Partisanship and parochialism
A review by Alexander Morrison of British Empire: Alan Lester (Ed.), 'The truth about empire: real histories of British colonialism', foreword by Sathnam Sanghera (London: Hurst & Co, 2024)
The ability to debate in good faith, using bona fide sources and logical argument is a sine qua non of historical academia. Well, it used to be. Some of my readers will know of the attempts of a coterie of British historians in recent years to close down debate on the nature of the Empire on the basis, seemingly, of morality. Their view is that British imperialism was a uniquely racist project. That’s fine I suppose, in the sense that people are entitled to their view, although of course I don’t agree with such a reductive idea. But the problem with this evangelical coterie of modern Peter-the-Hermit-type historians is that they have attempted to close down debate on the subject. Indeed, the suggestion is that if one holds an alternative view to theirs, you are also racist and worthy of cancellation.
This whole approach to historical enquiry would be Stalinistically absurd but for the fact that it has been very real. The person caught in the headlights has been Nigel Biggar or, to give him his correct title after his elevation to the House of Lords, The Rt Hon. the Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas, CBE. Nigel had the temerity some years ago to convene a study group at Oxford with the seemingly harmless task of producing a balance sheet of good and bad things about the empire. For this outrageous Menshevikism Biggar and all those who associated with him were cast into the fires of hell by the crowd who had determined that criticising a ‘progressive’ view of empire, in which all was irredeemably bad, were themselves irredeemably evil.
You may laugh, or scratch your heads in amazement at this foolishness, but this was pretty much the approach of the Peter-the-Hermit brigade.
Last year a riposte to this warrior band of zealots was published by Dr Alexander Morrison of New College, Oxford. It was brought to my attention by Yuan Yi Zhu. It is truly magnificent. If you have any interest in defending real history from the zealots and freaks who want to infantilise both the subject and the profession, you can read it here.