Ideologues are often performative, but sometimes they are simply pantomimic. One of today’s major stock villains is the British Empire—seen in melodramatic minds as a swaggering dastard, slashing through global history like Captain Hook in murderous search of Peter Pan and treasure, and whose malign legacy can be blamed for many modern ills. Attitudes toward the empire have certainly evolved since 1922, when George Santayana could argue seriously in Soliloquies in England that “never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master.”
Oxford ethicist Nigel Biggar got drawn into this debate in 2017, when he wrote a piece in the Times of London commending Bruce Gilley’s apoplexy-inducing Third World Quarterly article, “The Case for Colonialism.” He had waded in these waters before, when impassioned activists demanded the removal of all memorials of Cecil Rhodes, including Oxford’s prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, on the grounds that he had been responsible for rapine in southern Africa. Biggar had also convened a comparative educational project called “Ethics and Empire,” which was inevitably caricatured as an attempt to whitewash Britain’s imperial record. He has formerly criticized human rights and made a Christian case for “just wars.”
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