TRIGGERnometry - The Truth About Colonialism with Nigel Biggar

00:00:00.000 Very few people in this country know much about our imperial history.

00:00:04.000 And so when zealous, noisy, aggressive folk tell them that it was a litany of racism and oppression,

00:00:13.000 they don't know enough to contradict them.

00:00:16.000 And also what they do know is it doesn't look good if you contradict what appears to be the progressive view.

00:00:23.000 Because then you too will get labelled as being racist or colonial apologists or whatever.

00:00:29.000 So there was nothing exceptional about the British involvement in slavery.

00:00:33.000 What was exceptional and extraordinary was that toward the end of the 18th century,

00:00:38.000 the idea that owning other human beings as property began to be questioned on principle.

00:00:45.000 Britain was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish the slave trade and then to abolish slavery.

00:00:53.000 And it then led the world in suppressing both of those, as I said, from Brazil across Africa to Malaysia. 0.60

00:01:00.000 That was extraordinary.

00:01:01.000 No other state had done that before.

00:01:03.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:15.000 I'm Francis Foster.

00:01:17.000 I'm Constantine Kisson.

00:01:18.000 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:01:23.000 Our terrific returning guest today is an ethicist at the University of Oxford,

00:01:27.000 and of course the author of his latest book, Colonialism and Moral Reckoning.

00:01:32.000 Nigel Bigger, welcome back to Trigonometry.

00:01:34.000 I'm pleased to be back.

00:01:35.000 Thank you so much.

00:01:36.000 And this time you are on our set, on our turf, the last time we came to you.

00:01:40.000 I'm really impressed.

00:01:41.000 Well, thank you very much for coming back.

00:01:43.000 It's a real pleasure to have you on.

00:01:44.000 Your book is out.

00:01:45.000 It's caused quite a stir.

00:01:47.000 It's done very well.

00:01:48.000 Sunday Times bestseller several weeks in a row, et cetera, et cetera.

00:01:52.000 Without any further ado, what is your book about?

00:01:56.000 And what was the case that you wanted to make?

00:01:59.000 So the book is a response to a fashionable view, namely that European colonialism, and in particular, British colonialism,

00:02:11.000 was a litany of racism and economic exploitation and unwarranted violence.

00:02:18.000 So it was simply evil.

00:02:20.000 And at the extreme, you'll find people trying to approximate British imperial endeavour with Nazism.

00:02:30.000 So accusing British colonialists of genocide and such like.

00:02:37.000 So the book is a response to that.

00:02:40.000 And it argues that, yes, like any longstanding state, be it national or imperial,

00:02:48.000 the British Empire contained evils and goods.

00:02:53.000 It contained, for example, 150 years worth of engagement in slave trading and in slavery.

00:03:00.000 But also, subsequent to that, it was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish the trade and the institution.

00:03:10.000 And then Britain led the world in suppressing it from Brazil across Africa to Malaysia. 0.91

00:03:16.000 So goods and evils, like most states, and there's no way of kind of balancing up the goods and evils and saying,

00:03:25.000 well, so many years of anti-slavery compensates for so many years of slavery.

00:03:30.000 That doesn't make sense at all.

00:03:32.000 But what I go on to say is, well, no, you can't identify the British Empire with Nazism in any respect.

00:03:41.000 It wasn't essentially racist or exploitative.

00:03:45.000 And then you add to that the fact that there were persistent humanitarian and liberal threads to imperial policy, anti-slavery.

00:03:56.000 And then from about the 1860s onwards, the Empire learnt from the fact that it lost the American colonies in the 1780s,

00:04:04.000 and was committed to making Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand independent.

00:04:10.000 And they were virtually independent by 1930.

00:04:12.000 And India was put in the same track at the end of the First World War.

00:04:15.000 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,

00:04:31.000 and from May 1940 to June 1941, it was the only military opposition to Nazism, with the exception of Greece.

00:04:41.000 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.

00:04:54.000 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.

00:05:04.000 And I've been reading a Russian guy called Alexander Dugin.

00:05:07.000 Oh, yes.

00:05:08.000 I don't know if you're familiar with him.

00:05:09.000 I am.

00:05:10.000 But one of the things, he's part of this movement in Russia, these so-called New Eurasians.

00:05:16.000 And it's funny reading him, because his book was written not that long ago, I think in 2000.

00:05:22.000 And he goes, Russians are an imperial people.

00:05:24.000 We must be expanding in order to survive and to exist.

00:05:27.000 Can you talk to us about, 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.

00:05:37.000 Yeah.

00:05:38.000 Can you talk to us about empires in general?

00:05:40.000 What are they?

00:05:41.000 Why do they exist?

00:05:42.000 Who creates them?

00:05:43.000 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?

00:05:53.000 Tell us about that.

00:05:54.000 Yeah, good point.

00:05:55.000 So, you're quite right.

00:05:57.000 The focus certainly in America and in this country is on European empires and white empires and British Empire, in particular.

00:06:06.000 Whereas empire has been an historical phenomenon since the 4000 BC in Mesopotamia.

00:06:16.000 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 1800s. 0.99

00:06:27.000 So there's a strange focus on European empires, which we could talk about.

00:06:32.000 What is empire about?

00:06:34.000 I mean, often, it's about security.

00:06:38.000 So, take Anglo-Saxon England in the, I don't know, the 700s, 800s, 900s AD in England.

00:06:51.000 You have lots of little kingdoms.

00:06:54.000 Their borders are insecure.

00:06:57.000 They're subject to raids from outside the island.

00:07:02.000 And so, in order to secure their borders, they have to make sure that the people around them are under their control.

00:07:11.000 And sometimes that would involve expanding, so you impose your government on them.

00:07:16.000 And so, in a sense, many nation states, many old nation states, were the creations of series of expansions.

00:07:27.000 And so, eventually, you end up with, by about 1000, England is a virtually single nation state.

00:07:35.000 But then in the 14th century, you get English kings conquering Wales and then Ireland.

00:07:44.000 So, often, security is a main motive.

00:07:49.000 But then in the case of the British Empire, trade, a major motive.

00:07:55.000 So, that's the main reason, the first reason why the British ended up in Africa and in India. 0.80

00:08:03.000 And then you've also got, ironically, you've got anti-imperial endeavours.

00:08:07.000 So, one reason the English first pitched up on the coast of North America was to set up posts or ports from which English raiders could raid Spanish shipping at a time when imperial Spain, Catholic Spain, was threatening little Protestant England.

00:08:28.000 So, the motives for empire are various.

00:08:33.000 And you mentioned the Russian, the current Russian example.

00:08:37.000 So, I guess some proponents of empire think that a certain piece of territory belongs to them by right or by nature or something.

00:08:49.000 So, some Russians think that Ukraine is an internal part of Russia, regardless of what Ukrainians think.

00:08:56.000 And they feel they own it.

00:08:58.000 But it's hard to generalise because that wouldn't be true of every empire.

00:09:03.000 It may not even be true of the Russian Empire as a whole.

00:09:06.000 But there are a variety of motives.

00:09:08.000 Nigel, do you ever find it frustrating the way that we talk about history nowadays?

00:09:12.000 Because it seems to me that we have people arguing about history who don't really understand history, have never been taught it properly.

00:09:20.000 Yes, I feel frustrated sometimes by the level of ignorance.

00:09:27.000 I'm quite sure that the reason why the decolonising movement has taken root in so many of our institutions,

00:09:39.000 particularly since the Black Lives Matter movement crossed the Atlantic in 2021, I think.

00:09:43.000 2020.

00:09:44.000 2020, even earlier than that.

00:09:47.000 The reason it got traction was very few people in this country know much about our imperial history.

00:09:55.000 And so, when zealous, noisy, aggressive folk tell them that it was a litany of racism and oppression,

00:10:04.000 they don't know enough to contradict them.

00:10:08.000 And also what they do know is it doesn't look good if you contradict what appears to be the progressive view.

00:10:20.000 Because then you too will get labelled as being racist or a colonial apologist or whatever.

00:10:26.000 So that's part.

00:10:28.000 The ignorance has been a problem.

00:10:30.000 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,

00:10:41.000 the whole story of the British instance of empire and show people that it did contain good bits as well as bad,

00:10:48.000 and it was really quite complicated and nuanced.

00:10:51.000 So there's that.

00:10:52.000 The other thing that's odd is, and I'm not quite sure how to articulate this,

00:10:58.000 but an attitude to the past as if it ought to be the same as us.

00:11:04.000 I get really annoyed with television programmes or films that assimilate the past to us.

00:11:12.000 So there was a film about Emily Bronte made recently.

00:11:17.000 Was it just called Emily?

00:11:19.000 Where the story is that Emily Bronte in the 19th century wrote this book at Wuthering Heights,

00:11:27.000 which is full of romance and sexual passion.

00:11:33.000 And the filmmaker decided that Emily couldn't possibly have written this unless she herself had had a serious fling.

00:11:45.000 And she herself had personal experience of some sexual affair.

00:11:49.000 So the film tells a story about Emily along those lines.

00:11:54.000 The problem is there is no historical evidence at all to suggest that's true.

00:11:59.000 Emily conjured the story out of her own imagination.

00:12:04.000 But a 21st century filmmaker just can't cope with that.

00:12:08.000 So it has to make Emily like a 21st century person.

00:12:11.000 But the thing is, what I find interesting about the past is its difference.

00:12:17.000 And when you come up against the fact that Emily never married, never apparently had sex as far as we know,

00:12:23.000 and yet she was able to imagine the story, that's interesting.

00:12:26.000 And what's interesting is that it challenges our assumptions,

00:12:31.000 which makes it interesting and should cause us to think about the assumptions and the things we take for granted.

00:12:38.000 So it's so much safer to assimilate the past to the present, because then you don't have to think about it.

00:12:45.000 It's a very interesting point you made.

00:12:47.000 It's almost that we can't believe that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was 18 years old.

00:12:51.000 Unless she had some kind of experience of monsters.

00:12:55.000 But anyway, let's tackle some of the really difficult bits of the empire.

00:13:01.000 Because the one thing that people will say is the British traded in slaves.

00:13:06.000 They had slaves for many, many years.

00:13:08.000 That's how they generated huge amounts of wealth.

00:13:10.000 This is obviously awful.

00:13:12.000 Nigel, how can you possibly defend it?

00:13:14.000 Okay.

00:13:15.000 So let me make it clear.

00:13:17.000 I do not approve of slavery.

00:13:19.000 Can we just...

00:13:21.000 Just in case there's any doubt, folks.

00:13:25.000 Okay.

00:13:26.000 Let's take that for granted.

00:13:31.000 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 universal institution almost from the dawn of time.

00:13:50.000 So long before Europeans got into it, and the Portuguese were the first in the 1440s, in terms of trading in Africans.

00:13:59.000 Although there was slavery.

00:14:01.000 I mean, Bristol was a slave market in the medieval period.

00:14:05.000 Irish slaves being traded to Norsemen who then took them down the Volga to the Black Sea.

00:14:11.000 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.

00:14:24.000 The Comanche, 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.

00:14:40.000 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.

00:14:55.000 They often held slaves of their own.

00:14:58.000 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.

00:15:09.000 Which told me 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 owned slaves of their own.

00:15:23.000 And my point is, we have to accept the fact that for many people, even former slaves, owning slaves was acceptable or normal.

00:15:37.000 And even 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.

00:15:53.000 So we just have to accept that and get our heads around it.

00:15:57.000 It doesn't necessarily mean that everyone until us was morally corrupt and morally insensitive.

00:16:06.000 So that's one thing.

00:16:12.000 So there was nothing exceptional about the British involvement in slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries.

00:16:19.000 What was exceptional and extraordinary was that toward the end of the 18th century, partly because of Enlightenment views, mainly because of Christian views,

00:16:34.000 the idea that owning other human beings as property, began to be questioned on principle.

00:16:41.000 And so in 1787, you get the creation of the Society for the abolition of slavery in England.

00:16:49.000 I think Denmark was the first state in Europe to abolish the slave trade within its limited territories.

00:16:56.000 Britain followed three years later, 1807.

00:17:01.000 And then in 1833, the empire abolished slavery as an institution within its territories.

00:17:08.000 So let me just make this clear, because at the moment, in recent years,

00:17:16.000 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.

00:17:29.000 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,

00:17:41.000 and it then led the world in suppressing both of those, as I said, from Brazil across Africa to Malaysia.

00:17:48.000 That was extraordinary.

00:17:49.000 No other state had done that before.

00:17:51.000 No other states had done that before, certainly not in Africa, certainly not in Asia, nor among the indigenous peoples of North America.

00:17:59.000 That was extraordinary.

00:18:00.000 And we carried on doing that until the end of the empire in the 1960s.

00:18:06.000 And in the 1820s and 30s, the slave trade department in the British Foreign Office was the largest unit.

00:18:13.000 And in the 1830s or the 40s, thereabouts, 13% of the total manpower of the Royal Navy was devoted to stopping slave ships leaving West Africa for the Americas.

00:18:32.000 Just stopping that, quite apart from stopping slavery elsewhere.

00:18:37.000 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.

00:18:46.000 All we could do was stop it and then try and stop it elsewhere.

00:18:50.000 So I think we need to remember the bit of history that's closest to us.

00:18:54.000 Nigel, isn't there one reason that perhaps it's hard to see things in that way?

00:18:59.000 And that is, although I have a whole chapter in my book about this as well, and the point you make, I make too.

00:19:05.000 Right.

00:19:06.000 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.

00:19:15.000 It had technology that allowed it to transport people in a way and to places that previously people would have struggled to do.

00:19:23.000 The idea that you could transport millions of people across the Atlantic Ocean, really, that would have been unavailable to almost anybody.

00:19:30.000 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.

00:19:41.000 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.

00:19:57.000 Isn't that one of the reasons that just as human beings, we feel a very strong reaction to what we're being told?

00:20:04.000 That's a fair point, Constantine. Just to be clear, the British didn't start that. The Portuguese were doing that. 0.99

00:20:11.000 They were transporting slaves to the Canary Islands just off the coast of West Africa in the 1440s.

00:20:21.000 So, yes, Europeans who had developed the naval technology to transport goods and people across oceans, I suppose that may have been the first time that had happened.

00:20:33.000 And the conditions in the slave ships were horrendous. And the wastage, the human wastage, the percentage of enslaved Africans who died on route was high.

00:20:46.000 Although for commercial reasons, those trading slaves improved conditions such that the number of people dying on the ships declined.

00:20:57.000 Still doesn't excuse it. So that's probably true.

00:21:03.000 So, so, so the, the conditions on the ship on the slave ships were, uh, horrendous.

00:21:09.000 Um, but I think, um, so notwithstanding that.

00:21:15.000 I guess my point Nigel is sorry, but I feel I've sidetracked you a little bit is it's almost like you're right.

00:21:21.000 Everybody had slaves. 0.96

00:21:22.000 And in fact, in the research that I did, uh, somebody argued actually that slaves were the first good that people ever traded potentially.

00:21:29.000 Um, but my point is, it's almost like this is going to sound crass and deliberately.

00:21:34.000 So, cause I'm trying to make the point it's like everyone did it, but the British Empire was just better at it.

00:21:39.000 And that's why we're more perhaps ashamed because we did it on quite a large scale and very effectively.

00:21:45.000 Um, yes, that, that, that might be the case.

00:21:49.000 Although I think one shouldn't downplay the, the horrors of the, um, slave trade across Africa.

00:21:55.000 And when, when Europeans like David Livingston witnessed, it was just horrible, smaller in scale, I grant you, nor should we downplay the, the horrors of being, um, enslaved and carted off to the coast of North Africa, ended up in the slave galley. 0.55

00:22:10.000 Um, um, uh, that wasn't pretty either.

00:22:13.000 Or a eunuch or a sex slave. 1.00

00:22:15.000 Yeah, yeah. 1.00

00:22:16.000 So, but, but, uh, your point's well taken.

00:22:18.000 And there were forms of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, domestic slavery, which were more humane. 0.69

00:22:24.000 So certainly, uh, more, there were more and less humane forms of slavery.

00:22:28.000 And the, the, 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.

00:22:38.000 Yep.

00:22:39.000 I mean, what we're talking about is absolutely horrific and it, it, it leaves its stain.

00:22:46.000 So in many ways, do you have a sympathy with, with these people who are overtly critical of the empire and can't really look past that?

00:22:55.000 Because it is such a dreadful crime, if we're honest.

00:22:58.000 Um, I guess I, I don't actually, I don't, uh, partly because when I look back at history, I think of it, most of it was dreadful.

00:23:09.000 Most of it was dreadful.

00:23:10.000 I mean, so I look back at slavery, having looked at Pol Pot's killing fields, having looked at the Holocaust, having looked at the, well, you know, the, the, the millions are lost their lives in German Mao's great leap forward and cultural revolution. 0.72

00:23:28.000 Um, having looked at what Stalin did in Russia in the 1930s, um, having considered, um, having considered, um, having considered, so in other words, history is full of, um, massive inhumanity.

00:23:41.000 Um, and I, I, I don't mean to diminish the, the awfulness of, of slavery.

00:23:47.000 Uh, but the, you know, if you, if you want to, to get upset about the past, there's an awful lot you can get upset about.

00:23:54.000 Um, and I, I still think, I still think, and, and, you know, there's nothing you can do, nothing we can do to save those who were enslaved and treated abominably by, uh, English or Scottish sailors in the, uh, 1700s.

00:24:13.000 We can't undo that, um, but there was an awful lot of injustice about it.

00:24:18.000 We can, we can't undo, uh, the, the, the maltreatment of industrial workers in mid 19th century Victorian England.

00:24:26.000 We can't undo the injustices done to small kids set up chimney stacks.

00:24:31.000 We all know about that.

00:24:33.000 Um, um, all we can do is, is stop it and, and, uh, try and rectify the effects now.

00:24:41.000 And we did stop it.

00:24:43.000 And we did, we did try and rectify the, the, the, the effects.

00:24:48.000 Um, and we're still doing that.

00:24:50.000 And it was to great financial costs to the British Empire as well.

00:24:53.000 I don't think people also realize that either.

00:24:56.000 I mean, that's controversial.

00:24:57.000 So, so, um, if you follow the, the Marxist, um, economic historian, um, Eric Williams, his 1940 book, Capitalism and Slavery argues that, um, the British.

00:25:10.000 Made, um, the, the, the, the profits of the British made from the trade and slavery was a major, um, cause of Britain's industrial revolution taking off.

00:25:22.000 Um, but, but I, uh, uh, unless you're a Marxist, uh, that's not, that's not a, um, uh, a popularly held view now.

00:25:33.000 And historians of, um, the transatlantic slave trade and economic historians will not disagree with that.

00:25:40.000 Um, um, um, the, the, to your point about the costs of anti-slavery, um, David Elthus, the economic historian, I think has, has written that in the period of roughly 1816 to 1860, um, uh, the British spent as much suppressing the slave trade and slavery as they had profited as much in the 50 years before the, the, the

00:26:09.980 abolition. Um, and as I mentioned, in terms of, uh, the Royal Navy, um, 13% of his manpower at one point devoted to the West African squadron.

00:26:19.980 I have read that 17,000 sailors lost their lives, probably from disease, trying to suppress it.

00:26:26.980 And, and that was just the, just the Atlantic. Um, in fact, the empire was involved in, in anti-slavery for 150 years all over.

00:26:34.980 Um, now, now, does that compensate for 150 years of slavery? Well, no, but, but, um, what's done is done.

00:26:44.980 Uh, and so there's nothing can compensate. Uh, all you can do is, is try and do better. And we have done.

00:26:51.980 And Nigel, this is maybe a, 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, 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?

00:27:09.980 We're at this excessive introspection, this, 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?

00:27:21.980 Right. Well, first of all, I think it is dangerous. Um, uh, and the reason I wrote my book and I make that clear in the introduction was political. Um, and I, I don't pretend I don't have a political interest here. I do try to be fair.

00:27:37.980 And accurate as far as I can. Uh, but I do have a political interest here. And my interest is in, in the confidence and the self-confidence of the West. Uh, because I, I, in trying to explain why it is that the, the only thing, uh, the critics of empire care about are white empires. 0.74

00:27:59.980 And European empires and European empires. Um, why is that? Um, because I, I, I take it that the, the record of European empires and in particular the British one is a proxy for the record of the West.

00:28:13.980 Um, and it is, I mean, for, um, for, um, in terms of European civilization from 1815 to 1914, roughly Britain was the leader. Um, and so, um, it, it, it bothers me that the record of the West is being, um, traduced, maligned. Um, because my, my worry is that it will reduce the faith of contemporary Britons.

00:28:41.980 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.

00:28:51.980 Um, um, um, as to what it says about us, I mean, I, I have puzzled over why, I mean, in my book in, in the, in the, in the, throughout the book, I try and demonstrate how certain historians, not all, have, uh, taken the evidence and then made, um, judgments about the empire that the evidence just doesn't support.

00:29:15.840 So the empire committed genocide in Tasmania or the empire committed, um, um, um, genocide in, in the Western plains of Canada in the 1880s.

00:29:27.940 And I, I, I, I, I, I lay this out and if the reader wants to see the evidence, it's there in the book.

00:29:34.360 And then I say, well, why, why, why, what propels the judgment way out in advance of the evidence?

00:29:41.140 What's the motive for this?

00:29:43.480 I mean, why go beyond the evidence to make a, uh, uh, an unsupported critical claim about British colonialism?

00:29:52.920 Um, and I say to myself, well, um, you know, if, if the evidence, uh, as a committed Britain and as a committed Western, if, if the evidence, if the evidence requires me,

00:30:05.320 um, obliges me to accept that my people did awful things in the past, um, then I need to accept that.

00:30:14.140 But why would I, what, why would I choose to, to believe that my people did awful things in the past if the evidence doesn't require me?

00:30:22.180 And I, I, I speculate as to what might be propelling this, but there is, um, there's a, there's a, there's clearly on the part of some, uh, critics of empire,

00:30:34.100 uh, not just a readiness to accept the truth about the past, but a glee that they want to believe the worst.

00:30:41.300 Well, this is why I bring up the point, because the facts are what the facts are, and we've already talked about it, like all empires, the British empire committed many atrocities and did many bad things.

00:30:50.340 And like every society in history, it engaged in slavery.

00:30:55.500 However, there is many ways to tell that story.

00:30:58.860 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.

00:31:07.960 Or you could compare it to, to elsewhere and also go make the point that you've made, which is, and then we, we did what we could, and then we tried to deal with this and we tried to end it.

00:31:18.980 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.

00:31:28.340 But there is a demand in our society for a particular story about that.

00:31:34.100 And I am concerned, as you are, I think that that is not accidental.

00:31:39.780 The demand for that particular narrative comes from a desire to deflate our confidence, to demoralize people in the UK and the West and America about their own history.

00:31:53.820 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.

00:32:03.420 Yeah, so I quote in the book, a passage from a novel by, by an Austrian novelist, Robert Musil.

00:32:13.400 The novel wasn't completed on his death in 1942.

00:32:16.180 It's called The Man Without Qualities, it's called.

00:32:22.180 And it's set in the, I think before the First World War, on the eve of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

00:32:31.220 And I can't remember the passage in its entirety, but what he says is this.

00:32:38.260 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.

00:32:54.480 Its credit is used up.

00:32:55.680 And my worry is that if young Britons believe that 300 years worth of British engagement with the world from roughly 1650 to 1960

00:33:12.960 was simply a litany of racism and oppression, then it's bound to shake their confidence in our institutions that were built.

00:33:21.440 And it's also bound to weaken their resistance to illiberal threats from Putin's Russia or Xi Jinping's China.

00:33:36.300 Because the tendency will say, well, we're no better than they are.

00:33:39.660 And of course, the left...

00:33:40.520 Which is what a lot of people are saying.

00:33:41.640 Yeah, the left has been saying this forever.

00:33:44.560 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.

00:33:51.440 And that was said during the Cold War, too.

00:33:55.540 And I just think it's wrong.

00:33:57.200 I just think it's wrong.

00:33:58.560 And it's something that...

00:34:00.960 Why?

00:34:01.280 Why is it wrong?

00:34:01.940 You're a moral philosopher and an ethicist.

00:34:04.540 Why is that wrong, Nigel?

00:34:06.540 Aren't they just...

00:34:07.540 You know, Putin would say, you listen to his speeches, says we are an independent civilization with our own traditional values.

00:34:14.160 We do things differently.

00:34:15.500 You know, Russia is a country geographically that requires a different sort of government, a different set of values.

00:34:24.260 Why do you say the West is better?

00:34:27.100 And bear in mind as well that people on that side of the list would go, well, what about Iraq?

00:34:31.440 It was an illegal invasion.

00:34:32.860 A million people died.

00:34:34.200 And I mean, that's...

00:34:35.520 You look at Vietnam.

00:34:36.460 There's a lot of Western intervention that hasn't been productive.

00:34:39.780 And in fact, it has been a disaster.

00:34:42.080 Yeah.

00:34:42.220 So why are we better?

00:34:43.880 Yeah.

00:34:44.300 Those are difficult questions.

00:34:45.900 So let's agree that the West has made serious mistakes.

00:34:52.940 Every, as I say, every nation state or collection of nation states will have made serious mistakes.

00:34:56.760 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.

00:35:16.700 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.

00:35:27.660 And although President Putin might say, you know, this is the Russian way, there are plenty of Russians, speak for yourself, Constantine, who disagree.

00:35:35.200 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.

00:35:53.120 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.

00:36:16.160 If you believe in the West, if you believe in a liberal political life, then the West, notwithstanding its mistakes, is something worth believing in.

00:36:27.060 And there are plenty of people in Russia and China and Hong Kong today that would agree with that.

00:36:31.920 That's my view.

00:36:33.420 Since you asked.

00:36:34.720 Yeah.

00:36:35.600 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.

00:36:43.360 And so people forget.

00:36:45.420 Do you know what I mean?

00:36:46.660 Sorry, mate.

00:36:47.300 Well, it's partly because people are saying this, they enjoy these freedoms.

00:36:51.600 And part of my worry about contemporary Britons who know 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.

00:37:10.600 And even before I was 10 years old, I was laying reams of dates.

00:37:14.960 So I had some idea of the kind of framework.

00:37:17.420 My sense is, nowadays, young Britons are not taught history that way at all.

00:37:21.760 So they don't have much idea of where this all came from.

00:37:25.200 And so they just take it for granted.

00:37:26.360 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.

00:37:48.820 So I think we need not to take things for granted, the way we do.

00:37:53.400 Anyway, sorry.

00:37:54.240 No, I would completely agree with that, Nigel.

00:37:56.340 The question that I want to ask you is, you've been working in academia for the vast majority of your career.

00:38:03.780 Have most of these ideas come from academia?

00:38:06.860 And what responsibility do you think academia should take for this?

00:38:12.520 Because there's a lot of people who put the blame solely at the door of institutions like Oxford University, Cambridge University, Ivy League.

00:38:20.460 Is that true?

00:38:21.360 Is that fair?

00:38:24.160 So do these ideas come from academia?

00:38:26.940 My perception is that these radically critical ideas, many of them come from the new left.

00:38:39.480 They are a certain kind of Marxist idea, which these ideas have inhabited certain regions of academia for decades.

00:38:51.960 But because of, particularly, Black Lives Matter activism, they've moved suddenly to the centre.

00:38:59.600 And as I said, because so few, even academics, have any idea about our imperial past,

00:39:08.380 and because they do know that it's not cool to be even suspected of being racist or being pro-empire,

00:39:15.560 it's not even cool to be pro-Britain, frankly, they acquiesce.

00:39:19.220 So I think some of them have come from within universities,

00:39:25.120 but the activist mood has moved them to the centre stage.

00:39:34.420 And it does distress and perplex me that so many of my academic colleagues acquiesce,

00:39:42.220 particularly in the notion that, for example, that our universities,

00:39:48.700 like the rest of British society, are systemically racist,

00:39:52.080 when it seems to me there's plenty of evidence to suppose that isn't the case,

00:39:55.640 and that if there are different outcomes for different ethnic groups, 0.51

00:40:03.180 it's not as simple as white people do well and black people don't do well. 0.99

00:40:08.080 Well, the evidence is that ethnic Chinese do better than most white people, 0.99

00:40:14.720 and white poor do even worse than West Indian Britons.

00:40:18.200 So it's much more complicated.

00:40:19.900 But there's a strange lack of critical filtering of what comes in.

00:40:23.700 And why is that?

00:40:24.440 Well, I mean, you could say it's cowardice, a bit of that.

00:40:31.840 It's also that in academe, as in most institutions that are subject to bureaucracies,

00:40:39.560 all sorts of nonsense comes down from above.

00:40:42.820 To fight it is exhausting. 0.86

00:40:44.400 And most of the time you think, God, this is nonsense.

00:40:50.320 But it's easier to swallow it and try and find a way around it and tick the box

00:40:56.860 and get on with your life than it is to fight.

00:40:59.020 Particularly when you look around and think, who else is fighting here?

00:41:03.220 And no one is lifting, no one is protesting.

00:41:10.520 And you think, oh my God, I'm the only person in the room who thinks this is nonsense.

00:41:13.400 Whereas, in fact, nine out of ten people in the room are thinking just as you are.

00:41:17.720 No one is saying so.

00:41:19.580 So it's partly trying to figure out which battles are worth fighting.

00:41:24.560 I mean, charitable here.

00:41:26.080 And then deciding this one isn't worth fighting.

00:41:29.080 The problem is, when you do that again and again and again,

00:41:32.660 I mean, serious nonsense gets entrenched.

00:41:35.440 And then the job of trying to dislodge it becomes impossible.

00:41:41.260 And I think that's what's going on.

00:41:42.840 So am I critical of my academic colleagues?

00:41:50.040 Yes, I am.

00:41:51.240 I think there comes a point where you're responsible for allowing serious nonsense to take root.

00:42:00.720 So at the moment, it's decolonizing policies, which are based on a series of assumptions about racism in Britain today

00:42:08.740 and about what colonial history really was that are, I think, false.

00:42:14.460 And what is most distressing is that there's so little critical discussion of this in universities.

00:42:19.700 And I think a lot of university professors are betraying all they're supposed to be about.

00:42:24.900 That said, there are signs of resistance that have grown up in the last three years.

00:42:31.060 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,

00:42:39.960 where I'm told, although I was a graduate student at one in Chicago in the 1980s,

00:42:46.820 I've not taught this, I don't know what the atmosphere is like now,

00:42:49.960 but it appears as if it would be much harder to resist the decolonizing wave in the States than it is here.

00:42:57.620 Because the problem is, Nigel, like you just said, that if you don't challenge these ideas at the root,

00:43:02.880 then they will work their way in and they will fester and they will take hold

00:43:07.280 to the point where you write a book that is a perfectly legitimate analysis of the British Empire

00:43:14.140 and it gets cancelled.

00:43:16.820 Why was that? How did that happen?

00:43:20.140 Yeah, well, I mean, that wasn't the fault of my academic colleagues.

00:43:24.280 You could pin almost anything else on them.

00:43:26.300 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not that one.

00:43:28.520 I mean, there was an earlier, as we talked about this last time,

00:43:32.200 the attempt to cancel my Ethics and Empire project in 2017-18.

00:43:40.280 That was done by academic colleagues who now adamantly protested

00:43:48.160 that this wasn't a repressive thing at all.

00:43:50.800 But we won't go back into that.

00:43:53.180 On the book, so what happened with the book was, I mean, as we were saying earlier,

00:43:57.700 if only my critics knew what good service they performed for me

00:44:03.440 because actually, because of that, the attempt to suppress my Ethics and Empire project

00:44:11.880 in December 2017, in the spring of 2018,

00:44:17.180 I signed a contract to write a book on colonialism

00:44:19.260 because a publisher came to me and said,

00:44:21.800 how about writing an intelligent person's guide to colonialism

00:44:24.780 which I agreed to do.

00:44:28.520 So I got a contract out of it.

00:44:31.200 And then what happened was I had to produce the manuscript

00:44:35.980 by the close of December 2020.

00:44:42.700 And so at 3 p.m. on New Year's Eve on 2020,

00:44:48.600 I dispatched the manuscript with a whole nine hours to spare.

00:44:51.700 And then early 21, my commissioning editor wrote back,

00:44:58.520 he'd read the manuscript, he said, he used the word,

00:45:02.760 what was the word?

00:45:06.200 Speechless was the word he used,

00:45:07.820 with admiration for the comprehensiveness and the rigor

00:45:12.860 with which I had written.

00:45:14.800 And he said this is an important book.

00:45:16.660 He said it twice, and he predicted sales of between 15,000 and 20,000 copies,

00:45:22.260 which may seem big to you, but...

00:45:24.480 That's a lot, particularly for an academic-leaning book.

00:45:28.480 Well, I can tell you, I've been writing books since 1986,

00:45:34.800 and I don't think I've...

00:45:36.060 In total, I don't think I've sold more than about 6,000 copies.

00:45:40.100 So that was big, big news for me.

00:45:42.600 So that's where we were in January 21,

00:45:46.620 and he put the manuscripts into the copy editing process

00:45:50.620 of Bloomsbury Publishing.

00:45:51.700 This is the publisher.

00:45:53.320 They even designed a cover.

00:45:54.660 And then in March 21, I got an email from the top of Bloomsbury

00:45:58.840 announcing that they were going to postpone publication indefinitely

00:46:04.860 because, and I quote, public feeling is unfavorable.

00:46:11.460 And I was shocked.

00:46:13.780 I feared this would happen because it's happened in the States.

00:46:17.580 I was shocked.

00:46:21.120 Being a man of a certain age, my emotions are about two weeks behind me,

00:46:26.300 so I wasn't quite sure what I felt.

00:46:29.000 But my wife reports that I was devastated.

00:46:32.180 And I do remember lying down in my bed staring at the ceiling

00:46:35.980 feeling sorry for myself.

00:46:38.040 So I was very sorry at the prospect that what I thought

00:46:40.680 was an important contribution to public discourse

00:46:42.840 would never get published,

00:46:44.680 but more depressed at the thought that Britain had come to a place

00:46:47.580 where a publisher, a major publisher,

00:46:51.180 would decline to publish an important book

00:46:53.680 that selling up to 20,000 copies would make them a profit.

00:46:58.180 Why?

00:46:59.800 Because public feeling is unfavorable.

00:47:03.180 And I was told, I inquired, what does this mean?

00:47:09.080 And I was told, in fact,

00:47:10.880 Bloomsbury wanted me to walk away from the contract.

00:47:13.740 So I decided not to do that.

00:47:15.780 And I engaged them in innocent correspondence.

00:47:20.560 And I said, innocently,

00:47:22.380 so you say that public feeling is unfavorable?

00:47:26.000 There's lots of public feeling.

00:47:27.280 Which one are you referring to?

00:47:28.520 And I said, so conditions are not favorable?

00:47:34.080 Well, when would conditions become favorable?

00:47:35.840 And I was hoping they might actually be honest and tell me in print,

00:47:41.300 but the lawyers probably advised them not to.

00:47:44.300 So I got two responses which revealed nothing at all.

00:47:48.200 And then in early April, notwithstanding the fact they couldn't explain

00:47:52.660 which public feeling was upsetting them,

00:47:55.520 in early April I got an email saying,

00:47:57.900 oh, but we're sure you're impatient to have this book published,

00:47:59.900 so we're going to return your contract to you.

00:48:01.400 And even then I wasn't willing to bite.

00:48:07.780 So I paid several hundred quid to a lawyer

00:48:13.000 in the hope that she might tell me that I could hold Bloomsbury

00:48:17.080 to my contract.

00:48:18.920 And several hundred pounds poorer, I discovered, I couldn't.

00:48:22.700 So then I, then this was about three weeks after I got the email

00:48:28.760 from Bloomsbury, I wrote and said, okay, since you give me no choice,

00:48:33.620 I will receive the contract back.

00:48:37.200 But I want you to know what I think of you.

00:48:39.180 And what I said was, I'm just appalled.

00:48:41.600 I mean, I understand publishers need to make money,

00:48:43.980 but don't publishers also have a kind of civic duty

00:48:48.460 to keep our liberal space liberal

00:48:50.560 and to inject important views into the liberal public space

00:48:55.140 just in case prevailing orthodoxies are mistaken?

00:48:59.060 And I, maybe that's wrong, but I just, it seemed to me

00:49:01.700 that if every publisher behaved the way Bloomsbury did,

00:49:05.860 we in Britain and our public culture would be severely,

00:49:08.080 severely impoverished.

00:49:10.900 So that's what happened then.

00:49:12.140 And then, happily, another publisher, William Collins,

00:49:17.960 took up what Bloomsbury had thrown away,

00:49:21.960 and I got a contract in August 21 with William Collins

00:49:27.300 to publish, and they brought it out early in February.

00:49:33.380 And just before it was published, I decided to share

00:49:36.080 the email correspondence I'd had with Bloomsbury,

00:49:38.700 the journalist, who published it in The Times.

00:49:42.140 And got a response from Bloomsbury,

00:49:45.160 and their line is that Professor Bigger opted to leave his contract.

00:49:55.700 Given what I've told you, I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions from that.

00:50:01.380 Because there were, and I was listening to another interview you did

00:50:05.720 by way of research, and you intimated that it was some of the younger employees

00:50:10.600 at Bloomsbury who may have instigated this whole thing.

00:50:13.740 Early on, I was told that was the problem,

00:50:16.220 that the senior management had been lobbied by younger members of staff

00:50:21.360 who objected to producing Bigger's manuscript.

00:50:26.400 Now, I only have that one witness.

00:50:30.180 It was a senior witness from inside the institution.

00:50:33.860 Bloomsbury deny that.

00:50:35.860 But the only other explanation I've given, namely that I walked away from it,

00:50:39.040 is disingenuous.

00:50:39.940 I did walk away from it in the end because it gave me no choice.

00:50:42.180 And I observed that the phenomenon of junior staff somehow managing

00:50:47.900 to cow senior management into vetoing publications has been a widespread one.

00:50:54.780 We've had reports of it in the newspapers.

00:50:56.360 So until Bloomsbury come up with a better explanation,

00:50:59.000 that's the most plausible one I have.

00:51:01.560 And what does that say about our society?

00:51:04.420 Let's remove that particular example.

00:51:07.080 But this has happened time and time again.

00:51:10.000 We saw it happen with Jordan Peterson's book,

00:51:12.020 where they weren't successful because the publisher aren't nuts.

00:51:16.200 They know that Jordan's books will sell incredibly well.

00:51:18.820 But what does it say when authors who aren't at the level of Jordan

00:51:23.220 in terms of sales get their books cancelled

00:51:25.420 because junior employees who probably haven't even read the manuscript

00:51:30.500 decide that it's unacceptable?

00:51:33.000 What does that mean for us as a society?

00:51:34.560 It's terrifying, really.

00:51:40.400 Or just, to me, it's really odd.

00:51:44.200 I want to know, where did the grown-ups go?

00:51:47.380 I'm 67, so I'm accustomed to grown-ups saying no to non-grown-ups, right?

00:51:55.560 We had a conference that I ran in Oxford in 2019

00:51:59.880 on academic freedom under threat, what's to be done.

00:52:03.120 Did you come to that?

00:52:03.940 Yeah, we did.

00:52:04.580 Okay, yeah, yeah, the first time we met.

00:52:07.140 And I remember one of the kind of takeaways from that

00:52:11.980 was the observation.

00:52:16.040 One of the problems is that we now live in a period

00:52:19.520 when our institutions are governed by a generation of parents

00:52:25.000 who lost any sense of having authority over their kids.

00:52:30.280 Now, I'm not a parent.

00:52:32.480 I deeply have no end of respect for those who choose to become parents

00:52:36.120 because it seems to be bloody hard work.

00:52:39.200 Tell me if I'm wrong.

00:52:40.120 Tell me if I'm wrong.

00:52:43.880 But I take it that sometimes one has to say no to one's kids.

00:52:47.100 Well, not to say no to one's kids for one's kids' sake.

00:52:49.080 But I get the impression that a lot of parents, middle-class parents,

00:52:55.620 university-educated parents have difficulty doing that.

00:52:58.680 Why do I say that?

00:52:59.380 Because you've got eyes and ears, and if you look around the society,

00:53:04.080 you can see it everywhere.

00:53:05.060 Well, for example, I've heard, twice I've spoken to teachers in private schools

00:53:13.780 and asked them, in terms of, it seems to me that it's really important

00:53:19.120 for kids to learn how to use social media well, how to discriminate,

00:53:25.580 and not to spend their whole time plugged into it.

00:53:28.900 And I've asked teachers what they do to help kids manage social media

00:53:34.340 and the technology well.

00:53:39.140 And they say, well, we can do something,

00:53:40.680 but we do think parents ought to do something.

00:53:42.980 But the problem we're facing is that parents come to us and say,

00:53:48.040 would you please tell little Johnny to stop using his iPhone all the time?

00:53:52.200 Because I don't dare to.

00:53:54.480 I don't dare to, says the parent.

00:53:56.760 And this is in the context of a high-fee-paying school.

00:54:01.020 So this is presumably a parent who is a university education,

00:54:06.860 is very wealthy, very successful, doesn't dare say no to Johnny.

00:54:11.340 Now, you know, I don't know how widespread it is,

00:54:14.260 but if that's the case, then we have a generation of senior publishers

00:54:19.080 who just don't dare say no.

00:54:20.620 So is that it?

00:54:23.000 Or is it also a sense that there's a commercial reason to be on the right side of history?

00:54:30.840 Well, not in your case.

00:54:32.200 I mean, they predicted that the book would sell.

00:54:34.300 And by the way, this is the other thing.

00:54:36.000 I mean, controversy does generate sales.

00:54:39.020 So with your book, which was likely to have an element of controversy to it,

00:54:44.220 I don't imagine the financial motive had anything to do with it.

00:54:46.780 On the contrary, I think you're right that, you know,

00:54:50.460 these are people who are afraid of telling their junior employees no.

00:54:54.660 Okay, we've heard your opinion, and it's welcome as a contribution,

00:54:58.020 but we're not going ahead with it.

00:54:59.740 I think that's probably it.

00:55:01.020 Nigel, thankfully, you did manage to get the book published.

00:55:03.820 There are shoots of some sort of resistance building.

00:55:07.480 We've got about five minutes left.

00:55:10.140 What has the response been like and the reviews and so on?

00:55:15.100 How have you found that?

00:55:17.220 Yeah.

00:55:19.300 So the response has been mixed predictably.

00:55:23.920 Glowing reviews in The Guardian, Nigel.

00:55:25.940 Yeah, that was probably a little too much to hope for, Francis.

00:55:31.200 So very good reviews in The Sunday Times.

00:55:34.280 Trevor Phillips, he used the phrase, which I love to quote.

00:55:43.800 He said, this book, quote,

00:55:45.600 carries the intellectual force of an anti-javelin anti-tank missile.

00:55:50.540 I like that.

00:55:52.020 So a number of good reviews.

00:55:53.500 But last weekend, for example, there was a slew of about four hostile reviews,

00:55:58.200 which eventually I steeled myself to read.

00:56:03.540 And I think I, although I was feeling kind of a bit better by them,

00:56:06.760 I think I, what I need to accept is the fact that the line I'm pushing,

00:56:12.560 that actually empire is not necessarily wicked,

00:56:16.060 and the British empire actually contained a lot of admirable things,

00:56:20.760 is so unfashionable.

00:56:21.960 The last time when this kind of argument would have been 50 years ago.

00:56:28.680 And I'm an ethicist.

00:56:29.700 I'm the only ethicist who's ever tried to do it.

00:56:36.500 The current generation of historians is going to react to that with instinctive austerity.

00:56:40.580 Besides, if they didn't,

00:56:44.880 the cost of approving of bigger in public, career-wise, would be high.

00:56:48.600 So they're not going to do that for that reason.

00:56:50.940 So I just have to accept there will be hostile reviews,

00:56:54.700 certainly in The Guardian, in New Statesman and elsewhere.

00:56:58.900 But having looked at the hostile responses, I observe, first of all,

00:57:05.320 so a number of folk, particularly a fellow called Alan Lester at Sussex University,

00:57:13.400 has been very busy on Twitter identifying particular historical points

00:57:18.140 I've got wrong and places where I miss the evidence or whatever.

00:57:22.340 So let me be frank here and say,

00:57:24.880 the canvas of British imperial history alone is vast.

00:57:29.760 It's 300 years, 1650 roughly to 1960,

00:57:33.420 and runs from Newfoundland to New Zealand.

00:57:36.220 It's vast.

00:57:37.640 So have I made mistakes?

00:57:40.660 Without a doubt, I made mistakes.

00:57:41.960 And when I come across them, I will, in due course, correct myself.

00:57:49.600 But I observe that the attention of some of my critics has been at the very kind of micro level,

00:57:56.980 and no one has really taken on,

00:57:59.040 in fact, no one has really paid attention to the larger argument.

00:58:02.400 So, so far, my larger argument stands,

00:58:04.840 the kind of argument I've just articulated to you earlier.

00:58:07.580 And I also noticed, not for the first time,

00:58:10.200 that in order to take me down,

00:58:12.940 some of my critics have to allegger that I said things I never said.

00:58:16.940 So one of them says that Bigger thinks there's a vast array of historians out there

00:58:20.880 who hold these extreme opinions.

00:58:24.940 And I'm sorry to disappoint John Wilson of King's College London,

00:58:28.580 but I didn't write the book for him.

00:58:30.820 I wrote the book, I didn't write the book for historians.

00:58:33.480 I wrote it primarily for the literate British public

00:58:38.900 to give them some idea that the radically anti-colonialist decolonizing story

00:58:47.660 that the empire was all a litany of racism and repression is just not true.

00:58:51.380 It's not true to the facts.

00:58:52.420 That's the audience I care about.

00:58:55.600 And nor did I claim, I never claimed there's a vast array of historians.

00:58:59.100 There are certainly some.

00:58:59.880 And although Wilson discounts the likes of Caroline Elkins,

00:59:05.520 the truth is that Elkins has far more impact than Wilson does.

00:59:09.240 So I was interested in those historians who have public impact.

00:59:13.640 And then another reviewer said that I end up saying

00:59:17.000 that the British Jumbo is essentially humanitarian.

00:59:19.200 I don't say that at all.

00:59:20.380 So they keep having to wreck straw man to hit me.

00:59:23.720 And that kind of reassures me,

00:59:25.160 because you only wreck straw man if you can't hit the real target.

00:59:28.180 So I'm still monitoring the critics.

00:59:33.260 But so far, nothing devastating has been produced.

00:59:39.180 And I just observe the fact that the sales of the book have been extraordinarily high.

00:59:45.280 I didn't expect anything like the response there's been

00:59:50.180 in the Sunday Times bestseller that's two weeks running,

00:59:54.160 which is really encouraging,

00:59:56.180 because what it means is there is a large public appetite in this country.

01:00:00.820 And I hope when it's published in the US in May,

01:00:04.860 there are two.

01:00:05.600 A large public appetite for something that tries to be reasonable

01:00:08.900 and moderate and careful and even-handed.

01:00:12.320 Nigel?

01:00:13.060 Yeah.

01:00:13.220 Sorry.

01:00:13.720 Yeah.

01:00:14.140 I finished.

01:00:15.740 I was going to say, thank you so much.

01:00:18.100 It was genuinely, it's always a joy to talk to you,

01:00:20.600 and even more so on this interview.

01:00:22.360 Our interviews always end with the same question,

01:00:24.780 which is, what's one thing we're not talking about as a society

01:00:28.120 that we really should be?

01:00:29.000 I would say we need to sit back and think more carefully

01:00:36.440 about our use of words.

01:00:38.920 So, for example, let's have an adult conversation

01:00:41.760 about what racism is, what we mean by racism,

01:00:44.540 or when we talk about being harmed by someone else's opinion,

01:00:49.820 or when we talk about someone else's opinion doing us violence.

01:00:54.540 Can we talk about what we mean by violence and harm?

01:00:57.000 Because a lot of things are commonly said,

01:01:01.180 that if you sit back, you think, no, not really.

01:01:05.040 I mean, you know, I can say things that you find offensive

01:01:06.740 or upsetting.

01:01:07.840 You can say things that I find upsetting.

01:01:09.800 Are you harming me?

01:01:11.120 No, not.

01:01:11.920 Are you doing me violence?

01:01:13.220 No, you're not.

01:01:13.860 So I just think we need to have the courage

01:01:16.260 to think about our language more carefully.

01:01:21.540 That's my, that's my, that's the oversight, I think,

01:01:24.220 You still believe words have meaning.

01:01:25.980 Very old-fashioned.

01:01:27.760 But on that happy note, Nigel, colonialism and moral reckoning,

01:01:31.600 I hope you get a few more sales off the back of this interview.

01:01:34.480 It's been a great pleasure having you back on the show.

01:01:36.660 Wish you all the very best.

01:01:38.260 And thank you for being here.

01:01:39.540 And thank you guys for watching and listening.

01:01:41.740 We will be back with another brilliant episode like this one,

01:01:45.340 or our show.

01:01:46.200 All of them go out at 7pm UK time.

01:01:48.080 And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go,

01:01:50.460 it is always available as a podcast.

01:01:52.000 Head on over to Locals where we're going to ask your questions to Nigel

01:01:55.260 that you and you only are going to hear the answers to.

01:01:58.680 Take care and see you soon.

01:01:59.460 I would like to know if the professor sees any improvement in academia

01:02:04.740 since the last time you were on the show.

01:02:07.180 We'll be right back.

01:02:07.940 Take care and see you soon.

01:02:08.840 Bye bye.

01:02:10.740 Bye bye.

01:02:12.180 Bye bye.

01:02:12.900 Bye bye.

01:02:19.940 Bye bye.

01:02:33.540 Bye.

TRIGGERnometry - March 26, 2023

The Truth About Colonialism with Nigel Biggar

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