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An honest conversation about colonialism, with Nigel Biggar
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Today, colonialism is viewed by many as the original sin of British history. The truth is far more complex. Theologian, ethicist, and author Nigel Biggar is one of the very few public figures with the courage to take a holistic approach to the study of the British Empire.
His latest book is titled ‘Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning.’ It offers a moral inquest into the colonial past, forensically contesting damaging falsehoods and thereby helping to rejuvenate faith in the West’s future.
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Transcript
The Complex Truths of Colonialism
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. I recently heard an intriguing story told by former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia and friend of the show, John Anderson. About eight years ago, John had occasion to spend some time in Myanmar. He met an old man there. The old man said to John,
00:00:36
Speaker
I'm at the end of my life. I've seen 90 or so years, and only one of those 90 years did I feel safe and free in my own country. John asked, when was that? The old man replied, 1946. Before that, we had Japanese imperialism suffocating us. After that, my own people forced an oppressive regime on me. But in 1946, the British had liberated the country and ran the place for a year. I felt safe. I felt good.
00:01:07
Speaker
Yes, this was the same British Empire which is now reflexively categorised as irredeemably evil by so many. The truth about colonialism and empire is complex, but as a society we seem intent on simplifying it down to a simple story of goodies and baddies. Anyone who dares to consider the positive impacts of colonialism is smeared, often with the charge of racism.
Introducing Professor Nigel Bigger
00:01:31
Speaker
This is why my guest today, Professor Nigel Bigger, is such an important and courageous figure in the public debate. Nigel is a British theologian, ethicist, and author. His most recent book is titled Colonialism, A Moral Reckoning, in which, in the words of Neil Ferguson, he fearlessly goes where few other scholars dare venture to tread, to defend the British empire against its increasingly vitriolic detractors. Nigel, welcome to Australia.
00:02:01
Speaker
Thanks, Will. I'm really glad to be here and look forward to our talking. As do I. Let's start with the public debate around colonialism, which I alluded to there, because this book isn't a flag waving exercise. You look at colonialism holistically, you look at the evils as well as the virtues of colonialism.
00:02:21
Speaker
Now, for many, that just seems like a common sense approach, but it's not for many academics and for many in the media and for many in the wider public debate. Why has this approach become so controversial? Well, that's a great question and I've puzzled over it ever since I got dragged into the cultural war on colonialism.
00:02:44
Speaker
six years ago, because I do think my position, which six years ago was that we British and white Australians and others, we can find both.
00:02:55
Speaker
cause for pride and shame and lament in our colonial past. That seemed to me six years ago to be a completely anodyne, incontrovertible position. And in the six years since, I've only become stronger in thinking that it is incontrovertible. But you're right. For a lot of people, that is profoundly offensive and actually threatening.
00:03:18
Speaker
which explains the aggression with which they meet the suggestion. Why has it become such a controversial thing to assert such an obviously true balanced point of view?
The Decline of Debate Culture
00:03:30
Speaker
Well, clearly some people are very heavily invested in a narrative about the record of the West, and I think that's what's at stake here, a narrative about the record of the West in which the West is simply evil and irredeemable.
00:03:47
Speaker
And as for why people are invested so personally in this narrative, that's a very interesting question. Some people have built careers, of course, academic careers, political careers, in taking this position. I think also human beings generally like to play crusader. We all like doing that to some extent, and we're the people with the white hats, so to speak, wearing shiny armor, and we're casting down the wicked. It feels great, doesn't it?
00:04:16
Speaker
So I think all sorts of reasons why such a moderate, obviously sensible position has become difficult to hold in public. That word that you used, threatening, is an interesting one. It suggests that debate now, discussion, putting ideas against each other in a search for truth seems to be less important. In fact, actually, a lot of people are hostile to debate in a way that they weren't previously.
00:04:46
Speaker
As an academic, as someone who spent their life in the battle of ideas, this must be something that troubles you. It came as a shock, Will. When I made that comment about my views, my moderate views, which I do think actually held by a majority of people. When I said that my moderate views appeared to be threatening to some people, what I had in mind was something very particular. Way back in December,
00:05:09
Speaker
In the autumn of 2017, I had published an article in the London Times making this anodyne claim that we British, Canadian, Australians, we can find cause for both pride and shame in our colonial past.
00:05:26
Speaker
And a week later I put up on the website of a research project that I and John Darwin, the eminent historian of empire, launched the previous July called Ethics and Empire. I put up online a description of the project.
00:05:41
Speaker
And on December the 13th, Dr Priyabhargal Paul, a reader in postcolonial studies at the University of Cambridge, tweeted to her Oxford allies at 8.45 in the morning the following tweet, OMG, oh my god, this is serious shit.
00:06:01
Speaker
We need to, block capitals, shut this down. What followed in the space of about a week were three online denunciations of my project. My historian collaborator, John Darwin, resigned within four days of it breaking out. But let's just focus on that originating tweet, the thing that began the whole campaign of oppression. I didn't notice this at the time because I was too busy reeling and trying to
00:06:27
Speaker
figure out what the hell was happening. But, oh my God, this is serious shit. A Christian theologian ethicist and a serious historian are getting together and they want to run a project called Ethics and Empire. This is a threat.
00:06:44
Speaker
So right from the beginning, actually, there's an element of hysteria on the part of my opponents, and the reaction was a hysterical one, an aggressive one. So when normal people engage, well, let's suppose I say something that you find unbelievable or objectionable.
00:07:06
Speaker
Well, a normal person, I assume you're normal, would scratch your head and say, well, you know, bigger, you say X, but here are five reasons why what you say doesn't make sense. Respond to me. In other words, you'd engage in, you might be skeptical, but you'd pose questions and you'd challenge what I have to say in a rational fashion.
00:07:27
Speaker
Now, is that what Priyam Balagopal and the 58 Oxford colleagues have signed the second online denunciation, or the 195 academics worldwide who signed the third denunciation? Is that how they responded? Not at all. It was with aggression and an attempt at political manipulation. The last online denunciation was addressed to my university, urging you to pull support from my project. It was a political act, not an invitation to discussion.
00:07:56
Speaker
So actually, looking back and having examined, and I do this in my book as you know on several occasions, have examined in close detail what some of these critics have to say, I'm persuaded and increasingly persuaded that intellectually
00:08:12
Speaker
historically, ethically, they have not an intellectual leg to stand on. So every reason to feel anxious and worried when people start to say sensible things, because if they and others stop being, as it were, trapped in the headlights of the noise and aggression that Gopal and others make and start to listen to what they're actually saying, it becomes clear quite quickly that
00:08:40
Speaker
These little emperors, so to speak, are not wearing any clothes.
Western vs Non-Western Empires
00:08:45
Speaker
What I find particularly curious about the response of the types of academics that you've just mentioned is that they don't seem to be quite as upset when faced with the evils perpetrated by non-Western empires, the Ottomans, the early African empires.
00:09:03
Speaker
Why is there a particular instinct for this sort of feeling when we think about, say, the British Empire, but not with non-Western empires? No, that's putting your finger on a really important point. So I think there are two reasons for that, and both of them are political. Let's be clear about this, because the reason for selecting European empires, so-called white empires,
00:09:32
Speaker
is political, because as you say, there are all sorts of other empires you could get upset about. You could get upset about contemporary ones, for example, the Chinese one could be upsetting, or the Russian one should be upsetting to these academic colleagues. But the real ones, the present ones, the anti-Western ones are not the ones they get upset about. So why get upset about mostly defunct European empires? Well, there are two reasons. One is narrower.
00:10:01
Speaker
That is, when George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis in May 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement in the States experienced an upsurge in support and prominence. It crossed the Atlantic, landed in Britain, and the British version of BLM began to tell this story. Like the US,
00:10:24
Speaker
Britain is systemically racist, and in Britain's case, our systemic racism is rooted in our colonial past, which we continue to then rate by having statues to Cecil Rhodes, and halls of residence named after William Gladstone, and so forth. And our colonial past is reducible to one thing only, slavery, and the abhorrent dehumanising racism that justified slavery. Therefore, Britain has to decolonise itself,
00:10:54
Speaker
in order to free itself of lingering systemic racism. So that's one reason for focusing on the British Empire and on, in particular, the British Empire as equivalent to slavery. But there is a broader one, I think, and that is that, as I suggested earlier, the European Empire's, particularly the British one, is a proxy for the West.
00:11:18
Speaker
and the focus on the sins of the British Empire is a focus on the evils of the West, which Marxists, neo-Marxists, have long wanted to tell that story, and this is a new form of it.
00:11:33
Speaker
And of course, hostile forces in Beijing and Moscow and in the global south are very keen to hear that story told and to broadcast it. Al Jazeera loves to hear stories about mass killing of native peoples in Canada and broadcast it all over the world, even though in fact there's no evidence now that that ever happened. So I think it is a hostility toward the West that motivates this historical selectivity.
00:12:02
Speaker
Yes, that self-flagellating instinct in many parts of the West is an unfortunate one. It's a conversation that I have had with your friend John Anderson amongst several other people on this podcast. I don't want to go too much further on this
00:12:19
Speaker
debate today because I think we can fall in the trap that those people fall into of actually not looking at the evidence and not looking at the history and instead being influenced by the political agendas of the day. Nonetheless, I think it's important for us to ground the conversation there. Let's turn to empire in a historical context. The roots of empire, and I'm by no means a historian, but the roots of empire can be traced back to the beginnings of recorded history.
Understanding Empires and Colonialism
00:12:45
Speaker
The Akkadians are commonly referred to as the world's first empire. They were kicking around in the 24th century BC. What does it say about human beings, about human nature, that empire is a historical constant? Well, one of them needs to ask what empire is. And I think a simple and pretty serviceable definition is that empire involves one people dominating another. Well,
00:13:13
Speaker
That's been going on since the dawn of time because when you have different peoples with different customs and different interests rubbing alongside each other, they often threaten each other. And when people feel threatened, trust is low and trust is low recourse to violence is high. And in the end, if you don't want to be dominated, you need to dominate.
00:13:42
Speaker
And so just taking the case of Anglo-Saxons in England in the 600s, 700s, 800s, in England you had multiple different kingdoms of Anglo-Saxons and also Danes. And not surprisingly, there was constant friction, constant warfare. Eventually, the Kingdom of Wessex
00:14:05
Speaker
began to secure itself by expanding, expanding its control over its neighbors. And eventually, by the 10th century, you had the Kingdom of England. So the point is that you ask why is this so natural? It's natural because peoples want security. And if you want security, you need to pacify your neighbors. If you want to pacify them, you need to dominate them. And so you're absolutely right.
00:14:33
Speaker
Empire as a form of political organization has not only existed since mostly the dawn of time but it's existed all over the world on every continent and practiced by people of every skin colour. I mentioned earlier on this project Ethics and Empire that John Darwin and I launched in July 17 and the idea really was to look at
00:14:56
Speaker
empire from ancient China to the modern period, and to ask, how did ancient Chinese people regard the empire of their day in moral terms? How did medieval Muslims regard Arab empires of their day in moral terms? And the kind of paradigm of this is Saint Augustine's book, The City of God, published, which he wrote in the 420s, I think, AD, in which Augustine
00:15:25
Speaker
among other things, makes a critique of Roman Empire. So when we started this project, I was looking for ancient Chinese and medieval Muslim, etc., equivalents of Augustine's city of God. One of the early interesting discoveries was they don't exist. Ancient Chinese people, medieval Muslims, regarded empire as completely unremarkable.
00:15:49
Speaker
You will find treatises on what makes for a good or bad emperor, what makes for a virtuous or vicious emperor, but empire was a fact of life, and empire has been a fact of life. It was just like the air that they breathe. It was just a reality. There was no need to write on it, to discuss it, to talk about it. No, and of course, many people accepted it then and since.
00:16:13
Speaker
because it confers benefits. The Roman Empire allowed people to travel from Spain to Palestine because of imperial imposed peace. Trade was facilitated by an empire-wide free trade. So the empire does bring benefits.
00:16:32
Speaker
Yes, my next question was actually going to be, have there always been the same tensions in how empires have been perceived throughout history? So I'm glad you got ahead of the curve in getting to that question. We should circle back though, because I was happy that you did actually define what empire is. And I'd like to just clarify that empire and colonialism, whilst related concepts that you see as, that they can be distinguished. How do you distinguish those two terms?
00:16:58
Speaker
No, good. Quite right. First of all, I do my very best to avoid talking about imperialism or colonialism at all, because the ism part of those words implies something coherent and unitary that is misleading, because most empires grew up in a very ad hoc, reactive fashion. But putting that aside, what have colonies got to do with empire? Well, empire doesn't have to be colonial.
00:17:22
Speaker
You can have informal empires such as the British exercised through a financial investment in Latin America in the 19th century. Britain, apart from British Ghana, didn't govern any part of Latin America or South America, but through British
00:17:39
Speaker
financial power, there was what some people refer to as informal empire exercised over Latin America. So empire sometimes takes informal forms. Sometimes it takes the form of government. So you do have, of course, British government in India.
00:17:55
Speaker
from about the 1770s onwards until 1960. But would you call India a colony? Well, I think, strictly speaking, not. Why? Well, because the number of Britons who actually moved to India was tiny. In 1900, there were 330 million Indians. How many Brits were in India in that year? A total of 164,000. That's to say, equivalent to the current population of Oxford. Total.
00:18:25
Speaker
Right? And in India, the Raj, the British Raj, the British imperial government, did not invite people to come and settle.
00:18:35
Speaker
Yes, there were planters, there were businessmen, there were civil servants, but not settlers. So I think the paradigm of a colony is where you have, it goes back to Greek and Roman times, where you have Greeks and Romans pitching up on other parts of the Mediterranean and establishing colonies of Romans and Greeks settling there. Well, that didn't happen quite in India. It did happen in Africa, it did happen in North America, it did happen in Australia.
00:19:03
Speaker
So a colony is not quite the same as an empire, though it can be a form of empire. Yes, okay, that makes sense. You've started the conversation around the British Empire specifically, that is the focus of the book. It's the empire that you, or the form of colonialism, I suppose, that you know best. First question, and it's an almost unfairly nebulous question, but
00:19:39
Speaker
Lots of things. As I said earlier, not one thing. So as I say in the book, no one woke up in London one sunny day in 1600 and said, ooh, let's go and conquer the world. Wouldn't that be fun? Wasn't
Motivations for British Expansion
00:19:51
Speaker
like that. So the motives were various. The earliest, almost the earliest, was trade.
00:19:51
Speaker
What motivated the British Empire as it was emerging and as it reached its zenith?
00:19:59
Speaker
So the East India Company, I forget when it was launched, I think around 1600, perhaps a little before, was a monopoly given to certain merchants to go and trade with India. They got to India. They were given certain privileges by local rulers. Eventually, they got drawn into Indian politics in the 1700s. They ended up siding with certain Indians against others, providing military resources.
00:20:26
Speaker
And in return, they were granted land, sometimes ports. So by the end of the 1700s, the East Indian Company is not only a commercial company, but ends up ruling territory. One thing led to another, but it trades what began it. It's an extraordinary story, by the way, the fact that a private company ended up holding such a powerful geopolitical role. The world had never seen anything before, and I don't think we've ever seen something quite like it since.
00:20:52
Speaker
No. And of course, the East India Company, its jurisdiction ran well beyond India. So it landed up in Hong Kong, ended up in Malaysia. So it really was a power throughout Southeast Asia. That's right. And again, notice here that the only form of empire was indirect. This wasn't British government. This was a licensed private company. The British state was at one state removed from now.
00:21:17
Speaker
There were complaints that came to the British Parliament in the late 1700s about corruption, about the oppression of Indians by the company, and that meant that eventually the British government, a British parliament, ended up posing closer control over the company. Eventually, in E57, after the Indian mutiny, the government of India was taken out of the company's hands altogether and became directly ruled by the Crown.
00:21:45
Speaker
But you're right, the East India Company was an extraordinary phenomenon. I mentioned the outset that your book does a very good job of looking at colonialism holistically. So let's set the scene with respect to the British Empire, do the pros and cons list. What were the most negative consequences of the British Empire?
Consequences of European Diseases
00:22:04
Speaker
Probably the top of the list. No, actually the top of the list was disease. So Europeans who had become accustomed to domesticated animals and whose immune systems had
00:22:15
Speaker
adapted to the kinds of diseases that humans can contract from animals, domesticity animals, went to North America and Australasia, and inadvertently they imported diseases such as smallpox. And the impact of these diseases on native peoples in those places was
00:22:36
Speaker
devastating. In the 1700s, I've read a given Native American people that suffered successive epidemics of disease over a 50-year period would, on average, end up with 10% of its population alive, 90% dead, and it was similar in Australia.
00:22:58
Speaker
That was terrible. Nigel, just to follow up on that, I imagine British colonial settlers would have been aware that disease was impacting the native peoples of various lands. To what extent did they care and to what extent did they try and mitigate against that? My impression, Will, is they observed
00:23:19
Speaker
the impact of disease, that they didn't know that they brought it. Now, my sense is in the late 1600s, 1700s in North America, we didn't get to Australia, of course, until 1780s, that my sense is that lots of settlers weren't too bothered, partly because they felt very threatened by the natives, though some certainly were appalled at what was happening. But in the 1800s, after all, I think it was a kind of moral revolution
00:23:47
Speaker
in Britain, which began with the movement to abolish slavery, and not least in Australia and Tasmania. Colonial officials were, and also in the South Pacific, colonial officials were very disturbed by the impact of disease. By that time, they had figured out that Europeans had imported it, although let's be clear here, it wasn't just Europeans who imported disease. There is evidence that smallpox was brought to Northern Australia
00:24:17
Speaker
by fishermen from Indonesia. And by the way, the importation of disease went two ways too, because Europeans brought back to Europe venereal syphilis. But I'm an ethicist. So looking at this, I say this is all lamentable and it's dreadfully tragic, but no one intended it. So morally speaking, Europeans can't be blamed for this any more than Indonesian fishermen can be blamed for it. But it was really devastating. And I think
00:24:44
Speaker
that more than anything else was the worst evil. And I use evil here in a non-moral sense, the worst destructive impact of colonial endeavor. But let's not just linger there. Another major impact was, look, in 1800, the cultural gap between European civilization and the
00:25:08
Speaker
The cultures that Europeans found in North America and Tasmania and Australia was just vast in terms of science and technology and medicine. Now, this is not to say that native cultures were simply dumb. I mean, native peoples were far better adapted to their own environments than Europeans. But in many respects, native cultures were inferior. And I'll use that word knowing how incendiary sometimes some people
00:25:38
Speaker
But I do think in terms of science and technology, it is manifestly true. And so the impact of Europeans upon native peoples in terms of cultural disruption was enormous and demoralizing. So I think that was another major ill effect.
00:25:57
Speaker
And then sometimes Europeans were far too arrogant about their own culture, far too insensitive about native cultures, and natives felt humiliated and demoralized by that. I could go on. In fact, if readers want to read page 276, they'll find the full list of evils.
00:26:16
Speaker
That word arrogance is interesting. I think of someone like a Winston Churchill, a great proponent of British Empire and the virtues of British Empire. I imagine that arrogance, he would have seen it as a sense of duty, a sense that the British Empire has within it a set of values which they have an obligation to bring to the world.
00:26:40
Speaker
So how much did that sense of obligation play in the minds of leaders at the time?
00:26:47
Speaker
First of all, arrogance is quite a commonly human feature. We all suffer from it to some extent. If British imperialists could be arrogant, then modern progressive people can be pretty arrogant too, in terms of what they assume to be right and what they assume about themselves and their own virtue. Let's be clear, arrogance is not a peculiarly European or white vice. You can find lots of arrogant people who have non-white skins.
00:27:14
Speaker
Now, secondly, if British people like Winston Churchill around, let's say, 1900, felt that they were superior to other peoples, well, at that time, frankly, the Brits were on top of the world, and people on top of the world are vulnerable to being arrogant about it, and British people often were. Did they feel sometimes that often that they had things to give the rest of the world?
00:27:40
Speaker
and that they had a duty to give those things. Yes, they did, whether it be medicine or agricultural science, or whether it was to discourage native peoples from enslaving each other, or headhunting in New Zealand, or South Pacific, or to discourage Indians from burning their widows alive.
00:28:03
Speaker
or to discourage Kukui Africans from female circumcision, all sorts of things that contemporary progressives, I would have thought, find objectionable. Yes, they did. Did some native peoples resent that? Yes, they did. Did some native peoples welcome it? Yes, they did. So it's really quite complicated, but certainly arrogance was a vice and an offensive sense of
00:28:28
Speaker
racial superiority was sometimes expressed and native peoples were rightly humiliated and resentful of it. But was it sometimes well-intended?
Racism vs Cultural Superiority
00:28:39
Speaker
Yes, it was. And was it sometimes well-received? Yes, it was. So, for example, just to give you one example, in 1823, the East India Company wanted to fund a Hindu college that would recover and preserve and promote
00:28:53
Speaker
ancient Sanskrit Hindu culture. In that year, an Indian, Raja Ram Mohan Rai, who was a social reformer, a Hindu social reformer, wrote to the Governor General Lord Amherst and said, and this is Indian speaking, in effect, we don't need more benighted Hindu civilization. What we in India need is European science.
00:29:21
Speaker
So please don't invest in indigenous culture. Please give us the gift of European science. Roy was not entirely happy with British domination of India, but he recognised that the British brought certain civilizational goods and that Indians would benefit from having them.
00:29:40
Speaker
Yes, echoes of the old man that John Anderson spoke to in Myanmar. Absolutely. You mentioned in that answer, you used the term racial superiority and that it did play a role. Racism and colonialism, better or worse, are now inextricably linked in the discussion on colonialism today. What role, and we should point out that, at least in my view,
00:30:02
Speaker
having a sense of moral superiority or a sense that you are technologically superior is distinct from racism, from a feeling of one race being physiologically better than the other. What role did racism play in the minds of British colonial leaders? Yeah. So I think we need to have a discussion about what racism is. And I regard racial prejudice as no better than and no worse than.
00:30:29
Speaker
class prejudice or religious prejudice or political prejudice. Basically what prejudice is, is treating another individual as if he were simply a member of a group of people, a group of people about whom nothing good is to be said. So first of all, the group as a whole is denigrated and that any member of that group is assumed to be as bad as the group.
00:30:51
Speaker
So the individual is not treated on his own terms or her own terms, and the group as a whole is treated as bad without qualification. Any kind of prejudice of that kind I find ugly and abhorrent and offensive. Racism is just one kind of that. Secondly, again, Europeans do not invent racism. You can find a medieval Arab philosopher musing about why it is that Muslim Arabs are so superior to black Africans and white Europeans.
00:31:19
Speaker
Why are we, obviously, civilizationally so better? He concluded that the reason is the climate. The poor Europeans are too cold to be clever, and the poor blacks are too hot to be clever. There was a concept of natural racial superiority
00:31:35
Speaker
way back in medieval Islam. From memory, the ancient Greeks had a similar sentiment that Athens was at the top of the world at one point because of its geographic positioning for similar reasoning. Of course, anyone doesn't speak Greek is barbarian.
00:31:54
Speaker
bar, bar, just blah, blah, blah, blah. People who can't speak Greek don't really figure. So that's the second thing to say. The third thing to say is we need to distinguish between a justified sense of relative cultural superiority, which I think in the case of, let's say, the British in 1900 versus Bantu civilization in 1900, in many respects was quite true, and to distinguish that from a sense that we are entirely superior and they are
00:32:24
Speaker
entirely inferior, which I think is racist, because I think every culture or something to be said for it, and any culture is deficient in some respects. And someone has pointed out that among many native peoples, the care of the elderly was rather superior to the care of the elderly among the British. So these things have to be, we have to speak in relative terms here, but a major distinction has to be made between
00:32:51
Speaker
a view that says that non-white peoples are naturally biologically inferior, and white peoples are naturally biologically superior, so that white people bound are destined forever to rule non-white people. This would be what we now call white supremacists, which white supremacism
00:33:12
Speaker
its natural home was the American South or apartheid South Africa. But that's the view that white people are forever always superior. That's one view. Another view which I think is actually acceptable is to say, well, here we are in 1900 and relative in terms of science, technology, finance, military power, you might even say liberal politics,
00:33:39
Speaker
the British are superior to Bantu Africans in those terms, but Bantu Africans, in principle, are perfectly capable of developing to such a stage that they can become capable of all those things and more. And so that, for example, is the view of Cecil Rhodes. Now, Rhodes could often be patronising about Africans, but he was also patronising about the fellows of Oriel College Oxford, whom he regarded as children incapable of
00:34:08
Speaker
managing the investments he gave them. But Rhodes was quite clear in the Cape Parliament in 1894. He said, yes, the natives are children. OK, that's patronising. But he then went on to say, I do not believe that they're different from ourselves. And it's our duty to do what we can to enable them to grow and develop. Now, my own view is that that latter position is morally acceptable. Now, anti-racist regard, that is as racist. I disagree.
00:34:38
Speaker
Yes, what this is getting to is the distinction between race and culture and I still think today this is a conflation a lot of the time in the debates that we're having up until the present day and that a lot of people are too afraid to make valid cultural criticisms because they will be called a racist. I think you mentioned earlier female genital mutilation as a cultural practice.
00:35:01
Speaker
No one, no one can put a cultural relativism argument forward there and say we should allow this to happen or this is acceptable. That is an abhorrent cultural practice and that is distinct from the race of the people that do it. It's a really important distinction I think we need to make.
00:35:18
Speaker
Absolutely. And I agree. Just to confirm that, often in the 19th century, early 20th century, when people talk about race, they're talking about culture. So you'll find imperialists like Alfred Miller talking about the Anglo-Saxon race. He's not talking about skin colour. He's talking about the cultural and political values that Australians and Canadians and New Zealanders and British share, and into which
00:35:45
Speaker
and franchise blacks and Africans in the 1890s also began to share. So you're quite right, race means, it means culture. I mentioned that we're having these same debates the present day, often with the same problems that are associated with how we categorise these things. Israel-Palestine conflict and the current situation in the Middle East is one such example of that.
00:36:10
Speaker
You've got a fascinating CV for the world in which we live in that not only have you written on colonialism, you've also written on just war theory and you've written on, or in defense of war, quite literally, the title of your book. So I think this is a topic worth turning to. Zionism and the Israel-Palestine conflict has been described by some as a form of settler colonialism. In turn, that characterization is interpreted by many as anti-Semitic. Help me unpack all this.
Settler Colonialism and Complexities
00:36:40
Speaker
What is settler colonialism and how do you reflect on it in the context of what we're saying today in the Middle East? Okay, you've taken me on to extremely delicate territory here, so I'm going to choose my words as carefully as I can. What is settler colonialism? Well, it's where large numbers of European settlers come to foreign shores such as North America or Australia.
00:37:01
Speaker
So did European settlers come to Palestine? Yes, but let's complicate this a bit. Initially, the settlers came from Europe to Palestine to settle on land that had been bought from Arab landlords, right? So this wasn't invasion, this was settlement on purchased land. Second thing to say is that certainly over time,
00:37:28
Speaker
Many of the Jews that came to settle in Palestine came from elsewhere in the Middle East or North Africa. Their skins were not white. So we cannot call this white settler colonialism. And I guess the third thing to say is, yes, there was a colonial imperial element to
00:37:48
Speaker
Zionist immigration into Palestine because the British Empire, following the Balfour Declaration of 1917, did support Jewish immigration. The British, after the First World War, were given a mandate to manage Palestine into some kind of stable political form, and the British thought they could and sought to manage relations between Arabs and Jews, and they failed. We can talk about
00:38:18
Speaker
The British failed. One could say perhaps Jews and Arabs failed to compromise. And at one point, because of the degree of Arab unrest, the British tried to stop further Jewish immigration. At that point, Zionism becomes opposed to the British Empire. But actually, up until that point, the Empire had facilitated the immigration. But the point to make is that immigration was initially gradual and it was on to
00:38:45
Speaker
land that had been purchased from Arab owners. You mentioned that the British Empire failed in this context. That's relatively obvious now. My question, which is a hypothetical, do you think there were any possible circumstances given the religious, political, historical mess of this region? Do you think it was even possible that they could have succeeded? Well, no, I won't say it wasn't possible.
00:39:14
Speaker
But the problem wasn't helped by the, in different cases, different times, different Jewish leaders and Arab leaders being unwilling to compromise on their interests. Now, was it plausible to expect that they might?
00:39:28
Speaker
Looking back, it looks as if the probability was low, but if different people have made different decisions, there might have been a different outcome. The British tried various permutations in terms of two states, or an autonomous Jewish province, or an Arab state, or something like that, but that all failed.
00:39:47
Speaker
I mean, one thing that might have succeeded is if there had been some kind of overarching authority, one might call imperial, that was willing to stay there for a century or more and impose peace.
00:40:00
Speaker
The problem with the British was that, in fact, British military leaders warned of this before Britain accepted responsibility for Palestine. They said, we don't have, you know, we're stretched all over the world. We don't have the troops to manage Palestine. And at one point, I think, at the height of the disturbances, there were something like 150,000 British troops in Palestine.
00:40:22
Speaker
So I think if you have an authority with the resources, not these military, to control the situation, to manage relations, to enable different ethnicities to live together and learn to trust each other over a long period of time,
00:40:38
Speaker
that would have worked, but no one wanted to do that except the British. Many Americans wanted the Jews to emigrate and settle there, but they wouldn't take responsibility for managing the situation. Some would perhaps argue that the Pax Romana period in the Roman Empire was an example of a power such as that with that sort of mentality, albeit in a very different context.
00:41:04
Speaker
I want to turn to Australia specifically. As you know, Australia has recently held an unsuccessful referendum vote. The consequences of colonialism loomed large over the national conversation. What surprised you when you studied the British colonial period in Australia?
00:41:21
Speaker
Two things surprised me. One was the extent to which governors of Australia and New Zealand too were motivated by evangelical Christianity, particularly Governor Arthur in Tasmania, and the extent to which colonial governments often... I must confess here, I know Tasmania best because that's the allegedly classical case of genocide. I know that better than I know Australia in general, but my sense is that the governors were very concerned about the impact of
00:41:50
Speaker
European settlement upon native peoples. And that surprised me and pleased me. The other thing that surprised me and also pleased me was having gone through the evidence of what happened in Tasmania, I came to the conclusion that the use of the word genocide is misleading and inappropriate. And I want to add to that, there's at least one Australian historian who stands to the left of me on these things, Henry Reynolds, who also agrees that the word genocide in terms of Tasmania is not appropriate.
00:42:19
Speaker
Yes, I was going to say, please do, because this was literally my next question. There are several historians who would disagree with you and Henry Reynolds and would say that there was a historical genocide in Tasmania.
Debating 'Genocide' in Tasmania
00:42:31
Speaker
Let's unpack it a bit, perhaps starting with the term genocide and why the term genocide doesn't apply to what happened in Tasmania.
00:42:40
Speaker
Now good, that's vital, that's vital. As an ethicist, intention matters. We often do things that have ill effects, and in many circumstances, we can't be blamed for them. So Europeans bringing disease to North America, wherever, was tragic, lamentable, but they can't be blamed for that. So genocide is, strictly speaking, and this is the case under international law, it is intentional, and it's systematic, and classically, it is state-sponsored.
00:43:09
Speaker
The paradigm of genocide is, of course, the Nazi final solution. Now, what's happened is, of course, various historians, perhaps because they're not philosophers, perhaps for political reasons, have loosened the definition. So genocide, first of all, the fact that if a people is exterminated by disease caused by Europeans, well, that's genocide. Well, no, it's not. Or if you call it genocide, then you are blurring the line between
00:43:39
Speaker
as it were, the final solution kind of genocide and what's happening here.
00:43:43
Speaker
And the other thing, of course, is to talk about cultural genocide, which I think is also blurring the line between physical extinction and cultural disturbance or suppression. So I think we need to make distinctions here. So genocide means an intention to exterminate people, paradigmatically by government. And I've been through the evidence and there's this whole section of my book devoted to this. And my conclusion is that there was no, certainly on the part of
00:44:12
Speaker
the government of Tasmania, there was no intention to commit genocide. Yes, there's evidence that among some settlers there was exterminationist intention, but contrary to Henry Reynolds, I think the evidence suggests that that was a minority of
00:44:28
Speaker
settlers and here I side with Keith Windchuttle and so I think it's entirely inappropriate to use the word genocide to describe what happened in Tasmania. It's interesting that you there you distinguish between state intent and the intent of individuals or groups beneath the state level and related to that you have said in the past if there was something to criticise about colonial government in Australia and indeed elsewhere it was that it was too weak. Can you expand on that for me? What do you mean by that?
00:44:58
Speaker
Yes, so in Australia, it's rather like the wild west in North America.
00:45:05
Speaker
in the late 1800s. You have lots of settlers out west in America, but I think in 1874, the total number in the US Army was about 34,000. I mean, for the whole of the US. So Washington couldn't control what was going on out in the frontier. And the same was the case in Tasmania and in Australia. There were too few colonial officials, there were too few military, too few resources.
00:45:32
Speaker
to control what was happening. And the problem, therefore, was that governors found it difficult to control what was going on between settlers and natives on the frontier. And there's a story I tell, I think it's in a footnote, actually, in the book. In 879, the British smashed the Zulu Kingdom in South Africa.
00:45:55
Speaker
and divided it into eleven or twelve little fiefdoms, all of them ruled by Zulu, one by White. After some years, the Zulu chieftains
00:46:08
Speaker
were heard to complain, and they said, look, you British beat us back in 879. We understand the right of conquest. We did a lot of conquering ourselves. We got to rule other peoples by right of conquest. You got to rule us by right of conquest. Now would you please do it? What you did was you split us up, divided us, and then you walked away. Consequence of which is we are constantly at war with one another. What we want is the imposition of imperial authority to manage us.
00:46:37
Speaker
But the problem was that, and this may be a kind of systemic critique, that London didn't want the expense, and running colonies is expensive. So they wanted colonies to run themselves, or they wanted empires to be run by private companies, and therefore the resources were too few. But I think, paradoxically, a common criticism of the British Empire was that often colonial government was too weak, not too strong.
00:47:03
Speaker
Yes, that's very interesting. We're almost at time, Nigel, but I have one
A Balanced View of the British Empire
00:47:07
Speaker
more question. As much as I want to ask you, I won't ask you whether you think the British Empire was on balance, a good or a bad thing. I want people to go out and buy the book. What I will ask is when people are reflecting on that very question, was the British Empire on balance, good or bad for the world, how would you encourage them to approach it?
00:47:28
Speaker
Well, I'd encourage them first of all to pay honest attention to all of the data, not just the good stuff, but the bad stuff, not just the bad stuff, but the good stuff. And what I find amongst my anti-colonialist or decolonizing critics is an absolute refusal to acknowledge anything good. And that seems to me to be manifestly
00:47:46
Speaker
implausible. So be honest about the whole thing. As for how you make sense of all the goods and the bads that the British Empire contained, in the conclusion of my book, I explain how I do it. So I won't give the game away by explaining that here, but I show a way through. And I guess one other thing I'd say, Will, is observing that the British Empire contained goods and bads, rights and wrongs, makes the British Empire no different from any other longstanding state.
00:48:16
Speaker
There's no state in the world that's around for a long time that hasn't presided over or allowed or perpetrated bad things. That doesn't mean that the state is illegitimate, but it does mean that all states are run by human beings who have limited capacity and sometimes bad motives. So in that sense, the British Empire was no different from any other state.
00:48:40
Speaker
One of the sad things about today's public discourse is we're too quick to find a tweet or to find a social media post or whatever and use that to say someone is innately bad without any redeeming qualities. And that's why I think the work that you have done, not just on respect to colonialism, but also with how you think about, say, warfare, a range of social issues is so important, Nigel, because I think you do look at these issues holistically in context.
00:49:05
Speaker
As we said at the start of the conversation, it's almost crazy that this is a courageous thing to do in 2023, but it is, and you do it incredibly well. So thank you, not just for your contribution to the debate on colonialism, but your commitment to that philosophy. I think it's a very important one and it's much needed today. And moreover, thank you for coming on, Australiano. Thanks, Will. I really enjoyed this and thanks for the chance to talk about these important and highly topical things.
00:49:31
Speaker
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.