TRIGGERnometry - The Truth About Colonialism with Nigel Biggar

Episode Date: March 26, 2023

Nigel Biggar CBE was Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Pusey House, Oxford. He holds a BA in Modern History from Oxford and a PhD in Christian Theology & Ethics from the University of Chicago. His most recent book 'Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning' was initially accepted by Bloomsbury, who later changed their mind claiming "public feeling on the subject does not currently support the publication of the book". The book was ultimately published by William Collins and has become a Sunday Times Bestseller. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Very few people in this country know much about our imperial history. And so when zealous, noisy, aggressive folk tell them that it was a litany of racism and oppression, they don't know enough to contradict them. And also what they do know is it doesn't look good if you contradicts what appears to be the progressive view. Because then you too will get labeled as being racist or colonial apologists or whatever. So there was nothing exceptional about the British involvement in slavery. What was exceptional and extraordinary was that toward the end of the 18th century, the idea that owning other human beings as property began to be questioned on principle.

Britain was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish the slave trade and then to abolish slavery. And it then led the world in suppressing both of those, as I said, from Brazil across Africa to Malaysia. That was extraordinary. No other state had done that before. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our terrific returning guest today is an ethicist at the University of Oxford and, of course, the author of his latest book, Colonialism and Moral Reckoning. Nigel Bigger, welcome back to Trigonometry. I'm pleased to be back. Thank you so much. And this time you are on a...

our set, on our turf. Last time we came to you. I'm really impressed. No, thank you very much for coming back. It's a real pleasure to have you on. Your book is out. It's caused quite a stir. He's done very well.

Sunday Times bestseller several weeks in a row, et cetera, et cetera. Without any further ado, what is your book about? And what was the case that you wanted to make? So the book is a response to a fashionable view, namely that European colonialism and in particular British colonialism was a litany of racism and economic exploitation and unwarranted violence. So it was simply evil. And at the extreme, you'll find people trying to approximate British imperial endeavour with Nazism. So accusing British colonialists of genocide and such like.

So the book is a response to that, and it argues that, yes, like any longstanding state, be it national or imperial, the British Empire contained evils and goods. It contained, for example, 150 years worth of engagement in slave trading and in slavery, but also subsequent to that, it was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish the trade and the institution, and then Britain led the world in suppressing it from Brazil, across Africa, to Malaysia. So goods and evils, like most states, and there's no way of kind of balancing up the goods and evils and saying, well, so many years anti-slavery compensates for so many years

of slavery, that doesn't make sense at all. But what I go on to say is, well, no, you can't identify the British Empire with Nazism in any respect. It wasn't essentially racist or exploitative. And then you add to that the fact that there were persistent humanitarian and liberal threads to imperial policy, anti-slavery. and then from about the 1960s onwards, the empire learnt from the fact that it lost the American colonies in the 7080s

and was committed to making Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand independent, and they were virtually independent by 1930, and India was put in the same track at the end of the First World War. And then the final thing, the point I make is that the fact that the empire was committed to fighting the massively, murderous and essentially racist regime in Nazi Germany. And from May 1940 to June 1941, it was the only military opposition to Nazism, with the exception of Greece.

That fact tells you something about the fundamental values of the empire, notwithstanding all sorts of injustices and evils and elements of racism within the empire. And Nigel, I know we touched on this. last time, before we talk about the British Empire specifically, I've been reading a lot in the context of the conflict in Ukraine. And I've been reading a Russian guy called Alexander Dugan. Oh, yes. I don't know if you're familiar with him. I am.

But one of the things, he's part of this movement in Russia, these so-called New Eurasians. And his, it's funny reading him because his book was written not that long ago, I think, in 2000. And he goes, Russians are an imperial people. We must be expanding in order to. to survive and to exist. Can you talk to us because I think part of the reason we have this one-dimensional conversation about this issue is we seem to have forgotten that other countries had empires

too. Yeah. Can you talk to us about empires in general? What are they? Why do they exist? Who creates them? What is the rationale for building a country that essentially not a nation state, but it's a combination of different ethnicities and different relationships to each other?

Tell us about that. Yeah, good point. So you're quite right. The focus certainly in America and in this country is on European empires and white empires, and British Empire in particular. Whereas empire has been an historical phenomenon since the 4,000 BC in Mesopotamia. Arabs did it, Africans did it, the Chinese still do it, the Comanche did it in the southwest of the US and of what's now the US in the 18,

hundreds. So there's a strange focus on European empires which we could talk about. What is empire about? I mean, often it's it's about security. So take Anglo-Saxe in England in the, I don't know, the 700s, 800s, 900s, AD in England, you have lots of little kingdoms. Their borders are insecure. They're subject to raids from outside the island. And so in order to secure their borders, they have to make sure that the people around them are under their control. And sometimes that would involve expanding,

so you impose your government on them. And so in a sense, many nation states, many old nation states, were are the creations of series of expansions and so eventually you end up with by about 1000

England is a virtually single nation state but then in the 14th century you get English kings conquering Wales and then Ireland so often security is a main motive

but they're in the case of the British Empire, trade, major motives. So that's the main reason, the first reason, why the British ended up in Africa and in India. And then you've also got, ironically, you've got anti-imperial endeavours. So one reason the English first pitched up on the coast of North America was to set up posts or ports from which English were, you know, Raiders could raid Spanish shipping at a time when Imperial Spain, Catholic Spain, was threatening little Protestant England. So the motives for empire are various. And you mentioned the current Russian example. So I guess some proponents of empire think that a certain

piece of territory belongs to them by right or by nature or something. So Russian, Some Russians think the Ukraine as an internal part of Russia, regardless of what Ukrainians think, and they feel they own it. But it's hard to generalise because that wouldn't be true of every empire. I mean, not even true of the Russian Empire as a whole, but there are a variety of motives. Nigel, do you ever find it frustrating the way that we talk about history nowadays? Because it seems to me that we have people arguing about history

who don't really understand history who have never been taught it properly. Yes, I feel frustrated sometimes by the level of ignorance. I'm quite sure that the reason why the decolonising movement has taken root in so many of our institutions, particularly since the Black Lives Matter movement across the Atlantic in 2021, I think. 2020. 2020, even earlier than that. the reason it got traction was very few people in this country know much about our imperial history. And so when zealous, noisy, aggressive folk tell them that it was a litany of racism and oppression,

they don't know enough to contradict them. And also what they do know is it doesn't look good if you if you, if you, if you, um, contradicts what appears to be the progressive view, because then you too will get labeled as being racist or a colonial apologist or whatever. So that's part, the ignorance has been a problem. And one thing, even if a reader doesn't agree with the argument in my book, I hope that at least the book will lay out the full story,

the whole story of the British instance of empire, and show people that it did contain good bits as well as bad, and it was really quite complicated and nuanced. So there's that. The other thing that's odd is, and I'm not quite sure how to articulate this, but an attitude to the past as if it ought to be the same as us, I get really annoyed with television programs or films

that assimilate the past to us. So there was a film of the world. about Emily Bronte made recently. Was it just called Emily? Where the story is that, so Emily Bronte in the 19th century wrote this book at Wuthering Heights, which is full of romance and sexual passion.

And the filmmaker decided that Emily couldn't possibly have written this unless she herself had a serious fling and she herself had personal experience of some sexual affair. So the film tells the story about Emily along those lines. The problem is there is no historical evidence at all to suggest that's true. Emily conjured the story out of her own imagination. But a 21st century filmmaker just can't cope with that. So it has to make Emma like a 21st century person.

But the thing is what I find interesting, interesting about the past is its difference. And when you come up against, you know, the fact that Emily never married, never apparently had sex as far as we know, and yet she was able to imagine the story, that's interesting. And what's interesting is it challenges our assumptions, which makes it interesting and should cause us to think about the assumptions and the things we take for granted. But so it's so much safer to assimilate the past to the present. Because then you don't have to think about it. It's a very interesting point you made.

It's almost that we can't believe that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was 18 years old, unless you had some kind of experience of monsters. But anyway, let's tackle some of the really difficult bits of the empire. Because the one thing that people will say is the British traded in slaves. They had slaves for many, many years. That's how they generated huge amounts of wealth. This is obviously awful. Nigel, how can you possibly defend it?

Okay. So let me make clear, I do not approve of slavery. Can we just... Just... Gets out of clear. Can we get any doubt, folks? Okay. Let's take that for granted. But we have to... And this is related to the very last point.

We have to take on board the fact that slavery and trading in slaves was a universe institution almost from the dawn of time. So long before Europeans got into it, and the Portuguese were the first in the 1440s, in terms of trading in Africans. Although there was slavery, I mean, Bristol was a slave market in the medieval period, Irish slaves being traded to Norsemen,

who then took them down the Volga to the Black Sea. So there's lots of slave trading around Europe, but also Africans were involved in trading other Africans as slaves to the Romans, and then to the Muslim Arabs. The Comanche, the Indian, the Amerindian people who dwelt in the southwest of what's now the United States, according to one eminent historian, ran a vast slave economy in the 1700s. And then in the 1700s in Jamaica, when slaves escaped from the plantations and went into the forested interior, the mountains interior of Jamaica, they were called maroons. They often held slaves of their own.

And I was in Raleigh, North Carolina in January, visiting my wife's family there. And I went to the museum of the history of North Carolina, which told me that. that on the eve of the American Civil War in 1860, there were 30,000 freed slaves in the state of North Carolina, some of whom own slaves of their own. My point is we have to accept the fact that for many people, even former slaves, owning slaves was acceptable or normal.

And even if you might well if you were in the 18th century, 19th century, you might well object to cruel and inhuman forms of slavery and yet still think that slavery was a kind of a fact of life. So we just have to accept that and get our heads around it. It doesn't necessarily mean that everyone until us was morally corrupt and morally insensitive. So that's what's what we're one thing. So there was nothing exceptional about the British involvement in slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries. What was exceptional and extraordinary was that toward the end of the 18th century, partly because of enlightenment views, mainly because of Christian views, the idea that

owning other human beings as property began to be questioned. on principle. And so in 1787, you get the creation of the society for the abolition of slavery in England. I think Denmark was the first state in Europe to abolish the slave trade within its limited territories. Britain followed three years later, 1807. And then in 33, the empire abolished slavery as an institution within its territories. So, so, Let me just make this clear because at the moment, in recent years, we've been encouraged in Britain to look again at the horrors of slavery in which our ancestors were involved for 150, 200 years, as if nothing had changed. So the fact that Britain was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish the slave trade, and then to abolish slavery, and it then led the world in suppressing both of those, as I said,

from Brazil across Africa to Malaysia. That was extraordinary. No other state had done that before. No other states had done that before, certainly not in Africa, certainly not in Asia, nor among the indigenous peoples of North America. That was extraordinary. And we carried on doing that until the end of the empire in the 1960s. And in the 1820s and 30s, the Slave Trade Department in the British Horon Oppas was the largest unit.

And in the 1830s or 40s thereabouts, 13% of the total manpower of the Royal Navy was devoted to stopping slave ships leaving West Africa for the Americas. just stopping that quite apart from stopping slavery elsewhere. So I do think we need to remember the fact that we couldn't undo what we'd done for 200 years worth of enslaving. All we could do was stop it and then try and stop it elsewhere. So I think we need to remember the bit of history that's closest to us. Nigel, isn't there one reason that perhaps it's hard to see things in that way? And that is, although I have a whole chapter in my book about this as well, and the points you make, I make too.

Right. But the one thing that I think we could all agree was somewhat different about the British Empire is because it was technologically the most sophisticated nation in the world at the time, it had technology that allowed it to transport people in a way and to places that previously people would have struggled to do. the idea that you could transport millions of people across the Atlantic Ocean, really, that would have been unavailable to almost anybody. And so even though we know that the trans-Saharan slave trade, which took slaves from sub-Saharan Africa to the Maghreb to the Middle East, it lasted longer and had more people, and they were treated far worse, by the way. But it doesn't have the same imagery in our minds as people being stuffed into the hold

of a ship in terrible conditions and being sailed to a completely. foreign land and dumped there and forced to work in the plantations. Isn't that one of the reasons that just as human beings, we feel a very strong reaction to what we're being told? That's a fair point, Constantine. Just to be clear, the British didn't start that. The Portuguese were doing that. They were transporting slaves to the Canary Islands just off the coast of West Africa in the 1440s. So, yes, Europeans who have had developed the naval technology to transport goods and people across oceans, I suppose that may be the first time that had happened.

And the conditions and the slave ships were horrendous. And the wasteage, the human wastage, the percentage of enslaved Africans who died on route was high. Although it, for commercial reasons, those trading slaves, improved conditions such that the number of people dying on the ships declined. Still doesn't excuse it. So that's probably true. So the conditions on the slave ships were horrendous.

But I think, so notwithstanding that. I guess my point, Nigel, is sorry, I feel I've sidetracked you a little bit. It's almost like you're right, everybody had slaves. And in fact, in the research that I did, somebody argued actually that slaves were the first good that people ever traded, potentially. That's true. But my point is, it's almost like this is going to sound crass

and deliberately so, because I'm trying to make the point. It's like everyone did it, but the British Empire was just better at it. And that's why we're more perhaps ashamed because we did it on quite a large scale and very effectively. Yes, that might be the case. Although I think one shouldn't downplay the horrors of, the slave trade across Africa and when Europeans like David Livingston witnessed it was just horrible, smaller in scale, I grant you, nor should we downplay the horrors of being enslaved

and carted off to the coast of North Africa ended up in a slave galley. That wasn't pretty either. Or a eunuch or a sex slave if you're wrong. But you point to all take it and there were forms of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, domestic slavery, which were more humane. So certainly more, there were more and less humane forms of slavery and the one in which the Europeans, not just the British engaged, transporting people across the Atlantic, and then the slave plantations was among the worst. Yep. I mean, what we're talking about is absolutely horrific and it leaves its stain. So in many ways, do you have a sympathy with these people who are overtly critical of the embassy?

and can't really look past that, because it is such a dreadful crime, if we're honest. I guess I don't, actually. Partly because when I look back at history, I think of it, most of it was dreadful. Most of it was dreadful. I mean, so I look back at slavery, having looked at Paul Potts' killing fields, having looked at the Holocaust, having looked at the, well, you know, The millions have lost their lives in German Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, having looked at what Stalin did in Russia in the 1930s, having considered the Irish famine,

having considered – so in words, history is full of massive inhumanity. I don't mean to diminish the awfulness of slavery. But, you know, if you want to get upset about the past, an awful lot you can get it set about. And I still think, I still think, and, you know, there's nothing you can do, nothing we can do to save those who were enslaved and treated abominably by English or Scottish sailors in the 1700s. We can't undo that. But there was an awful lot of injustice about it. We can't undo the maltreatment. of industrial workers in mid-ninth century, Victoria in England.

We can't undo the injustice as done to small kids set up chimney stacks. We all know about that. All we can do is stop it and try and rectify the effects now. And we did stop it. And we did try and rectify the effects. And we're still doing that. And it was to great financial costs. the British Empire as well. I don't think people also realise that either.

I mean, that's controversial. So, so if you follow the Marxist economic historian Eric Williams, his 1940 book Capitalism, Slavery, argues that the British made, the profits that the British made from the trade and slavery was a major cause of Britain's Industrial Revolution taking off, but unless you're a Marxist that's not a popularly held view now and historians of the transatlining slave trade and economic historians will not disagree with that to your point about the costs of anti-slavery

David Elthus, the economic historian I think has written that in the period of roughly 1816 to 1860, the British spent as much suppressing the slave trade and slavery as they had profited as much in the 50 years before the abolition. And as I mentioned, in terms of the Royal Navy, 13% of his manpower at one point devoted to the West African squadron, I have read that 17,000 sailors lost their lives, probably from disease, I've tried to suppress it. And that was just the Atlantic.

In fact, the empire was involved in anti-slavery for 150 years all over. Now, does that compensate for 150 years of slavery? Well, no. But what's done is done. And it says that there's nothing can compensate. all you can do is try and do better. And we have done. And Nigel, this is maybe, I don't know, is it an unfair question or not?

But I feel like because we have this warped way of looking at history in the UK and in the West more broadly, what do you think that says about us and the stage of our civilization that we're at, this excessive introspection, this kind of very one-dimensional view of our history, is it a signal of something? Is it a symptom of some kind of disorder? I don't know. What is it? Right.

Well, first of all, I think it is dangerous. And the reason I wrote my book and I make that clear in the introduction was political. And I don't pretend. I don't have a political interest here. I do try to be fair and accurate as far as I can. But I do have a political interest here. And my interest is in the confidence and the self-converbalt. of the West.

Because I try to explain why it is that the only thing the critics of empire care about are white empires and European empires. Why is that? Because I take it that the record of European empires, and in particular the British one, is a proxy for the record of the West. And it is, I mean, for in terms of... European civilization from 1815 to 1914 roughly, Britain was the leader. And so it bothers me that the wrecker of the West is being reduced, maligned,

because my worry is that it will reduce the faith of contemporary Britons and younger Britons in the West and in Britain as an important, if secondary, pillar of the West. So that is why it matters to me. As to what it says about us, I mean, I have puzzled over why, I mean, in my book, in the, throughout the book, I try and demonstrate how certain historians, not all, have taken the evidence and then made judgments. about the empire that the evidence just doesn't support. So the empire committed genocide in Tasmania

or the empire committed genocide in the Western Plains of Canada in the 1980s. And I lay this out, and the reader wants to see the evidence is there in the book. And then I say, well, what propels the judgment way out in advance of the evidence? What's the motive for this? Why go beyond the evidence to make an unsupported critical claim about British colonialism?

And I say to myself, well, you know, if the evidence, as a committed Britain and as a committed Western, if the evidence requires me, obliges me to accept that my people did awful things in the past, then I need to accept that. But why would I choose to believe that my people did awful things in the past if the evidence doesn't require me? And I speculate as to what might be propelling this, but there is clearly, on the part of some critics of empire,

not just a readiness to accept the truth about the past, but a glee, that they want to be. leave the worst. Well, this is why I bring up the point, because the facts are what the fact are, we've already talked about it. Like all empires, the British Empire, committed many atrocities and did many bad things, and like every society in history, engaged in slavery. However, there is many ways to tell that story. I mean, as you point out yourself, a story could be this is a country that did terrible things. And you leave it there and you say, we're terrible people who must have turned forever. Or you could compare it.

to elsewhere and also go make the point that you've made, which is, and then we did what we could, and then we tried to deal with this, and we tried to end it. And then actually, we had to force, for example, countries in the Middle East to stop trading in slaves, a great cost, diplomatically, militarily, in human lives and so on. But there is a demand in our society for a particular story about that. And I am concerned, as you are, I think, that that is not accidental. The demand for that particular narrative comes from a desire to deflate our confidence, to to demoralize people in the UK and the West and in America about their own history. And I just wonder if you had any thoughts on, you know, as a historian, on what happens to societies once they go down

that path. Yeah, so I quoted in the book, a passage from a novel by an Austrian novelist Robert Musil, the novel wasn't completed on his death in 1942. It's called The Man Without Qualities, it's called. And it's set in the die, I think before the First World War, on the eve of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And I can't remember the passage in its entirety, but what he says is this, he says that confidence in nations and empires collapses in the same way that it collapses in business concerns

when its credit is used up. Its credit is used up. And my worry is that if young Britons believe that 300 years' worth of British engagement with the world from roughly 1650 to 1960 was simply a litany of racism and oppression, then it's bound to shake their confidence in our institutions that were built. And it's also bound to weaken their resistance to illiberal threats from Putin's Russia or Xi Jinping's China.

because the tendency will be say, well, we're no better than they are. And, of course, the left is what a lot of people are saying. Yeah, the left has been saying this forever. And I think this is partly a refrain of a certain part of the left, the hard left, that actually the West is no better than the East. And that was said during the Cold War II. And I just think it's wrong. I just think it's wrong.

And it's something that... Why? Why is it wrong? You're a moral philosopher and an ethicist. Why is that wrong, Nigel? Aren't they just, you know, Putin would say you listen to speeches, says we are an independent civilization with our own traditional values. We do things differently. You know, Russia is a country geographically that requires a different sort of government,

different set of values. Why do you say the West is better? And bear in mind as well that people on that side of the list would go, well, what about Iraq? It was an illegal invasion. A million people died. And I mean, that's, you look at Vietnam. There's a lot of Western intervention that hasn't been productive and, in fact, has been a disaster.

Yeah. So why are we better? Yeah, those are difficult questions. So let's agree that the West has made serious mistakes. Every nation state or collection of nations states will have made serious mistakes. But it's still true that we are committed to a political. way of life in which the power of executive government is limited by law, effectively limited by law.

And that's one of the features of liberal democratic government that it cannot do the kinds of things that President Putin is doing in Russia. And although President Putin might say, you know, this is the Russian way, there are plenty of Russians, speak for yourself, Constantine, who disagree. And even if they, plenty of Russians are critical of the West, but even plenty of people in Russia and indeed in China, certainly in Hong Kong, can see the evils of a repressive government that is subject to no effective legal control. So if you believe in the, if you believe that too much power is a dangerous thing for any state to have,

If you believe in the importance of having the power of the state curbed by law so that individuals can criticize it or get on with their lives in the way they choose, if you believe in a liberal political life, then the West, notwithstanding its mistakes, is something worth believing in. And there are plenty of people in Russia and China and Hong Kong today that would agree with that. That's my view. since you asked. I think someone, sorry, Francis, just to finish this point, is the reason I ask you is, I think we don't articulate that enough. And so people forget. Do you know what I mean?

Sorry, mate. Well, it's quite because people are saying this, they enjoy these freedoms. And part of my worry about contemporary Britain's who knows a little about their history. And I was growing up, I grew up in a time when you couldn't get out of school. without having some idea of how we got in Britain to where we are today in terms of national and constitutional development. And even before I was 10 years old, I was laying reams of dates. So I had some idea of the kind of framework.

My sense is nowadays young Britons are not taught history that way at all. So they don't have much idea of where this all came from. And so they just take it for granted. And I do get frustrated when it seems to me a lot of my fellow citizens forget just how extraordinarily fortunate we are in Britain, which now enjoys the greatest security, wealth, health, generally speaking, that we have ever enjoyed, and that compared to most nations in the world, we're extraordinary. So I think we need not to take things for granted the way we do. Anyway, sorry. No, I would completely agree with that, Nigel. The question that I want to ask you is

you've been working in academia for the vast majority of your career. Have most of these ideas come from academia? And what responsibility do you think academia should take for this? Because there's a lot of people who put the blame solely at the door of institutions like Oxford University, Cambridge University, Ivy League. Is that true? Is that fair? So do these ideas come from academia? My perception is that these radically critical ideas, many of them come from the new left.

They are a certain kind of Marxist idea, which these ideas have inhabited certain regions of academia for decades, but because of particularly Black Lives Matter activism, they've moved suddenly to the center. And as I said, because so few, even academics have any idea about our imperial past, and because they do know that it's not cool to be even suspected of being racist or being pro-empirate. It's not even cool to be pro-Britain, frankly. They acquiesce. So I think, yeah, some of them have come from within universities, but the activist mood has given them,

I kind of has moved them to the centre stage. And it does distress and perplex me that, perplex me that so many of my academic colleagues acquiesce. Particularly in the notion that, for example, that our universities, like the rest of British society, are systemically racist. When it seems to me there's plenty of evidence to suppose that isn't the case

and that if there are different outcomes for different ethnic groups, it's not as simple as white people do well and black people don't do well. The evidence is that ethnic Chinese do better than most white people, and white poor do even worse than West Indian Britain. So it's much more complicated. But there's a strange lack of critical filtering of what comes in. And why is that? Well, I mean, you could say it's cowardice, a bit of that.

It's also that in academia, as in most institutions that are subject to bureaucracies, all sorts of nonsense comes down from above. To fight it is exhausting. And most of the time you think, God, this is nonsense. But it's easier to follow it and try and find a way around it and tick the box. and get on with your life than it is to fight. Particularly when you look around and think, who else is fighting here?

And no one is lifting, no one is protesting. And you think, oh my God, I'm the only person in the room who thinks this is a nonsense. Whereas in fact, nine out of ten people in the room are thinking just as you are, no one's saying so. So it's partly trying to figure out

which battles are worth fighting. I mean charitable here, and then deciding this one isn't worth fighting. The problem is, when you do that again and again and again, I mean, serious nonsense gets entrenched, and then the job of trying to dislodge it becomes impossible. And I think that's what's going on. So am I critical of my academic colleagues?

Yes, I am. And I think there comes a point where you're responsible for allowing serious nonsense to take root. So at the moment, it's decolonizing policies, which are based on a series of assumptions about racism in Britain today and about what colonial history really was that are, I think, false. And what is most distressing is that there's so little critical discussion of this in university. And I think a lot of university professors are betraying all they're supposed to be about. That said, there are signs of resistance that have grown up in the last three years. So the cause is not lost here in the way that it appears to be lost in a lot of Ivy League universities in the states.

Where I'm told, although I was a graduate student at one in Chicago in the 1980s, I've not taught there. So I don't know what the atmosphere was like now, but it appears as if it would be much harder to resist the decolonising wave in the states than it is here. Because the problem is, Nigel, like you just said, that if you don't challenge these ideas at the route, then they will work their way in and they will fester and they will take hold to the point where you write a book that is a perfectly legitimate analysis of the British Empire and it gets cancelled. Why was that? How did that happen? Yeah, well, I mean, that wasn't the fault of my academic colleagues. You could pin almost anything else on them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, not that one. I mean, there was an earlier, as we talked about this last time,

the attempt to counsel my Ethics and Empire project in 2017-18 that was done by academic colleagues, who now who now adamantly protest that this wasn't a repressive thing at all. But we won't go back into that. On the book, so what happened with the book was, I mean, as we were saying earlier,

if only my critics knew what good service they performed for me because actually, because of that, the attempt to suppress my ethics empire project in December 2017, in the spring of 2018, I signed a contract to write a book on colonialism because a publisher came to me and said, how about writing an intelligent person's guide to colonialism, which I agreed to do. So I got a contract out of it. And then what happened was I had to produce the manuscript by the close of December 2020. And so at 3pm on New Year's Eve, on 2020, I dispatched the manuscript with a whole nine hours to spare.

And then in early 21, my commissioning editor wrote back. He read the manuscript. He said he used the word, what did he? What was the word? Speechless was the word he used. with admiration for the comprehensiveness and the rigor with which I had written. And he said this is an important book. He said it twice.

And he predicted sales of between 15,000 and 20,000 copies, which may not seem big to you. That's a lot for, particularly for an academic leaning book. Well, I can tell you, I've been writing books since 1986. And I don't think I've in total. I don't think I've sold more than about 6,000 copies. So that was big, big news for me. So that's where we were in January 21. And he put the manuscripts into the copy editing process of Bloomsbury publishing.

This is the publisher. They even designed to cover. And then in March 21, I got an email from the top of Bloomsbury announcing that they were going to postpone publication indefinitely because, and I, quote, public feeling is unfavorable. And I was shocked. I feared this would happen because it's happened in the States. I was shocked. Being a man of a certain age, my emotions are about two weeks behind me.

So I wasn't quite sure what I felt. But my wife reports that I was devastated. And I do remember lying down my bed, staring at the ceiling, feeling sorry for myself. So I was very sorry at the prospect that what I thought was an important contribution to public discourse would never get published, but more depressed at the thought that Britain had come to a place where a publisher, a major publisher, would decline to publish an important book that selling up to 20,000 copies would make them a profit. Why?

Because public feelings are favourable. And I was told, I inquired in what does this mean, and I was told in fact, Loomsbury wanted me to walk away from the contract. So I decided not to do that. And I engaged them in innocent correspondence, and I said innocently. So you say that public feelings are favourable? There's lots of public feeling, which one are you referring to? And I said, so conditions are not favourable.

Well, when would conditions become favourable? And I was hoping they might actually be honest and tell me in print, but their lawyers probably advised them not to. So I got two responses which revealed nothing at all. And then in early April, notwithstanding the fact they couldn't explain which public feeling was upsetting them, in early April I got an email saying, we're sure you're impatient to have this book published, so we're going to return your contract to you. And even then I wasn't willing to bite.

So I paid several hundred quid to a lawyer in the hope that she might tell me that I could hold Bloomsbury to my contract. And several hundred pounds poorer, I discovered I couldn't. So then I, then this was a... about three weeks after I got the email from Boomsvary, I wrote and said, okay, since you give me no choice, I will receive the contract back, but I want you to know what I think of you. And what I said was, I'm just appalled. I mean, I understand publishers need to make money, but don't publishers also have a kind of civic duty to keep our liberal space liberal and to to inject important views into the liberal public space just in case prevailing orthodoxies

are mistaken. And I, maybe that's wrong, but it seemed to me that if every publisher behaved Bloomsbury, the way Bloomsbury did, we in Britain and our public culture would be severely, severely impoverished. So that's what happened then. And then happily, another publisher, William Collins, took up what Bloomsbury had thrown away and I got a contract in August 21 with William Collins to publish and they brought it out early in February. And just before it was published, I decided to share the email correspondence I'd had with Broomser with a journalist who published it in the Times and got a response from

Boomsbury. And their line is that Professor Bigger opted to leave his contract. Given what I've told you, I'll leave you to draw your conclusions from that. Because there were, and I was listening to another interview you did by way of research, and you intimated that it was some of the younger employees at Bloomsbury who may have instigated this whole thing. Early on, I was told that was the problem, that the senior management had been lobbied by younger members of staff who objected to producing Biggers manuscript.

Now, I only have that one witness. It was a senior witness from inside the institution. Blooms would deny that, but the only other explanation, namely that I walked away from it is disingenuous. I did walk away, in the end, because it gave me no choice. And I observed that the phenomenon of junior staff somehow managing to to cow senior management into vetoing publications has been a widespread when we've had reports of it in the newspaper.

So until Booms, we've come up with a better explanation, that's the most plausible one I have. And what doesn't that say about our society? Let's remove that particular example. But this has happened time and time again. We saw it happen with Jordan Peterson's book, where they weren't successful because the publisher aren't nuts. They know that Jordan's books will sell incredibly well.

But what does it say when authors who aren't at the level of Jordan in terms of sales get their books canceled? Because junior employees who probably haven't even read the manuscript decide that it's unacceptable. What does that mean for us as a society? It's terrifying, really. To me, it's really odd. I want to know where did the grown-ups go? and 67, so I'm accustomed to grownups saying no to non-grown-ups, right? We had a conference that I ran in Oxford in 2019 on academic freedom under threat,

what's to be done? Did you come to that? Yeah, we did. Okay, yeah, yeah, the first time we met. And I remember one of the kind of takeaways from that was the observation. of the problems is that we now live in a period when our institutions are governed by a generation of parents who lost in a sense of having authority over their kids. Now, I'm not a parent. I have no end of respect for those who choose to become parents because it seems to be bloody hard work. Tell me if I'm wrong. Tell me if I'm wrong. But I take it that sometimes one has to say

no to one's kids. Well, not to say no to one's kids for one's kids' for one's kids' sake. But I get the impression that a lot of parents, middle-class parents, university-educated parents, have difficulty doing that. Why do they say that? Because you've got eyes and ears, and if you look around to society, you can see it everywhere. Well, for example, I've heard, I was, twice I've spoken to teachers in private schools and asked them

In terms of, it seems to me that it's really important for kids to learn how to use social media well, how to discriminate, and not to spend their whole time plugged into it. And I ask teachers of what they do to help kids manage social media and the technology well. And they say, well, we can do something, but we do think parents ought to do something. but the problem we're facing is that parents come to us and say, would you please tell little Johnny to stop using his iPhone all the time? Because I don't dare to. I don't dare to, says the parent. And this is in the context of high fee-paying schools.

So this is presumably a parent who is a university education, is very wealthy, very successful, doesn't dare say no to Johnny. Now, you know, I don't know how widespread it is, but if that's the case, then we have a generation of senior publishers who just don't dare say no. Is that it? Or is it also a sense that there's a commercial reason to be on the right side of history? Well, not in your case. I mean, they predicted the book would sell. And by the way, this is the other thing.

I mean, controversy does generate sales. So with your book, which was likely to have an element of controversy to it, I don't imagine the financial motive had anything to do with it. On the contrary, I think you're right that these are people who are afraid of telling their junior employees no. Okay, we've heard your opinion and it's welcome as a contribution, but we're not going ahead with it. I think that's probably it.

Nigel, thankfully, you did manage to get the book published. So there are shoots of some sort of resistance building. we've got about five minutes left. What has the response been like? And the reviews and so on. How have you found that? Yeah. So the response has been mixed predictably.

Glowing reviews in The Guardian, I told you. Yeah, that was probably a little too much to hope for, Francis. So very good reviews in the Sunday Times, Trevor Phillips. He used the phrase, which I love to quote. He said, this book, quote, carries the intellectual force of an anti-gevelin anti-tank missile like that. So a number of good reviews. But last weekend, for example, there was a slew of about four hostile reviews, which eventually

I steal myself to read. And I think I, although I was feeling kind of a bit better by them, I think I, what I need to accept is the fact that the line I'm pushing that actually empire is not necessarily wicked and the British Empire actually contained a lot of admirable things is so unfashionable. The last time when this kind of argument would have been 50 years ago, and I'm an ethicist, I'm the only person, ethicist who's ever tried to do it. A current generation of historians is going to act to that with instinctive hostility. Besides, if they didn't, the costs of approving of bigger in public, career-wise, would be high.

So they're not going to do that for that reason. So I just have to accept there will be hostile reviews, certainly in The Guardian, in the new statesmen and elsewhere. But having looked at the hostile responses, I observe, first of all, so a number of folk are particularly a fellow called Alan Lester at Sussex University has been very busy on Twitter, identifying particular historical points I've got wrong and places where I miss the evidence or whatever. So let me be frank here and say, you know, the canvas of British Imperial History alone is vast.

It's 300 years, 1650 roughly to 1960, and runs from Newfoundland to New Zealand. It's vast. So have I made mistakes? Without a doubt, I made mistakes. And when I come across them, I will in due course correct myself. But I observe that the attention of some of my critics has been at the very kind of micro level. And no one has really taken on, in fact, no one has really paid attention to the larger argument. So so far my larger argument stands, the kind of argument I've just articulated to you earlier.

And I also notice not for the first time that in order to take me down, some of my critics have to allege that I said things I never said. So one of them says that Bigger thinks there's a vast array of historians out there who hold these extreme opinions. And I'm sorry to disappoint John Wilson of King's College London, but I didn't write the book for him. I wrote the book, I didn't write the book for historians. I wrote it primarily for the literate British public to give them some idea that the radically anti-colonialist decolonizing story that the empire was all the litany of racism and repression is just not true. It's not true to the fact.

That's the audience I care about. And nor did I claim, I never claim there's a vast array of historians. There are certainly some. And although Wilson discounts the likes of Caroline Elkins, the truth is that Elkins has far more impact than Wilson does. So I was interested in those historians who have public impact. And then another reviewer said that I end up saying that the British Amboy is essentially humanitarian. I don't say that at all.

So they keep having to erect straw man to hit me. And that kind of reassures me because you only erect straw man if you can't hit the real target. So I'm still monitoring the critics. But so far, that nothing devastating has been produced. And I just observe the fact that the sales of the book have been extraordinarily high. I didn't expect anything like the response there's been in the Sunday Times best so that's two weeks running, which is really encouraging because what it means is there is a large public appetite in this country, and I hope when it's published in the US in May,

there too, a large public appetite for something that tries to be reasonable and moderate and careful and even-handed. Yeah. Yeah, I've finished. I was going to say thank you so much. It's always a joy to talk to you, and even more so, on this interview. Our interviews always end with the same question, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

I would say we need to sit back and think more carefully about our use of words. So, for example, let's have an adult conversation about what racism is, what we mean by racism, or when we talk about being harmed by someone else's opinion, or where we talk about someone else's opinion doing us violence, can we talk about what we mean by violence and harm? Because a lot of things are commonly said that if you sit back, you think, no, not really. I mean, I can say things that you find offensive or upsetting.

You can say things that I find upsetting. Are you harming me? No, not. Are you doing me violence? No, you're not. So I just think we need to have the courage to think about our language more carefully. That's my, that's my, that's the oversight, I think we need to correct. You still believe words have meaning, very old-fashioned.

But on that happen, you know, Nigel, colonialism and moral reckoning, I hope you get a few more sales off the back of this interview. It's been a great pleasure having you back on the show. Wish you all the very best. And thank you for being here. And thank you guys for watching and listening. we will be back with another brilliant episode like this one or also all of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go,

it is always available as a podcast. Head on over to locals where we're going to ask your questions to Nigel that you and you only are going to hear the answers to. Take care and see you soon. I would like to know if the professor sees any improvement in academia since the last time you were on the show.