The Truth About Empire

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Alan Lester (Editor), The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism, Hurst, 2024, 304 pp., $25.00 Kindle Edition, $35.00 Hardcover

The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism is likely to mislead casual readers. This collection of essays bills itself as an “accessible guide to the British Empire, and a weapon of defence against the assault on historical truth,” but it is really the product of a bitter row between Professor Alan Lester at Sussex University and Professor Nigel Biggar of Oxford.

Prof. Lester is the editor of The Truth About Empire, and is a determined critic of Britain’s imperial past. His books have been mostly academic, with the exception of his polemic, Deny and Disavow: Distancing the Imperial Past in the Culture Wars, in which he wrote that the empire was: “a vehicle for establishing, maintaining, and justifying White Supremacy on a global scale, and for persuading Britons that ours is a White island that keeps colonised subjects of colour in their place overseas.” (p. 14)

By contrast, academic ethicist Prof. Biggar defends the empire. He is the founder of initiatives such as the Ethics and Empire project and the History Reclaimed group. His book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, while written from a mainstream “antiracist” point of view, does at least distinguish between biological racism and cultural partiality — and it defends the latter.

Colonialism provoked anti-empire academics, not only from Britain but from former colonies. Prof. Lester wrote what Prof. Biggar considered the most hostile review of the book, which led to a series of scathing exchanges between the two. Prof. Lester took special issue with Colonialism’s distinction between beliefs in environmental and biological determinism. He quoted Stuart Hall to say, “So called biological racism has never been separated from cultural inferiorisation. The two logics have always been intertwined, ever since the beginning . . . .” He hardly ever uses the words “civilize” or “race” without scare quotes.

Prof. Lester and Prof. Biggar’s argument gave rise to The Truth About Empire, meant by anti-colonialists to be the final word on Prof. Biggar’s Colonialism. This is why casual readers are likely to feel misled. Truth is mostly twice-argued points that have become increasingly derivative and obscure.

Truth’s anthology format is well-chosen as an academic assault. Colonialism covered a lot of ground and spread its arguments a bit thin. This may be unavoidable because there are so many more academics who attack the empire than those who defend it. Colonialism is vulnerable to Truth’s multi-pronged attack because its contributors are probably right to claim superior knowledge in their fields of study.

Truth’s authors may not always use their knowledge honestly, however; in many cases, the collection withholds significant details. Typical is the tellingly brief summary of the 1897 British invasion of Benin, written by Prof. Lester. He disparagingly refers to accounts of slavery and human sacrifice in the African kingdom of Benin as the “pretexts” for the British invasion. Nowhere does Truth quote gruesome contemporary accounts of human sacrifice, nor the expedition’s own reports of mass sacrifice and mutilation by Benin’s rulers. Prof. Lester implies that the British intentionally burned Benin City (another contributor even says the city was “sacked”), ignoring the contrary evidence that the majority of the destruction was an accident caused by two African bearers in the army train.

Omissions like this suggest that the authors don’t trust us to interpret the evidence ourselves, a suspicion only encouraged by their endless insistence on their academic credentials. Prof. Lester hardly inspires confidence when he explains that Truth’s “denial of imperial racism and violence [is] . . . a disinformation campaign sharing both tactics and motivations with those around Covid, Brexit and climate change.”

Anti-colonialist arguments can seem weak to anyone who knows the facts. Imperial apologists and critics alike frequently hold up Tasmania’s Black War as the worst “genocide” perpetrated by the empire. However, the indigenous population was at most 8,000 people (or as few as 2,000, according to earlier estimates), and the war took fewer than a thousand native lives directly. What, too, should we make of Truth’s assertion that these few people were the “traditional owners of the land,” which, at 26,000 square kilometers, is roughly half the size of England. The idea of “ownership” is laughable.

There are inconsistencies in this anthology. Professor Richard Huzzey’s Morality and the History of Abolition and Empire pretends to offer an olive branch to Prof. Biggar — though a condescending one. The author reminds Prof. Biggar that “‘good and evil may be meaningful terms of analysis for theologians’ yet are ‘useless to historians.’” The very next piece, Dr. Liam Liburd’s A Short History of a Controversial Comparison, however, is a defense of black author Kehindre Andrews’ claim that “The British Empire was far worse than the Nazis.” Conveniently, though, and in keeping with Truth’s practice of omitting essential details, that quote is absent from the text. Instead, it makes vague references to “comparisons between the British Empire and Nazi Germany made by Andrews.”

Needless to say, Truth’s inconsistencies and omissions weigh against the white man nearly every time. As Prof. Biggar wrote in Colonialism, “Whereas the balm of indulgence is given the [native], the acid of cynicism is poured relentlessly over the British,” (p. 299). That is true of all modern historiography about European interaction with other cultures. Truth’s concluding essay, No End to a Reckoning, reprimands Prof. Biggar for having put too much faith in the accounts of the “elite white men” who governed the empire. It seems we should not trust anything elite white men wrote.

Why did Prof. Lester and his colleagues felt the need to respond directly to Colonialism? It’s rare to see the Left put on the defensive. In Truth’s introduction, Sathnam Sanghera felt he could rationalize the book’s “focusing on [right-wing political] incidents” though he recognized excesses by the Left as well. For him, “the crucial difference is that, in Britain, the left has not been in power for a decade. In contrast, the right have in recent years had their arguments adopted by government . . . .”

There is some truth to this. The UK government until recently tried to outdo their trans-Atlantic cousins in protecting national heritage. Truth’s authors accuse the Tories of defending British history in a way that appeals to British anxieties over demographic change. I agree.

The irony is that Rishi Sunak and his allies often claimed to defend traditional Britain while allowing or even facilitating mass immigration. The Tories even promoted multiculturalism; they praised the “Windrush generation” of the first non-white immigrants. The anti-colonialist faction ignores this. It uncritically takes the Conservative (and never fulfilled) tough-on-immigration promises at face value. Now, with the both political power and the momentum of demographic transformation behind it, Labour has promised to ditch the pretense of the Right’s defense of British history and thus end the “culture wars.”

Anti-colonialists are right: Historians should go beyond comfortable facts. However, anti-colonialists are obnoxious for two reasons. First is their specious claim to be seeking objective truth without applying contemporary morals to the past. This is so obviously untrue that it has earned the irritation, at times public derision, of others in their field. Second is the self-destructive political prescriptions they assume follow from their historical interpretations.

Prof. Lester, for one, believes that Britain’s imperial past justifies demographic transformation. In Deny and Disavow, he wrote, “We need to start seeing slavery and the successive forms of colonialism . . . as something that Britons did to other Britons . . . if we are to move towards racial reconciliation in this country.” This includes acknowledging that, “Black people became British as a result of Empire — that ‘they are here because we were there.’” (p. 89) This is civilizational suicide.

Deny and Disavow also writes of Western whites’ “deeply irrational fear of racial extinction” (p. 29) — but notably doesn’t claim it isn’t happening. On the same page, he all but celebrates the coming reduction of American whites to a minority. As for Britons, he quotes Peter Mitchell, author of Imperial Nostalgia: “There is the sense of betrayal and anxiety of replacement: generational, cultural, gendered and racial. This terror is at the core of a frighteningly intense emotional charge . . . .” (p. 86) It’s the terror — not the cause — that perplexes him.

One suspects that historians such as Prof. Lester are punishing the British for a history of alleged crimes, despite their insistence that they do not see history in terms of guilt or shame. When another anti-colonialist commenter tried to foist the sins of the empire onto a “tiny number of people” running “a gigantic cartel,” Prof. Lester tried to spread the blame: “the investments ran deeper. That land was taken above all by a diaspora from the British Isles of well over 20 million people . . . all came as occupiers rather than supplicants.” Prof. Biggar acknowledges that uncontrolled settlers rather than colonial governments often committed violence, and believes this helps absolve the empire’s institutions. Prof. Lester transfers the fault onto the British population at large.

Truth’s authors are glad to see that pride in Britain’s history is diminishing. Partly this is due to demographic change. It’s also true that native Britons’ pride is faltering.

“The sun never sets on the British Empire” was once a common, proud observation. It wasn’t a moral one. Neither was the command of “Rule, Britannia!’’ to “rule the waves!” There are two kinds of pride evoked by the British Empire: one moral, the other triumphant. Even if the authors of The Truth About Empire make many surrender the first, I wonder if they could ever completely kill the second.