Title: The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism
Author: Alan Lester (ed)
Publisher: Hurst
Year: 2023
When the retired Oxford theologian Nigel Biggar published Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning in 2021, it marked an apogee of a long-drawn culture war over the British imperial record. Biggar had spent the past few years fashioning himself into a figurehead for a certain strain of imperial apologetics which by 2021 had coalesced into a well-organised culture-war ecology of think tanks, media and politicians with well-funded links to the global reactionary right. If Biggar felt himself slighted by his academic colleagues or wanted to cavil about whether Cecil Rhodes was a racist or not, he could write a long piece about it for Unherd or The Critic that evening, do a podcast with Douglas Murray by Monday, and within a few months be making a speech about it to Policy Exchange.
The Truth About Empire is framed as an attempt to respond to Colonialism by an assortment of historians working in the field of imperial and colonial history. However the immediate problem the book faces is that what it’s responding to is not necessarily reducible to a book. Nigel Biggar’s real output is not Colonialism, but Nigel Biggar: a figure of austere dignity tending a lonely flame of fealty to a lost empire. Likewise, the work of what we might call the reactionary-historiographical complex isn’t really to make historical interventions but to cultivate a structure of feeling based around a defence of white innocence, and directed against multicultural cosmopolitanism and the spectre of decadent intellectual elites undermining western civilisation from within.
A historian’s arsenal
What makes The Truth About Empire valuable is that it marshals a broad front of ways to respond to this kind of thinking while positioning itself carefully as the production of professional historians. In doing so, it provides a kind of index of approaches experts can take when their subject is made the ground of culture war discourse-mongering.
Most obviously, they can do their job. Alan Lester, the editor of The Truth About Empire, has gone out of his way to engage Biggar on his own terms in the best possible faith and as courteously as possible. In his introductory chapter, Lester patiently lays out the case against Biggar’s history of imperial innocence, explaining with heroic reasonableness why, for example, the genocide of the Tasmanian aborigines was neither an unfortunate accident nor an aberrant exception to the rule of imperial benevolence.
Lester’s greatest contribution is his insistence on historical complexity. Where the culture warriors contend that the empire’s historical record is too complex to dismiss out of hand as purely criminal, Lester gently insists that it is certainly too complex to characterise as essentially innocent, and that to trace its constitutive structures of domination, violence and extraction is the necessary work of historians. This kind of response is perhaps a necessary foundation to the work of criticising the wider project, as Lester has done in his book Deny and Disavow.
The reactionary cultures of historical memory won’t be beaten just by debunking but by building counter-structures, networks of influence and cultural power proposing saner ways of imagining the national past
More narrowly, Margot Finn’s contribution to The Truth About Empire focuses purely on Biggar’s historical shortcomings. Painstakingly tracing Biggar’s sources, she notes how heavily they lean white and male (and how dramatically his hostility leans towards the non-white and non-male), and unfolds the layers of laziness, tendentiousness and plain dishonesty in his citations. It is a pleasure to see a respected senior historian deliver up a full-service methodological kicking, but it exposes the attritional nature of this kind of critique: how many historians, you wonder, have to do this kind of work before Biggar is discredited? And would it make any dent in the project itself?
The best parts of The Truth About Empire build on this bread-and-butter work and then go beyond discrediting the reactionary project, taking some falsehood in Biggar’s book and using it as a starting-point from which do to some proper history. Stuart Ward’s chapter on Biggar’s antecedents in the ‘balance-sheet’ approach to colonialism is a brilliant historicisation of the genre of post-imperial apologetics. Every piece of reactionary nostalgism imagines itself to be a brave and original development: the flyleaf of Colonialism testifies at length to the book’s daringness, its novelty, its lone heroism in finally standing against the tides of fashion and cowardice. Ward proves otherwise, patiently and good-humouredly tracing its preoccupations and moral landscape backwards through time to the anxious moment of formal decolonisation itself.
Similarly, Liam Liburd’s chapter takes one of Biggar’s bugbears – the comparison between histories of colonialism and those of European fascism – and inverts it. Where Biggar sees any comparison as wholly inadmissible, he also clearly understands it as wholly contemporary, a matter of manners in debating two things that (to his mind, at least) have long since ceased to exist.
Liburd uses this to elucidate the long history of the comparison: back when fascism and empire were deciding the fate of the world, black Marxist thinkers such as George Padmore and Cedric Robinson were theorising the complex kinship between the two, and insisting on the interlinked nature of the struggles against both.
Structures of feeling
There is a bigger point about the culture wars to be made here. It is common for reviewers of this kind of book to point out that it’s hardly going to persuade anyone, as if your average reader were looking from Biggar’s book to this one and wondering which way to leap. This misunderstands how the public sphere works, in ways that the likes of Biggar understand very well. They are not trying to persuade anyone of an intellectual viewpoint, but popularising a structure of feeling, cultivating resentment, and talking up an enemy; they’re shifting the dial of a culture, through concerted action and discursive force.
Colonialism is one prop in an ongoing public performance whose strange indignity consists in part in its lack of any measure in the lengths to which it will go. When not writing books, Biggar has given sermons from the pulpit of Christ Church Cathedral making the Christian argument for a hard line on channel boat crossings, and inferred parallels (despite his aversion to comparisons with fascism) between his own situation and that of the plotters against Hitler of June 1944.
While it is important to point out that such things are meant to make violence more possible, it only gets you so far. Similarly, exposing the intellectual poverty of the work itself is a necessary service to public scholarship and a good way to maintain the discipline’s reputation and self-respect. Ultimately, these are reactive responses that need to be folded into a bigger strategy.
The reactionary cultures of historical memory won’t be beaten just by debunking but by building counter-structures, networks of influence and cultural power proposing saner ways of imagining the national past and its meanings. They will be beaten too by historians such as the ones in The Truth About Empire, who are able to fold this kind of clowning into broader and more generous histories, and generate from the culture warriors more of the culture (the one they hate) that will drown them.
