Amazon Book Description
- A new assessment of the West’s colonial record
- In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the ‘End of History’ – that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever.
- Now however, with Russia rattling its sabre on the borders of Europe and China rising to challenge the post-1945 world order, the liberal West faces major threats.
- These threats are not only external. Especially in the Anglosphere, the ‘decolonisation’ movement corrodes the West’s self-confidence by retelling the history of European and American colonial dominance as a litany of racism, exploitation, and massively murderous violence.
- Nigel Biggar tests this indictment, addressing the crucial questions in eight chapters
- Was the British Empire driven primarily by greed and the lust to dominate?
- Should we speak of ‘colonialism and slavery’ in the same breath, as if they were identical?
- Was the Empire essentially racist?
- How far was it based on the theft of land?
- Did it involve genocide?
- Was it driven fundamentally by the motive of economic exploitation?
- Was undemocratic colonial government necessarily illegitimate? and,
- Was the Empire essentially violent, and its violence pervasively racist and terroristic?
- Biggar makes clear that, like any other long-standing state, the British Empire involved elements of injustice, sometimes appalling. On occasions it was culpably incompetent and presided over moments of dreadful tragedy.
- Nevertheless, from the early 1800s the Empire was committed to abolishing the slave trade in the name of a Christian conviction of the basic equality of all human beings. It ended endemic inter-tribal warfare, opened local economies to the opportunities of global trade, moderated the impact of inescapable modernisation, established the rule of law and liberal institutions such as a free press, and spent itself in defeating the murderously racist Nazi and Japanese empires in the Second World War.
- As encyclopaedic in historical breadth as it is penetrating in analytical depth, Colonialism offers a moral inquest into the colonial past, forensically contesting damaging falsehoods and thereby helping to rejuvenate faith in the West’s future.
- Nigel Biggar's book Colonialism was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 2023-02-13.
- Nigel Biggar, CBE is Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas and Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford. Described as ‘one of the leading living Western ethicists’ (John Gray, New Statesman), he was appointed Commander of the British Empire for services to higher education in the 2021 Queen’s Birthday Honours list and named one of Prospect magazine’s Top Thinkers of 2024. In January 2025 he entered the House of Lords as a Conservative peer. He is the author of the bestselling Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning.
- Nigel Biggar (was) Regius Professor of Moral & Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, and Director of the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics & Public Life. He has degrees from Oxford, Regent College, and the University of Chicago. He studies the contribution of religion to the health of liberal societies; moral questions about killing (especially in relation to suicide, euthanasia, and war); forgiveness after civil conflict; the public responsibility of the media; and the public vocation of universities.
Amazon Press Reviews
- ‘A fascinating read, informative, surprising and written with panache and clarity’
→ The Times, Andrew Billen
- ‘A thoughtful, compelling text’
→ Daily Telegraph, five-star review
- ‘A salutary corrective’
→ The Times, Book of the Week
- ‘Carries the intellectual force of a Javeline antitank missile. Colonialism is no apologia for empire… but calls for balance…Biggar acknowledges wickedness in our nation but his version of history calls us to accept the messiness and moral compromises inherent in liberalism’
→ Sunday Times
- ‘Nigel Biggar has written … the book on the morality of the British Empire, a kind of Encyclopaedia Pacis Britannicae…. a thoughtful, compelling text’
→ Sunday Telegraph
- ‘An important, timely and brave book…the first serious counter blast against the hysterical and ahistorical orthodoxy that has placed such a stranglehold on our public discourse on the British Empire, and as such will prove to be an indispensable handbook in the battles to come. It is also exceedingly well written and compellingly argued’
→ The Critic
- ‘An important book, as well as a courageous one’
→ Literary Review
- ‘Patiently argued and carefully balanced yet passionately committed to the production of a narrative which replaces denunciation with evidences and understanding’
→ Quillette
- ‘Biggar fearlessly goes where few other scholars now venture to tread: to defend the British empire against its increasingly vitriolic detractors … Those who wish to accuse the Victorians of genocide – who seek gulags in Kenya or Holocausts in the Raj – will probably not risk being ‘triggered’ by reading this book. But they really should … Biggar’s book simply cannot be ignored by anyone who wishes to hold a view on the subject’
→ Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author of "Ferguson (Niall) - Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World"
Note
- I've only just received this book (November 2025) so - as is my occasional practice - I've 'borrowed' an Amazon Customer Review.
- This one gives it 4 stars and is fairly balanced.
Amazon Customer Review
- Flawed Polemic in Defence of Empire
- Colonialism, by Professor Nigel Biggar, is a compelling, urgent, polemic written by an academic with an urgent case to make. It is well written and very much worth reading — if only to assimilate his argument and expand your perspective. Whether or not you agree with that argument — whether or not it’s even valid or moral — is another matter.
- The question, in summary: were slavery, racism, theft of ancestral land, genocide, economic exploitation, bad government and institutional violence part and parcel of the British Empire and all its doings?
- The thesis, in summary: the British Empire was just one of many through history. Empires have happened everywhere for at least 5,000 years. Nothing about the British one was uniquely bad, but it’s the only one that is the target of the contemporary “anti-colonialists”. The formation and subsequent development of the British Empire were not a premeditated project; it grew organically. It was of its time and should be judged accordingly. It committed evil acts and instituted malign policies. But the intent of its administrators was good in the vast majority of cases; most of their measures had beneficial effects, including on the ruled people. Sometimes, they got it wrong. But the Empire was not genocidal, was not fundamentally exploitative, was not “essentially racist”, was not unnecessarily violent, and it acted to suppress slavery both in the Empire and worldwide. No comparison or equation with the Nazis is valid, including in terms of motivation, central direction, “racism”, “genocide” or “holocaust”. Through their excessive contrition, and their virtue-signalling, contemporary anti-colonialists would throw the well-intentioned, improvement-seeking, Imperial baby out with the revisionist, politically correct, bathwater. And all this is to the detriment of Britain’s place in and positive influence on the modern “liberal world order”.
- The (my) verdict, in summary: nothing the British Empire stood for or did can validly be equated with the philosophy or actions of Nazi Germany. Hitler’s Germany was intrinsically a racial state; it did provoke global war; it did aim to exterminate entire peoples; it did in fact perpetrate the Shoah, the Holocaust. The Empire cannot validly be accused of anything equivalent. But, comparison with the Nazis as a moral yardstick sets a low bar. The Empire *was* racist in the composition of its administration, if (mostly) benign and paternalistic in its treatment of the subject races. The Empire *did* enthusiastically promote slavery; its change of heart after 1807 was hard-headed as well as altruistic. The Empire *was* in some instances shockingly and unnecessarily violent. The Empire *was* economically exploitative. In counterpoint, the Empire did provide railways, engineering, agricultural science, sanitation, water management, medical advances, competent civil administration and much more.
- Prof. Biggar seems to me to be generally factually accurate. That almost half of Colonialism is notes, sources and bibliography is consistent with that view. But, on almost every topic dealt with, I am not an expert and might not spot falsehoods or errors in Prof. Biggar’s presentation. The one exception is Ireland: the Irish Famine and the 1916 Easter Rising. As a ‘native’ (!!), I do know the intricacies of these rather well. And, wearing my impartial hat, the Prof.’s facts and conclusions do appear to be correct. In the case of the Famine, the weakness is his failure to ask why the west-of-Ireland peasants became so dependent on the lumper potato in the first place. (There are many reasons, for which the British administration in Ireland at least shares responsibility — but that’s a book in itself). It seems then, across the board, that Prof. Biggar may perhaps be factually accurate but also guilty of the occasional omission.
- Throughout his book, Prof. Biggar also too readily falls back on the lowest-common-denominator defence of the Empire: we weren’t as bad as the Nazis; the Empire wasn’t “essentially racist”; Empires have existed for 5,000 years and the British one was nothing unique; all states and empires exercise violence in pursuit of their ends; slavery was the worldwide norm until about 1800 so it was at least justifiable that the British Empire engaged in it also; the colonies didn’t have the universal franchise, but then Britain didn’t either…… and so it goes. As I noted, the bar of Prof. Biggar’s justification is on the low side.
- In my June 2019 Amazon review of Margaret Mitchell’s classic 1936 novel of the American Civil War, Gone With the Wind, I wrote this:
“The book is of its time and therefore racist…. If Gone with the Wind were written in its current form today, it would be correctly judged an abomination. For 1936, one must accept it as it is and of its time. One of the greatest errors of the early 21st century is the practice of judging historical figures and events by the standards of now. It is only just to judge authors, and anyone else, by taking fully into account the accepted standards of their own time. In 2102 (the same remove from 2019 as today is from 1936), how will they judge our practices today of unrestricted frivolous travel, meat-eating, incarceration, gun-licensing, use of chemical pesticides, the elevation of opinion and prejudice over fact? -- to name a few. I would say that no generation should be too self-satisfied or smug.”
- This, I think, is what Prof. Biggar is driving at: the essential unfairness of judging the British Empire by the standards and mores of 2023. If so, I agree wholeheartedly with him and I decry the revisionists. But his defences of the Empire, as set out in Colonialism, are flawed to say the least.
- Colonialism, in essence, is a bit of a rant, and one side of a custard-pie-fight between academics. It’s a good read, but a bit exhausting. My next book will be a romantic novel.
Book Comment
Collins, 14 March 2024. New Paperback
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2026
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)