Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning

A new assessment of the British Empire and its colonial past.

In recent years, Western colonialism has been widely damned as racist, exploitative, and given to indiscriminate violence. As ethicist Professor Nigel Biggar has found, arguing against that black and white narrative isn’t easy.

Now, in eight chapters addressing motives, slavery, racism, land, culture, economics, government, and violence, Biggar seeks to assess the reality of the British empire in more nuanced terms. History contains an ocean of injustice, most of it unremedied and beyond correction, but it would be simplistic to pretend imperial intervention was of the same type everywhere, that it was a singly motivated and cohesively enacted, or otherwise escaped being complicated, morally ambiguous and disparate.

In a book that is both compelling and scrupulously researched, Biggar contests damaging falsehoods to provide a searching discussion of the core ethical questions that arose from the complex experience of empire. Was the British empire essentially racist? How foundational was the theft of land to its success? Where it was violent, was the violence pervasively racist and terroristic? How far do its motivations matter, and how much did greed and the lust to dominate come into it?

By so doing, Biggar offers a moral inquest into the colonial past which is not merely historical but political; it is not a matter of settling a pedantic truth about yesterday, but addressing the self-perception and self-confidence of today.