A review of Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning 

Bruce Gilley, Western Standard, July 29, 2023

There is a delightful irony when a priest tells the secular laity to be less confident in its moral dogmas.

Nigel Biggar, professor of theology at Oxford, is that priest and he has posted his theses about the British empire (including the empire in Canada) on the door of the High Church of Anti-Colonial Ideology.

A reformation of this corrupt institution is underway. When the Reformation is achieved, Biggar will loom as the ethicist whose work reclaimed the moral high ground from the inquisitors below.

His book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning sets out Eight Theses about what we might call the global expansion of the kingdom of Wessex, a remnant of the Roman empire that was overrun by the Danes and then the Normans, before emerging as a rather successful unified state.

Biggar is not precise about which phase of the British Empire he has in mind.

Most of his discussion covers not the first phase that began with Ireland in 1603 and Bermuda in 1609 (and which would include Canada and the United States,) but the grander post-Napoleonic second phase that began with the Cape of Good Hope (1814,) Singapore (1819,) and Burma (1824.)

The Eight Theses are in any case backward-looking evaluations rather than chronological assessments, so they cover the whole four centuries ending with the loss of Hong Kong (1997).

The Eight Theses are as follows:

1. The British empire was based on admirable motives even if, like all human affairs, it often suffered from vices;

2. Anti-slavery, far more than slavery, was a central thrust of British imperial policy;

3. A justified belief in the superiority of British civilization, a belief shared by most natives, sometimes bled into an unjustified sense of racial superiority (but that this was mainly among the working classes, and it was less common than the caste racism in India or the inter-tribal racism in Africa or among indigenous peoples in the Americas);

4. Disease far more than land acquisition is what rendered many native populations weakened by European settlement (and state-led land acquisition was the best alternative to what would otherwise have been an unholy scramble with no legal remedies for the natives;)

5. Efforts at cultural uplift for the natives were based on anti-racist and humanitarian motives, none of which either in intention or in practice can ever be glibly called “genocide”;

6. Colonialism brought a necessary and inevitable economic shift from subsistence and plunder economies to markets, wage labour, and capitalism which delivered more economic well-being than would have arrived in these places otherwise;

7. Colonial governments were heavily dependent on native support and participation, sowing the seeds of national consciousness and self-government; and, finally,

8. The use of force by colonial governments was usually justified and proportionate.

In the eight chapters documenting each thesis, Biggar takes up the moral critique of empire and the key events that have been used to justify that critique.

Getting past simplistic hate-the-British narratives

Like a patient man of the collar providing pastoral care for the spiritually afflicted, he offers those trapped in the “hate-the-British-Empire” narrative a way out that is both empirically and ethically sound.

For instance, for those interested in the familiar debates on Cecil Rhodes, or the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya, Biggar makes sure to cover the ground.

He also offers a delightful debunking of the myth of the ‘Amritsar Massacre’ (not the one in 1984 that killed 1,500 or the Sikh death squads in Amritsar that killed thousands of Muslims during Partition of 1947 but the one involving a frightened British brigade in 1919 that killed 379.)

Biggar’s relegation to a footnote of his response to the specious claims of the Danish-British historian Kim Wagner that the 1919 skirmish reflected a violent and racist “essence” of the British empire is appropriate: “Literally peripheral.” After all, he explains, even the most generous reading of Wagner’s thesis would find that it applies only in the chaotic conditions of frontier areas, not in the core areas.

Clearing the Canadian air with informed history and context, I will dwell here on Biggar’s response to claims of “ethnic cleansing” and “displacement” lodged against the government of Sir John A. Macdonald by University of Regina “health studies” professor James Daschuk in his 2013 book Clearing the Plains.

The charges relate to the Macdonald government’s handling of the Canadian prairie famine from 1878 to 1883. Biggar shows that Daschuk’s criticisms are specious.

The Canadian government responded with alacrity and shipped huge amounts of food to “Indians” who were starving as a result of tuberculosis, a winter drought, and the decline of the bison population.

It asked that healthy natives who could be useful on planned Indian farms should work for their rations. Indeed it worried that too many Indians wanted to work on the farms and that it would run out of employment.

The Canadian government response was sufficient to prevent blood-letting among the competing native clans that would have resulted from what Daschuk coyly refers to in his book as “traditional means of acquiring wealth” (i.e. plundering/stealing).

As Biggar shows, the supposedly evil statement by Macdonald in the House of Commons in 1882 that Daschuk and other critics have cited—“[W]e are doing all we can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation, to reduce the expense”—is mangled by being taken out of context.

The “all we can” referred to attempts to stretch the available rations to cover as many of the starving as possible given supply constraints. It also referred to the desperate sense in the government that the Plains Indians needed to be moved along to reserves to ensure they survived the coming winter.

Making the food conditional on wage labour was not a devious scheme for genocide but a well-reasoned plan to give the Indians a basis for future survival. In all, 45 natives died in this “genocide” according to a count by Patrice Dutil in The Dorchester Review cited by Biggar.

As Biggar notes: “No, that is not a typographical error.”

The mistaken monocausal claim: Racism explains everything

The treaty Indians whose lives were at risk in the prairie famine were supportive of the government response.

Regrettably, Daschuk does not allow the opinions of those whose lives were at stake to get in the way of his Grand Narrative. He opens his book with the assertion that “racism among policy makers and members of mainstream society was the key factor in creating the gap in health outcomes” between Indians and Canadian society.

That ignores

• the Stone Age level of development among North America’s first settlers when the Europeans arrived;

• the disease and warfare that scattered their numbers;

• the near-enforced welfare dependency and victimization narratives thrust upon them by later Canadian leftists and via a preference for continued collectivism on reserves chosen in many cases by some native themselves– the narrative that Biggar’s book challenges.

Instead, Daschuk assumes racism as the cause for every observed effect.

Be more and not less critical of anti-colonial “theology/ideology”

My only complaint about Biggar’s treatment of such episodes in the history of the British empire is that he is not nearly critical enough of the clergy in the High Church of Anti-Colonial Ideology.

Because Biggar is merciful in his gentle remonstrance of the likes of Daschuk, he accepts many of their anti-colonial critiques too readily. It is that old British tick: the need to be sensible, dear fellow.

Biggar sometimes sounds like a country parson eager to avoid a summons to tea with the Bishop. Even a reformer, after all, has to keep his living in the Church. As a result, his deference to some of the claims of anti-colonial doctrine is delivered with too much apology for my “rebel Protestant” tastes.

In his description of the prairie famine, for instance, he cites Daschuk himself (whose claims of genocide he has just shown to be ludicrous) that the Indian farming program was “hastily contrived” and an “abysmal failure.”

All this haste and failure, avers Biggar, raises the possibility of “culpable negligence” by the Macdonald government, a highly regrettable thing.

Why is Daschuk suddenly a pillar of reason and objectivity?

When the famine began, there were no railroads and no food supply systems to deliver rations to the prairies. In addition, the continent’s first settlers were still mostly nomadic, so to find everyone would require sending the NorthWest Mounted Police to chase them about the plains, which at nearly 1.8 million square kilometres was and is more than three times the size of France.

Still, despite such challenges, Macdonald tripled government (i.e. taxpayer) spending on Canada’s native populations, making it the third largest program expense in the federal budget.

The Indian farming program began in 1878 required instructors, seeds, and tools for the 17,000 Indians scattered across an area seven times larger than the entire United Kingdom.

Seventeen farming outreach agencies were established as well as two model government farms and provision stations. But without railways and with starvation preventing work, the results were meager.

The Prairies were brutal for everyone

For example, the farm instructors spent most of their time distributing rations, according to Sarah Carter’s 1990 book Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy.

Most important, no one yet knew how to farm in the Canadian prairies. White settlers were having just as much difficulty surviving as the Indians. “Farming at this time in the [Northwest] Territories was a dubious, precarious undertaking for anyone, even an experienced Ontario farmer,” Carter wrote in her book. “It was not to be for a decade and more that suitable techniques for dryland farming were discovered through trial and error and the work of the experimental farms.”

Also read, if you will, Carter’s account in the same book of the travails of James Scott, the appointed Indian farm instructor for Touchwood Hills near today’s Punnichy, Saskatchewan.

Scott left his wife and seven children in Brampton in June 1879 and arrived in late August, a journey of 2,500 km (roughly Lisbon to Berlin). Most of his equipment had gone missing, his oxen were near-death, and his companions had scattered.

Creating viable farms in this area was the work of a generation, but Scott lasted only two years because of the plethora of difficulties: one native chief hoarded the farm equipment he was given for use by his extended family; other Prairie natives insisted that Scott buy his supplies only from them; farm tools arrived missing parts; land thought to be arable turned out to be barren.

And so on. The program was ended in 1884, a noble experiment that failed.

The Prairies failed everyone

Other charges laid by Daschuk and addressed by Biggar include the complaint that many of the tools broke.

Since Daschuk studied only “Indians” for this book, he automatically assumed this was some dark racist conspiracy. I dare him to read Nellie McClung’s account of faulty wheat binders in her memoirs, Clearing in the West, after her family arrived in Manitoba in 1880.

“The story of that binder is a story of grief and the other [people’s] binders were no better. Everything went wrong, someone was on the road to Brandon nearly every night, for the parts left with the blacksmith were not sufficient..It seemed that we had replaced every part on the binder that could possibly break.”

Poor old Nellie McClung has since been downgraded from a noble woman and suffragette to yet another evil tool of British settler colonialism by no less than the same Sarah Carter whose earlier work was less infected by the Woke moral panic of our age.

In her 2016 book with the University of Manitoba Press, Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies, Carter accuses McClung of a cardinal sin: she “expressed deep pride in and admiration for the British Empire.”

As an alumnus of Nellie McClung Elementary School in Calgary, I can only say that Carter’s book has raised dear Nellie in my esteem immensely. Further, as a young girl brought to Manitoba to eke out a living, Carter charges, McClung was “complicit in the enterprise of dispossessing Indigenous people.”

Carter and Daschuk are emblematic of the lunatic, anti-reality turn in the writing of colonial history which is selective and simplistic (the British Empire always the villain; the continent’s first settlers and their progeny only and always victims).

They should be called out for what they are, not coddled.

To return to Biggar’s too-easy charge of possible “culpable negligence” in the Macdonald government’s response, it is as off-base as the “woke” narratives he challenges.

“Hastily contrived?”

Of course the Indian farms were hastily contrived: a famine was underway and winter was coming (a term that in Canada has a very different meaning than the gentle rains of England in January).

“Abysmal failure?” By what possible reasonable standard of expectations in the context? Methinks the specter of the Bishop’s summons to tea weighs too heavily on the writing of our reforming Oxford parson.

Specifics help; general contrition does not.

Another instance of Biggar being too sensible by half comes in his chapter on economic development under colonialism.

After dousing claims of “economic drain” and “de-industrialization”, especially with respect to India, he “sensibly” avers that “greed, racial contempt, the abuse of superior power and consequent injustice…deserve our indignation and moral condemnation.”

Yet he offers no examples of greed, racism, or abuses of power by colonial powers that might rouse our indignation and condemnation. Of course such abuses occurred, but if Biggar is going to offer a confessional apology in that direction, it would have been helpful to give examples so readers could know in specific what qualifies as such injustices and just as important, what does not.

No doubt, the clergy in the High Church of Anti-Colonial Ideology would hasten to offer examples, the sorts of false flag operations used to raise a moral panic and stampede the impressionable minds of the learning public into the burning of some witches.

All of humanity is flawed

Alas, greed, racism, and abuses of power can be found in every human society (Yes, children, even in First Nations, black, lesbian, and matriarchal societies).

To rouse more than our normal corrective sympathies, to rouse us to Indignation and Condemnation, would require those injustices to be enduring, intensive, and baked into the system, as well as unforeseen and avoidable.

Were greed, racism, and abuses of power such a systemic feature of British colonialism? Can we find official regulations in British colonial governance that stated that “Administrative officials shall be hired based on their greed, racism, and ability to abuse their power”?

Of course not. This is why our sensible parson doth concede too much. These attempts to sound balanced come across as rhetorical, offered for good measure, in hopes of avoiding tea with the Bishop (who was probably put up to it by his wife, she more fearful than he).

All this is history, but what of the present?

In each chapter, Biggar pitches the argument into the present, which may interest readers more. Telling newer immigrants that they do not need to adapt and integrate into mainstream or British-inspired societal norms because they are now free to “decolonize” their lives is a recipe for their continued failure and misery.

Or put differently, an “equity” agenda that denies human equality in all its potential and foibles, in all its potential for good and evil, will shortly lead to a Great Leap Backwards to naivete and then on to an illiberal society which hurts the most vulnerable the most.

A clear example: If policing practices such as the use of force when critically necessary, are assumed to be “white,” some necessary policing tactics will be ruled out of order and in the very communities that need order.

The use of force by a liberal state is justified and necessary to preserve human well-being: start calling it “colonial oppression” and you will very quickly see blood-letting that takes mostly non-white lives. This is why in an American context an estimated 10,000 additional blacks were killed in mainly black-on-black homicides in the two years following the George Floyd riots.

Related and finally, the art of self-government, so painstakingly built up under the British, survived or failed after independence depending on how long it had been given to take root (too short in most African colonies) and whether the post-colonial elites made the effort to uphold it or destroy it.

In our era, Biggar notes, Western countries are at risk of replicating the post-colonial failures of many colonies by repudiating the Western liberal heritage, regressing like so many failed states of the Third World.

“Thanks to illiberal ‘cancel culture’, British and other Western peoples stand in danger of losing,” he writes, the democratic virtues of respecting the equal right of various viewpoints and individuals to compete for power. “Cultural advantage, however hard won, can always be lost again, since what has been learned can always be forgotten.”

Or expressed another way: It would be helpful if those in the anti-colonial West reformed and imitated not Zimbabwe and Tanzania but Singapore and Hong Kong (before the Chinese takeover), the latter two having kept the sensible aspects of British rule such as capitalism and the rule of law and in so doing mostly flourished.

The Eight Theses of Father Nigel Biggar may prompt the Church to reform but so far they have prompted only angry only outbursts from the British academic clergy.

In a reply to one particularly hysterical review (by Alan Lester of the University of Sussex in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History,) Biggar writes that, in the end, he is less concerned with the strength of the Anti-Colonial Church within today’s academy (probably beyond repair) than with its effects on public understandings of the past (British, Canadian, and so forth.) His book is for the public, and there it has received a joyous reception. Let the Lesters stew in their academic journals. No one listens anymore.

As Martin Luther wrote: “That person whom no one disturbs does not have peace.” Biggar can enjoy the deep peace of knowing that he has lanced the Babylon of fake colonial history. May he be continually disturbed.

Bruce Gilley is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Portland State University, a Senior Fellow at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, and member of the board of the National Association of Scholars. He is author of a chapter in the book, The 1867 Project: Why Canada Should Be Cherished, Not Cancelled.