The History They Rewrote: Colonialism, Context, and the Asymmetric Ledger
Post 5 of 8 — The Inheritance: Western Civilization, Its Critics, and What Is Actually at Stake
Nigel Biggar is a professor of moral theology at Oxford and a trained historian. He is not a polemicist by instinct or by career. When he published Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning in 2023, he was engaging in the scholarly activity his discipline demands: examining evidence, making distinctions, and arriving at conclusions calibrated to the complexity of the subject.
The response was predictable. He was accused of apologizing for empire, of racism, of providing cover for contemporary injustice. His institution received complaints. The controversy confirmed, for anyone paying attention, exactly the thesis Biggar was making: this unscrupulous indifference to historical truth indicates that the controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present, not the past [1].
Biggar is right. The decolonization movement is not primarily interested in the historical British Empire, or the historical Portuguese Empire, or the historical Belgian Congo. It is interested in the Anglo-American liberal world order that has prevailed since 1945 [2] and in stripping that order of its moral legitimacy. Empire is the vehicle. The destination is the present.
What the Historical Record Actually Shows
Beginning with the actual history is itself now a somewhat radical act, which tells you something about the state of the debate.
The British Empire transported enslaved Africans to its Caribbean and American colonies for roughly 150 years. This is true, well-documented, and genuinely appalling by any reasonable moral standard. It is also, on the prosecutorial reading of colonial history, the only truth that matters — the lens through which every subsequent aspect of the British imperial record must be assessed.
Biggar’s more complete accounting of the record: after a century and a half of transporting slaves to the West Indies and the American colonies, 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 [3].
The scale of this effort is not widely taught. Kaufmann and Pape concluded that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade alone in 1807-1867 was “the most expensive example of costly international moral action recorded in modern history” [4]. Factoring in direct costs and secondary costs — the higher prices for goods British consumers paid throughout this period — this was an extraordinary sustained commitment of national resources to a moral objective. Murray’s summary of the same finding: the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade constituted “the most expensive example” of international moral action “recorded in modern history” [5].
None of this appears in the decolonization curriculum. Biggar’s conclusion follows directly: “The British Empire cannot be equated with slavery, since, during the second half of the empire’s life, imperial policy was consistently committed to abolishing it. The vicious racism of slavers and planters was not essential to the British Empire, and whatever racism exists in Britain today is not its fruit” [6].
This is not a defense of everything the British Empire did. It is a statement of what honest historical assessment requires: to assess the legacy of empire, it is necessary to assess the period in the round [7].
How to Judge the Past Honestly
Biggar’s treatment of the moral judgment question is one of the most carefully argued parts of his book, and worth understanding precisely because it avoids the twin failures of the debate: refusing to judge the past at all (the relativist cop-out) and judging it with complete anachronism (the prosecutorial standard).
His position: we can and should make moral judgments about the past. The claim that we cannot judge the past at all is not moral humility — it is moral abdication. History contains an ocean of injustice, most of it unremedied and now lying beyond correction in this world [8]. We are not forbidden from noticing.
But good moral judgment will account for two things. First, that human beings are always in the process of moral learning, and that some moral truths that are obvious to us were just not obvious to our ancestors [9]. Slavery seems to us horrible. It used not to seem horrible. The fact that we now know better is itself evidence of moral progress — progress that originated overwhelmingly within the Western tradition.
Second, that the peace and security that most people in the early twenty-first century West take for granted as normal are, historically, quite extraordinary [10]. Judging the conduct of a colonial administrator in 1890 by the standards of a Oxford don in 2024 is not moral rigor. It is moral anachronism. Biggar’s quotation of Joseph Chamberlain — “We have to lie on the bed which our predecessors made for us” — represents what he calls an admirable practical wisdom that academic activists typically lack [11]. Not having such wisdom, they also lack forgiveness for honest error and tragic failure.
The Asymmetric Ledger
Murray names the central structural problem of the colonial debate with precision: it is clear that some unfair ledger has been created — a ledger in which the West is treated by one set of standards and the rest of the world by another. A ledger in which it seems that the West can do no right and the rest of the world can do no wrong — or do wrong only because we in the West made them do it [12].
The empirical prerequisite for this ledger is the ignorance Murray identifies: “In order to be able to judge the West, you would have to know at least some of the history of the rest. The only thing modern Western populations are more ignorant about than their own history is the history of other peoples outside the West. Yet such knowledge is surely a prerequisite to being able to arrive at any moral judgments” [13].
Biggar provides the comparative history that closes the argument. When Cecil Rhodes judged British civilization superior to what he encountered in South Africa in 1870 — in natural science, technology, finance, communications, commerce, naval power, and liberal political institutions — he was making a judgment that every civilization in every era has made about civilizations it encountered. Arab geographers and philosophers compared their own cultural sophistication favourably to what seemed to them the more primitive cultures of white northern Europeans and black Africans. The imperial Qing dynasty regarded the British and other Westerners as barbarians, without any embarrassment at all. Somalis held their contempt for Bantu peoples — ‘We cannot obey slaves. It is impossible for us to live under slave people’ [14].
The cultural judgment Rhodes made was not unusual. It was universal. The asymmetric standard that condemns him for it — while ignoring identical judgments made by non-Western actors throughout history — is not a moral standard at all. It is a political weapon.
O’Neill states the logical conclusion with his characteristic bluntness: to judge non-whites by a lower moral standard than the one you use for whites is the very definition of racism [15]. The decolonization framework, by refusing to apply to non-Western historical actors the same critical scrutiny it applies to Western ones, embeds the hierarchy it claims to dismantle.
The Strategic Beneficiary
Murray identifies who benefits from the West’s sustained exercise in self-accusation with a clarity that the Western commentariat largely avoids: while the CCP has been actively engaging in the most appalling human rights abuses, it is clearly delighted that the West has distracted itself with a set of self-abasements of its own [16].
The asymmetric ledger applied to colonial history is not merely a historical error. It is a strategic liability. The United States and the United Kingdom, the primary inheritors of the liberal world order, spend enormous institutional energy prosecuting themselves for their historical failures while China, Russia, and others with rather more recent and rather more severe records of oppression attract virtually no equivalent scrutiny from the same institutions.
Biggar identified the real target from the outset: the controversy over empire aims at the Anglo-American liberal world order that has prevailed since 1945. The people most invested in dismantling that order from outside know that the decolonization movement is doing their work for them, from inside, for free.
Referenced Highlights
[1] “This unscrupulous indifference to historical truth indicates that the controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present, not the past.”
Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise
[2] “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.”
Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise
[3] “After a century and a half of transporting slaves to the West Indies and the American colonies, 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.”
Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise
[4] “Kaufmann and Pape conclude that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade (alone) in 1807-67 was ‘the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history’.”
Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise
[5] “Britain’s suppression of the Atlantic slave trade constituted ‘the most expensive example’ of international moral action ‘recorded in modern history.’”
The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise
[6] “The British Empire cannot be equated with slavery, since, during the second half of the empire’s life, imperial policy was consistently committed to abolishing it. The vicious racism of slavers and planters was not essential to the British Empire, and whatever racism exists in Britain today is not its fruit.”
Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise
[7] “The rise of postcolonial studies had been a necessary correction within academia, but that period itself now needed interrogating. For to assess the legacy of empire, it is necessary to assess the period in the round.”
The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise
[8] “History contains an ocean of injustice, most of it unremedied and now lying beyond correction in this world.”
Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise
[9] “It is true that we should not judge the past by the present, if it means... that human beings are always in the process of learning morally, and that some moral truths that are obvious to us were just not obvious to our ancestors.”
Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise
[10] “The peace and security that most people in the early twenty-first century West take for granted as normal are, historically, quite extraordinary.”
Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise
[11] “When Joseph Chamberlain commented on imperial policy, ‘We have to lie on the bed which our predecessors made for us’, he spoke with an admirable practical wisdom that academics and student activists typically lack.”
Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise
[12] “It is clear that some unfair ledger has been created. A ledger in which the West is treated by one set of standards and the rest of the world by another. A ledger in which it seems that the West can do no right and the rest of the world can do no wrong.”
The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise
[13] “In order to be able to judge the West, you would have to know at least some of the history of the rest. The only thing modern Western populations are more ignorant about than their own history is the history of other peoples outside the West. Yet such knowledge is surely a prerequisite to being able to arrive at any moral judgments.”
The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise
[14] “When Cecil Rhodes landed in South Africa in 1870... it was manifestly obvious to him that British civilisation at the time was superior... In the medieval period Muslim Arab geographers compared their own cultural sophistication favourably to what seemed to them the more primitive cultures of white northern Europeans and black Africans... The imperial Qing dynasty regarded the British – and other Westerners – as barbarians, without any embarrassment at all.”
Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise
[15] “To judge non-whites by a lower moral standard than the one you use for whites is the very definition of racism.”
After the Pogrom — Brendan O’Neill. Open in Readwise
[16] “At the same time that the CCP has been actively engaging in the most appalling human rights abuses, it is clearly delighted that the West has distracted itself with a set of self-abasements of its own.”
The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise