Debates about Australia’s colonisation, and especially about the British invasion of First Nations land, reached a peak in the early 2000s. Historians who emphasised high levels of frontier violence and the loss of Aboriginal lives were charged with fabrication, prompting new efforts to document conflict across the country. Those debates are now twenty years or more old, and while historical argument will and should continue, it is now widely accepted that British colonisation was devastating for First Nations people.
Britain, necessarily a key player in Australian historical debates, has witnessed its own disagreements about the moral character of its past actions. At issue is the question of whether a balance sheet would reveal the British Empire to have been mainly a good thing or mainly bad. Were its effects in Asia, Africa, the Americas and Oceania something to be proud of, or were they so destructive that Britain should apologise and pay compensation and reparations to affected communities, as Caribbean nations are now demanding? Or was the reality somewhere in between?
These questions have been at issue in Britain for more than a century, but the debate has become more heated over the past decade. One spark for the rising temperature was the Rhodes Must Fall movement, which succeeded in having a statue honouring English coloniser Cecil Rhodes removed from the University of Cape Town in 2015 and sparked protests at Oxford University against a similar statue at Oriel College. The debate then broadened, with conservative politicians and public figures increasingly concerned that modern historical scholarship — and its impact on history education and sites of public memory such as monuments and museums — was undermining British people’s pride in their own country. As Conservative MP Gareth Bacon put it, “Britain is under attack.”
Into the midst of this contention came theologian Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023), a largely positive account of Empire and a critique of various practising historians. Biggar’s book, a bestseller in Britain, was reviewed especially favourably by those who feel the British Empire needs and deserves defending.
According to his publisher, Biggar argued that while the British Empire involved “elements of injustice, sometimes appalling” and was at times “culpably incompetent,” it also abolished the slave trade, ended endemic intertribal warfare, opened local economies to global trade, and spread the rule of law and a free press. Those concerned for the long-term reputation of the Empire saw the book as welcome support for and proof of their position.
Biggar’s book had its critics, of course, and one of the most outspoken was Alan Lester, a professor of historical geography at the University of Sussex. Author of Ruling the World (2021) and other influential histories of the British Empire, Lester turned his attention in 2022 to those who defend the British Empire with Deny and Disavow: Distancing the Imperial Past in the Culture Wars. Most recently, he has edited a new collection of essays by established historians taking issue with Biggar’s argument, findings and historical method.
Titled The Truth about Empire, the collection’s subtitle is Real Histories of British Colonialism. By “real,” the editor means histories written by specialists on the basis of extensive research. For readers of Australian history and those who remember our history wars at their most intense, this new collection brings to mind Robert Manne’s Whitewash (2003), in which a group of historians similarly dissected Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One.
Lester’s aim is to demonstrate to a wider public the state of historical knowledge on key aspects of the British Empire and thereby show the limitations of Biggar’s argument. His introduction gets the ball rolling with an account of Britain’s current culture wars and a broad-sweep account of the British Empire. In the chapters that follow, an impressive line-up of historians discuss the role of the British Empire in Tasmania, Canada, India, Singapore, South Africa and China, and consider themes such as the abolition of slavery and the end of Empire. I can examine only a few of these chapters here.
In “No End of a Reckoning,” Australian historian Stuart Ward explains how the idea of an imperial “balance sheet” arose. While debates over the morality of Empire extend as far back as the Anglo-Boer war, they started to become historical debates after Indian independence in 1947, when, as Ward puts it, “recognition dawned that the empire itself was entering its final days.” It was then that the idea of measuring the Empire on an historical–moral scale began to emerge.
A key work was Margery Perham’s book, The Colonial Reckoning, based on her 1961 Reith lectures and published the following year. Perham was a leading historian of colonial administration, especially in Africa, and the lectures were a late-career opportunity for her to reflect on her life’s work and the Empire at its centre. Ward suggests it was Perham who really set off the habit of stocktaking the empire, listing its positives and negatives in order to draw up a “very rough and ready political and moral colonial balance-sheet.” That belief has persisted, though we are now witnessing a particularly energetic phase.
Andrea Major’s discussion of the abolition of sati (widow-burning) in colonial India is a standout. A professor of colonial history at the University of Leeds, she specialises in the relationship between Britain and India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her chapter focuses less on Biggar than do most of the other chapters, and discusses the history and historiography of sati and its abolition in 1829 more broadly. She is critical of the balance sheet approach and instead seeks to think about “the complex ways in which the colonial state functioned in practice.”
By the 1820s, Major argues, the division over sati was not between Britons and Indians but rather between progressives and reformers wanting to end the practice on one side and orthodox Hindus and anti-interventionist British officials on the other. Her complex and detailed account ends by suggesting that “the reality of colonial social reform was uneven, ambiguous, and problematic, and it was rarely completely separable from the more coercive aspects of empire.”
Robert Bickers contributes a nice short chapter on China, pointing out that while it was never a British colony, it experienced so extensive a series of interventions by European powers that the years from 1842 to 1943 came to be known as the Century of Humiliation. Furthermore, Bickers suggests, the British enterprise in China was “steeped in violence.” He starts with a striking description of the Royal Marines National Memorial, and specifically its bronze relief, on the Mall in London. The memorial was built in 1903 to commemorate marines who died in 1900 during Britain’s third war with China. “Stand close,” Bickers writes, “and you can see clearly a marine run his bayonet deep into the chest of a Chinese soldier who has been knocked clean off his feet by the impact of the thrust. You can run your hand over it.”
That incident was part of a history of British intervention in China that began with the First Anglo-Chinese war, known as the Opium war, of 1839–42 and ended when a Royal Navy ship escaped on the Yangzi from the forces of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. Although there was a lot more to the history of Britain in China, says Bicker — including “profound intellectual engagement and exchange, admiration, humanitarian enterprise, love and friendship” — we should not forget that “the foundation was violence, in thought, word, and deed.”
Australian readers may be interested especially by the late Lyndall Ryan’s chapter on Tasmania and the question of genocide. Ryan points out the centrality of debates over Tasmania’s 1826–32 Black war in Australia’s early twenty-first-century history wars, and highlights parallels with the current culture wars in Britain. Keith Windschuttle’s claims that she and others had fabricated the evidence that the British colonisation of Tasmania was violent and entailed extensive loss of Aboriginal lives had the opposite effect to what he intended, she argues: in reaction to his claims, a new wave of research demonstrated the prevalence of frontier violence in Tasmania and the Australian colonies more generally. Ryan’s own subsequent research on massacres has since become well-known, especially with the launch by the University of Newcastle of a map showing where those attacks on Aboriginal people occurred.
The Truth about Empire will be valuable for anyone with a special interest in the history of the British Empire, especially teachers and students. Its chapters serve as useful guides to recent historical scholarship on particular topics within British imperial history, from South Africa to Canada and well beyond. Its focus on the work of Nigel Biggar, however, brings with it some limitations.
As Margot Finn shows in the closing chapter, Biggar fails to deal with major developments in British imperial scholarship. He pays very little attention, for example, to the work of women historians, and doesn’t so much as mention, let alone discuss, the work of such key figures in the new imperial history as Catherine Hall, Antoinette Burton, Clare Anderson, Indrani Chatterjee, Lata Mani and Durba Ghosh. But because The Truth about Empire is structured as a rebuttal of Biggar’s Colonialism, it cannot really discuss the work and impact of these historians, who have so influenced our understanding of British imperial history. One wonders whether Biggar’s book is worth quite so much attention.
And yet, and yet. Debate, argument and counter-argument are to be welcomed, not least because disagreement tends to generate new research, questions and ideas. In that spirit, we can welcome The Truth about Empire as a major contribution to current debates over British imperial history. •
The Truth about Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism
Edited by Alan Lester | Hurst | $49.99 | 304 pages.
