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history jonathan sumption Cruel Britannia? Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning By Nigel Biggar (William Collins 480pp £25) Nigel Biggar retired a few months ago from the Regius Professor- ship of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford. He is a notable figure in the world of moral philosophy, not only because of his distinguished academic career as an ethicist but also because of his persistent refusal to observe the conventional pieties which characterise so much that is writ- ten in his field. There are few notions more pious or conventional than that empires are wicked and that the British Empire was unutterably and irredeemably so. In 2017, Biggar initiated the ‘Ethics and Empire’ project at Oxford, which sought to explore the factual and moral basis for this hostility. The project, its author and the university were at once denounced by other scholars in the field on the grounds that the very idea of balance in this area is unacceptable. To quote one of the most vocal antagonists, ‘any attempt to create a balance sheet of the good and evil of empire can’t be based on rigorous scholarship.’ This seems a surprising proposition. It is hard to think of any human institution enduring for centuries of which it can seriously be said it was all good or all bad. If the British Empire was all bad, then it stands almost unique in the three millennia of recorded human barbarism. Yet for three centuries, honourable men and women served the British Empire with pride and were admired for it by their contemporaries, including many of its subjects and some of its more articulate opponents. Something so paradoxical is surely worthy of serious examination. This is why Colonialism is an important book as well as a courageous one. Biggar’s starting point is that empire is not a historical aberration or a departure from historical norms. It is part of the natural order of a world that until recently lacked stable frontiers formalised by an overarching scheme of international law. The armed migration of peoples in search of resources might serve to unlock the riches of the world and spread knowledge and technical competence, processes which potentially benefit all mankind. To u t c o m p r e n d r e c ’ e s t t o u t p a rd o n n e r is an aphorism variously attributed to Spinoza, Madame de Staël and Tolstoy. But Biggar’s quest for understanding has not made him an uncritical admirer of Britain’s empire or any other one. He acknowledges that colonialism severely disrupted existing patterns of indigenous life. It was often achieved or maintained through violence and injustice. In the last analysis, all states maintain themselves by force or the threat of it. Government, imperial or domestic, has always involved light and shade, achievement and failure, good and evil. Biggar’s point is that it falsifies history to collect together everything bad about an institution and serve it up as if it were the whole. Biggar makes three broad points by way of mitigation when it comes to the British Empire’s legacy. First, many of the worst Save 30% on newsstand prices visit www.literaryreview.co.uk/ subscribe and use code ‘LRFeb23’ things were not the result of ideology or calculated policy. They were abuses which were recognised as such and addressed, not always successfully. Second, the disruption brought benefits as well as suffering. Practices such as slavery, cannibalism, sati and human sacrifice, which were by any standards barbarous, were eliminated. The ground was laid for an economic and social transformation that lifted much of the world out of extremes of poverty. Third, the British brought not just disruption but also the rule of law, constitutional government, honest administration, economic development and modern educational and research facilities, all long before they would have been achieved without European intervention. Biggar takes his agenda from the Empire’s critics. He deals in turn with each of the principal criticisms, starting with slaver y and going on to address racism, cultural aggression, population displacement, economic exploitation, authoritarianism and political violence. He confronts the famous horror stories: the Opium Wars, the Benin expedition, the Amritsar massacre, the suppression of the Mau Mau in Kenya. In each case, he sets out the historical context, which is so often absent. He acknowledges the respects in which the charges are justified, but points out in what respects they are unjustified or exaggerated. There are a few places where Biggar may be accused of tendentious selection or special pleading. But in general, his approach is objective and he fairly addresses the contrary arguments. A good example is the chapter on slavery, which touches on perhaps the most sensitive and controversial issue of all. Biggar does not for a moment seek to defend the Atlantic slave trade, and recognises that it was imperialism that made it possible. It created the markets for slaves, the fleets which transported them and the legal and administrative framework that kept them in subjection. But if imperialism made slavery possible, it also enabled its suppression when sentiment changed. For a society such as Britain’s, imbued with Christian moral teaching, the trade was defensible only on the footing that black people were not really human. Literary Review | february 2023 6
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history It was the rejection of that notion which transformed English attitudes to slavery in the course of the 18th century. Domestic slavery was banned in common law in the 1770s. After a long campaign by evangelical Christians, the slave trade was criminalised by statute in 1807 and slavery itself abolished throughout the British Empire in 1834. The Foreign Office and the Royal Navy campaigned for its international suppression throughout the 19th century. Britain was decades ahead of the rest of Europe and the United States in recognising the moral case against slavery and taking active steps to suppress it. The size, reach and diplomatic and naval power of the British Empire were by far the most significant factors in the demise in less than a century of an institution that had subsisted across the world throughout history. Unless we draw up a balance sheet of empire, we will never understand one of the most significant forces in the making of the modern world. Inevitably, it will be an incomplete balance sheet. There will be credits and debits, but no bottom line. This is because, as Biggar points out, the good and bad things about empire are incommensurate. Depending on one’s values, one can read Colonialism and conclude that the British Empire was on balance a very good thing or a very bad thing. But one cannot read it and plausibly suggest that there is nothing to balance at all. Would India be better off if it had not inherited its subcontinental identity, its framework of constitutional government, its economic infrastructure and the rule of law from Britain? Would sub-Saharan Africa be better off if Europeans had left it to itself? Would the world be better off if Europeans had never settled in North America? These questions are surely worth asking. The real objection to empires has always been that they denied self-determination to indigenous populations. Selfdetermination is a moral good, but it is not the only one. Our forebears thought that sound government was better than selfgovernment and that trade and economic and technical development were better for humanity than cultural autarky. This is not the modern consensus. But it is a morally defensible position. j e f f r e y wa s s e r s t r o m Tangled Tales of a Traumatic Time Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution By Tania Branigan (Faber & Faber 304pp £20) Long march: Xi Jinping doing farmwork, 1988 Tania Branigan reported from Beijing for The Guardian from 2008 until 2015, so Red Memory is part of a long and varied lineage of books about China by for- eign correspondents. Most such volumes are of merely transitory interest. A small percentage have enduring value, such as the New Yorker writer Emily Hahn’s publica- tions of the 1930s and Louisa Lim’s The People’s Republic of Amnesia (2014), which focused on the 1989 massacre that followed the Tiananmen Square protests and the struggles to suppress and keep alive mem- ories of that event. Two articles by Branigan that ran in 2013 – the first full year of the Xi Jinping era – caught my attention at the time. One was a whimsical look at an isolated village with a disproportionately large number of centenarians. Branigan mixed deft scenesetting with comments from a range of residents who had interesting things to say about how to live for a long time – or scoffed at the notion of there being a secret to longevity. Here, I thought, was someone with a knack for evoking rural locales and getting people to talk in revealing ways. The same qualities stood out in the other article. At its heart was a conversation in Beijing with a diehard defender of Mao who insisted that the official line on the decade of the Cultural Revolution – a ten-year stretch that began with Red Guards attacking people for allegedly being insufficiently loyal to Mao in 1966 and ended with the Chairman’s death – was all wrong. The Communist Party did not swerve off course in Mao’s final years and then correct its trajectory under the reform-minded Deng Xiaoping. Mao was taking the country in the right direction; the derailment came with the veer towards capitalism late in the 1970s. The article opens with an eerie description of a village far from the capital devoted to the Chairman. Branigan describes a place devoid of any hint of Mao’s culpability for great suffering. ‘The East is Red’, a paean to the long-dead leader, ‘blasts through the speakers and echoes down the wide, empty streets, past the blazingly white statue of Chairman Mao,’ Branigan writes. After reading those articles, I looked forward to the day I would hold in my hands a book by Branigan about Chinese villages in a time of rapid urbanisation. The book that she has written, however, is not that one. Yes, there are elements in it that fit with what first drew me to her work. One excellent chapter opens with the rural community that has become a shrine to Mao. Other strong chapters include striking depictions of visits to isolated locales, some of them in obscure urban settings rather than rural ones. ‘Luxuriant greenery crawled over marble monuments, immense and once stark white but now lichened and grey,’ she writes, describing a graveyard in Chongqing created to honour those who died in factional february 2023 | Literary Review 7

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It was the rejection of that notion which transformed English attitudes to slavery in the course of the 18th century. Domestic slavery was banned in common law in the 1770s. After a long campaign by evangelical Christians, the slave trade was criminalised by statute in 1807 and slavery itself abolished throughout the British Empire in 1834. The Foreign Office and the Royal Navy campaigned for its international suppression throughout the 19th century. Britain was decades ahead of the rest of Europe and the United States in recognising the moral case against slavery and taking active steps to suppress it. The size, reach and diplomatic and naval power of the British Empire were by far the most significant factors in the demise in less than a century of an institution that had subsisted across the world throughout history.

Unless we draw up a balance sheet of empire, we will never understand one of the most significant forces in the making of the modern world. Inevitably, it will be an incomplete balance sheet. There will be credits and debits, but no bottom line. This is because, as Biggar points out, the good and bad things about empire are incommensurate. Depending on one’s values, one can read Colonialism and conclude that the British Empire was on balance a very good thing or a very bad thing. But one cannot read it and plausibly suggest that there is nothing to balance at all.

Would India be better off if it had not inherited its subcontinental identity, its framework of constitutional government, its economic infrastructure and the rule of law from Britain? Would sub-Saharan Africa be better off if Europeans had left it to itself? Would the world be better off if Europeans had never settled in North America? These questions are surely worth asking.

The real objection to empires has always been that they denied self-determination to indigenous populations. Selfdetermination is a moral good, but it is not the only one. Our forebears thought that sound government was better than selfgovernment and that trade and economic and technical development were better for humanity than cultural autarky. This is not the modern consensus. But it is a morally defensible position.

j e f f r e y wa s s e r s t r o m

Tangled Tales of a Traumatic Time Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution

By Tania Branigan (Faber & Faber 304pp £20)

Long march: Xi Jinping doing farmwork, 1988

Tania Branigan reported from Beijing for The Guardian from 2008 until 2015, so Red Memory is part of a long and varied lineage of books about China by for- eign correspondents. Most such volumes are of merely transitory interest. A small percentage have enduring value, such as the New Yorker writer Emily Hahn’s publica- tions of the 1930s and Louisa Lim’s The People’s Republic of Amnesia (2014), which focused on the 1989 massacre that followed the Tiananmen Square protests and the struggles to suppress and keep alive mem- ories of that event.

Two articles by Branigan that ran in 2013 – the first full year of the Xi Jinping era – caught my attention at the time. One was a whimsical look at an isolated village with a disproportionately large number of centenarians. Branigan mixed deft scenesetting with comments from a range of residents who had interesting things to say about how to live for a long time – or scoffed at the notion of there being a secret to longevity. Here, I thought, was someone with a knack for evoking rural locales and getting people to talk in revealing ways.

The same qualities stood out in the other article. At its heart was a conversation in Beijing with a diehard defender of Mao who insisted that the official line on the decade of the Cultural Revolution – a ten-year stretch that began with Red Guards attacking people for allegedly being insufficiently loyal to

Mao in 1966 and ended with the Chairman’s death – was all wrong. The Communist Party did not swerve off course in Mao’s final years and then correct its trajectory under the reform-minded Deng Xiaoping. Mao was taking the country in the right direction; the derailment came with the veer towards capitalism late in the 1970s. The article opens with an eerie description of a village far from the capital devoted to the Chairman. Branigan describes a place devoid of any hint of Mao’s culpability for great suffering. ‘The East is Red’, a paean to the long-dead leader, ‘blasts through the speakers and echoes down the wide, empty streets, past the blazingly white statue of Chairman Mao,’ Branigan writes.

After reading those articles, I looked forward to the day I would hold in my hands a book by Branigan about Chinese villages in a time of rapid urbanisation. The book that she has written, however, is not that one. Yes, there are elements in it that fit with what first drew me to her work. One excellent chapter opens with the rural community that has become a shrine to Mao. Other strong chapters include striking depictions of visits to isolated locales, some of them in obscure urban settings rather than rural ones. ‘Luxuriant greenery crawled over marble monuments, immense and once stark white but now lichened and grey,’ she writes, describing a graveyard in Chongqing created to honour those who died in factional february 2023 | Literary Review 7

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