In Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, Nigel Biggar challenges claims that label the British Empire as genocidal

Title: Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning
Author: Nigel Biggar
Publisher: William Collins/HarperCollins
Publication Year: 2023
(Available from Amazon)

Decolonization theory has become one of the dominant ways Western history is taught and discussed. Like many influential movements, it has produced serious scholarship as well as more rigid advocacy.

In Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, Nigel Biggar enters this debate directly. He challenges core claims of post-colonial scholarship, especially its moral judgment of the British Empire, and argues that some widely accepted conclusions rest on selective evidence and elastic definitions.

Not all scholars accept that interpretation of the British Empire. Writers such as Douglas Stokes, Tirthankar Roy and Olúfemi Táíwò have begun to question prevailing views about empire and its legacy. Biggar is among the most direct. In Colonialism, he argues that some post-colonial historians have moved from explaining the past to judging it, reading history primarily to confirm present-day moral verdicts.

Contemporary theory, associated with Edward Said—the Palestinian-American literary scholar whose 1978 book Orientalism helped found post-colonial studies—and Frantz Fanon—the Martinique-born psychiatrist and political theorist whose 1961 work The Wretched of the Earth influenced anti-colonial movements—often presents the West as fundamentally shaped by domination.

In this account, Western norms—the scientific method, the rule of law and free markets—are inseparable from imperial power. Empire is treated not as a historical phenomenon with mixed outcomes but as a system defined in advance by exploitation and, at times, genocide.

Biggar rejects that framing outright. He argues that empires are recurring political forms that have appeared across continents and centuries and are not inherently worse than the nation-state. In some cases, he writes, modern empires provided more stable government than the 20th century nation-states that followed them. “We British,” he writes, “have reason to feel pride as well as shame about our imperial past. Note: pride as well as shame.” His aim is clear: test the claim that empire was inherently oppressive against the historical record of the British Empire.

Start with the charge of greed. Critics argue that empire was driven by predatory ambition. Biggar does not deny that economic motives mattered, but he situates British expansion within concrete geopolitical rivalries and security concerns.

Early moves into the North Atlantic and North America followed Spain’s rapid accumulation of wealth and territory in the Americas. British involvement in India grew out of the East India Company’s commercial interests and the instability that followed the collapse of the Mughal Empire. As Tirthankar Roy observes, “the empire was not an invasion. Many Indians, because they did not trust other Indians, wanted the British to secure power.” In this telling, British expansion was often reactive and contingent rather than the execution of a single grand design.

The accusation of genocide is far more serious than accusations of greed. Biggar insists that the term must rest on Article II of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted after the Holocaust, which defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy a protected group.

He rejects efforts to stretch the definition to include deaths caused by disease or cultural change following incorporation into wider political and economic systems. The mass deaths that followed European contact in the Americas and Australia were catastrophic, he argues, but not intentional. Europeans lacked both a germ theory of disease and awareness of the consequences of contact. If intent is removed from the definition, the term itself loses precision.

On cultural policy, Biggar turns to the distinction Raphael Lemkin drew between “cultural genocide” and “cultural assimilation.” Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the word “genocide,” argued that the two were not the same. Biggar argues that British and Canadian policies aimed at assimilation rather than physical or cultural annihilation, a distinction that does not excuse harm but matters if legal and historical language is to retain meaning.

Colonialism’s significance extends beyond imperial history. Biggar calls for clear definitions, disciplined use of evidence and moral judgment rooted in context to ensure that historical claims are tested by consistent standards rather than moral certainty. Historian Alexander Morrison observes that “someone needed to enter the lists against” post-colonial historians “who are quite prepared to engage in distortions of historical fact to achieve their point.”

Readers may disagree with Biggar’s conclusions. Some will reject his case outright. But Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning confronts assumptions that many institutions now treat as settled. It asks whether empire must be reduced to a single moral verdict or examined in its full historical complexity. The issue is larger than one book or one empire: it is whether historical argument is governed by evidence or by moral certainty.

Biggar’s intervention insists that the difference matters.

John Bonnett is an intellectual historian, author, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and a history professor at Brock University. A former Tier II Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities and winner of the Gertrude J. Robinson monograph prize, his expertise spans intellectual history, communication theory, and digital historical frameworks.

Our Verdict

Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning is not a comfortable book, and it is not meant to be. It challenges a dominant narrative and demands that serious accusations—greed, genocide, moral illegitimacy—be tested against evidence rather than repeated as doctrine. Biggar does not excuse empire but he refuses to reduce it to a slogan. Agree or disagree, this is a book that restores argument to a debate too often treated as settled.

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