Colonialism

When the Soviet empire collapsed in 1989, many people concluded that history had reached its final stage, and that the worldwide dominance of liberal democracy was secure for good.

That confidence has since weakened. Russia is menacing Europe's borders, China is working to challenge the international order built after 1945, and the liberal West faces threats from within as well. Especially in the Anglosphere, a decolonisation movement is eroding the West's self-assurance by presenting the history of European and American imperial rule as a catalogue of racism, exploitation and brutal, large-scale killing.

Nigel Biggar puts this charge to the test across eight chapters, each taking up a central question. Was the British Empire driven mainly by greed and a desire for domination? Can colonialism and slavery be discussed as if they were the same thing? Was the Empire essentially racist, and did it rest on the seizure of land or amount to genocide? Was economic exploitation its core motive? Was undemocratic colonial rule necessarily illegitimate? Was its violence fundamentally racist and terroristic?

Biggar acknowledges that, like any long-lasting state, the British Empire contained injustices, some of them shocking. At times it was negligently incompetent and it presided over terrible tragedies. Yet from the early nineteenth century it worked to abolish the slave trade, on the Christian conviction that all human beings are fundamentally equal. It ended chronic warfare between tribes, connected local economies to global trade, eased the disruptive effects of unavoidable modernisation, and established the rule of law and liberal institutions such as a free press. It also spent itself in defeating the racist, murderous Nazi and Japanese empires in the Second World War.

The book ranges widely across history while probing it in depth, offering a moral reckoning with the colonial past. Its author sets out to dismantle damaging falsehoods, with the aim of renewing confidence in the West's future.