoples often found it to be not only sufficiently legitimate, but the best available, even admirable and to be emulated. So, in the 1950s and 1960s several million Chinese voted with their feet, fled the lawless mainland and found refuge in the colony of Hong Kong." Even now there are many Chinese in Hong Kong who, if given the choice, would prefer life in a gradually democratising, liberal, law-governed British colony to life under the arbitrary, repressive thumb of the Chinese regime in Beijing.” (p. 288)
Biggar does not whitewash the British Empire; he writes:
“Let me begin by drawing up a tally of the evils of British colonialism – and by 'evils' here I mean not only culpable wrongdoing or injustice, but also unintended harms. In the account offered in this book we have met: brutal slavery; the epidemic spread of devastating disease: economic and social disruption; the unjust displacement of natives by settlers; failures of colonial government to prevent settler abuse and famine; elements of racial alienation and racist contempt; policies of needlessly wholesale cultural suppression; miscarriages of justice; instances of unjustifiable military aggression and the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force; and the failure to admit native talent to the higher echelons of colonial government on terms of equality quickly enough to forestall the build-up of nationalist resentment. All these evils are lamentable, and where culpable, they merit moral condemnation. None of them, however, amounts to genocide in the proper sense of the concerted, intentional killing of all the members of a people, the paradigm of which was the Nazi policy of implementing a 'Final Solution' to the 'problem' of the Jews. In the history of the British Empire, there was nothing morally equivalent to Nazi concentration or death camps, or to the Soviet Gulag.” (p. 276)
My brief review has only scratched the surface of this richly interesting book. If you are interested in history and/or contemporary political discourse, then I encourage you to pick up a copy of this book; I think that you will find it to be thought-provoking and rewarding!
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Against the lies of the "de-colonialisers".
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