 Good afternoon everybody and thank you all for being here on this lovely sunny afternoon. It is such a pleasure to see so many of you here for this evening's event. So by way of introduction my name is Mae Vryan, I'm a senior lecturer in the Department of War Studies and I co-direct the Center for Grand Strategy. And one of the kind of veins that runs through a lot of our Center's projects is this theme of applied history, the idea of kind of interrogating the role that history has played and can play in informing statecraft, informing foreign policy to look at the track record of how history gets used, how history gets understood and thought about by policymakers and by those who shape, well in particular foreign policy but just more broadly that kind of general theme of statecraft. And we think about the ways deliberate and otherwise that history gets used negatively or the ways that history gets used maybe in ways that lead to adverse outcomes. And so it's a privilege as part of this role to get to invite and host some of the leading thinkers, the leading historians who are engaging with exactly these questions and looking at the ways that you know battles over history, you know contests over narratives, dominant narratives and the ways that history can be a battleground itself have shaped policy in the past and in the present. And of course we're at a particularly interesting inflection point I would say it's fair to say in British history, the time when the ideas of history and understandings of especially imperial history, histories of slavery and race and so on are part of a particularly live debate, that kind of history is infusing a very live conversation that is in many ways characterizing public life in this country for the last few years and certainly shaping policy. And sort of trying to untangle all of that and trying to untangle the last 20 years especially sort of since Afghanistan or you know the years since the 2008 financial crash and all of the you know incredibly complex and turbulent events and trends that have shaped those years and the ways that you know some of these things and some of those tensions and some of the debates that have emerged in that context have shaped a very polarized present. It's an extremely complicated and difficult thing to do and it sort of gives me a headache to try to untangle it all. But luckily I don't have to because a very distinguished speaker has written this book which I very very highly recommend. It's an incredibly I mean incredibly I think clear and you know clear concise very beautifully written untangling of this complexity and making sense of the sort of the culture war phenomenon that we're living through in the present. So it's a great pleasure to welcome you here this evening Alan. Professor Alan Lester is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex. Probably needs no introduction to anyone in this room. I imagine you're all here because of his extraordinary reputation, his authorship of books including Imperial Networks, Colonial Lives Across the British Empire, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, a book that particularly influenced my own research, Ruling the World and then of course Deny and Disavow as well as you know many many other articles and contributions. Also his reputation and role as an increasingly important public historian and the role that Alan has played in I think demonstrating the I kind of think of Alan as a sort of masterclass and how to engage in that kind of debate and how to engage I think constructively meticulously and constructively on Twitter, engaging in debates sometimes with people who don't seem to be interested in having as productive a debate as he wants to and I kind of a masterclass in doing that in a really I think constructive respectful and dignified tone. So I've certainly learned a lot from Alan about the ways that historians can engage with these questions and the ways that we can make a positive contribution. So it's my very great pleasure to welcome Alan Lester. We're going to have a talk about 40 to 45 minutes or so. We're going to have time for questions then and I hope you'll all join us afterwards for reception. It's in the War Studies Meeting Room, the Dockroll Meeting Room actually as it's now called and so do please join us afterwards for that. Anyway without further ado, Professor Alan Lester. Thank you very much mate. Thank you. Can I just check, can you all hear me okay? It's the microphone working but my voice isn't particularly strong today so I'll hopefully be able to project through the microphone okay. I'm not sure if I can live up to that Billy but thank you very much mate, generous comments. So what I'll try and do in the next sort of 40-45 minutes is say a bit about why I think the Imperial past, the colonial past, has been politicized to the extent that it has in recent years in Britain and then towards the end I'll engage with a particularly prominent figure in the Imperial culture wars, Nigel Bigger, whom I've gathered some of you encountered recently and talk about some of the disagreements that I have with him. So the political context first, over the last few years we've seen people in the Conservative government under Boris Johnson then very briefly Liz Truss and now Rishi Sunak energised an unprecedented and to me quite disturbing culture war. Culture wars are phenomenon first defined by James Davidson Hunter in the USA in which as he puts it, politics becomes a proxy for cultural positions that simply won't book any kind of dissent or argument. It's a form of tribalism that began in the 1960s with conservative institutions resisting the advances in civil rights for women and African-Americans and the decline of religious authority. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis it reached new levels of intensity with Donald Trump's populist backlash to Barack Obama's presidency. Trump and on this side of the Atlantic Boris Johnson both proved adept at manipulating social conservative sense of existential threat leading populist movements that appeared to marginalise voters. Increasing inequalities and polarisation of politics over the last decade has provided fertile ground for both men and their parties. In the UK a buoyant post-Brexit populist wing of the Conservative Party with relentlessly visciferous supporters in the press and a handful of proponents in academia are waging their own rhetorical war on those who propose anti-racist environmental and gender-related reforms using the word woke as a sneering catchall descriptor for such people. Young people who are sensitive to these issues are dismissed as snowflakes and accused of adopting a council culture by daring to speak out. The expertise of those who research uncomfortable facts has been dismissed by the most prominent of politicians. In immediate aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests and on this side of the Atlantic the toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol in June 2020 Boris Johnson's housing secretary Robert Jenwick declared quote we will save Britain's statues from the woke militants who want to censor our past. Then the digital cultural media secretary Oliver Doudan at the time instructed Britain's leading museums galleries and heritage organisations that quote they must defend our culture and history from the noisy minority of activists constantly trying to do Britain down. Doudan's successor as culture secretary Nadine Doris was even more hard-line the Daily Mail declaring that she was promoted specifically quote to fight the woke warriors at culture. The Johnson government found willing allies in the right-wing press. In 2020 until now the Mail, Express, Telegraph, Spectator and GBTV in particular have poured out a relentless barrage of articles and editorials waging a so-called war on woke. The record of the British Empire looms large in this politicking. They rail against academics and heritage organisations seeking to provide greater public knowledge of Britain's Imperial history. They portray the National Trust's efforts to supply information about the role of slave ownership in its properties histories or key gardens attention to enslaved people's role in sugar production for instance as deliberate attempts to inculcate national shame. For historians to point out that colonisation involved the considerable application of violence or that Britain's tended to see other races as inferior is in this new political context apparently anti-British. One of Russia's many problems as the current Prime Minister is dealing with a relatively large group of former Johnson supporting conservative MPs who are still wedded to this kind of politics through culture war. Alongside their stop the boats anti-refugee rhetoric they see it as a key means of retaining so-called red wall seats gained in the 2019 get Brexit done election. They formed the common sense group of MPs who published their manifesto called common sense conservative thinking for a post-liberal age in 2021. The group's chair is Sir John Hayes he was the man to whom Sorella Braverman leaked confidential files in breach of the ministerial code which caused her resignation for all of a few days. Hayes declared quote some of what we have heard from public bodies this is about including information on slavery and colonialism has been mischievous some of it has been sinister and some of it has just been daft it needs to be stopped in its tracks end quote. The proud memory of the British Empire is sacrosanct for this influential and well-resourced lobby. Quote Britain is under attack wrote Gareth Bacon MP in the common sense agenda. Lost in a physical sense he continues but in a philosophical ideological and historical sense our heritage is under a direct assault the very sense of what it is to be British has been called into question institutions have been undermined the reputation of key figures in our country's history has been reduced reduced end quote. Now the common sense MPs admit that the history of slavery and colonialism was not always one of which to be proud but in their manifesto they try to deflect it as far as possible to the USA where Black Lives Matter began. So quoting from their manifesto claims of perceived injustice stem somewhere down the line from really injustice they admit slavery was and is inhumane as were the Jim Crow laws and segregation however they continue the ensuing civil rights movement was a tremendous achievement in writing those wrongs. Once those very real laws were abolished there was a vacuum which needed to be filled with more things to fix as a result although racism certainly does still exist the real racism expanded to encompass perceived racism too end quote. So the intent here is clearly to establish Black Lives Matter as a misplaced transplant to the UK from the USA where it belongs and even there it may once have had some justification but is now anachronistic. Whilst pandering to the Brexiteering common sense group Vice Johnson also sought to deflect the critique offered by Black Lives Matter activists by appointing the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities or CRED otherwise known as the Sewell Committee which produced the Sewell Report. The report's main intent was to deny that Britain still harbours structural racism and one of its supporting thrusts was to deflect from any critical teaching of British colonialism. Now government reports unsurprisingly are supposed to gather evidence before drawing their conclusions however Boris Johnson seems uncannily to have anticipated this Commission's eventual findings even before it was announced. I think this is a country he said that has made huge progress in tackling racism we should look sometimes at the positive stuff we've got more young Black and minority ethnic kids going to university than ever before more Black kids doing the tougher subjects at school doing better than ever before in school we don't hear enough of this positive stuff. We certainly did once the CRED Committee had produced this report. As Jonathan Portes has written quote in 35 years of both producing and consuming government reports I don't think I've ever seen one where the evidence and analysis has been so comprehensively discredited so quickly and completely. In an unusual intervention the United Nations was moved to label the reports as quote an attempt to normalise white supremacy. The main issue was that in setting out its methodology the report made it clear that any apparent racial disparities would be explained either by supposedly independent factors other than race such as geography. Geography was treated as an independent factor in its own right completely separate from race or they would be classified simply as unexplained. From the very start then the possibility that racism might be at play for instance in producing a geography of segregation in the housing market or in education for example that possibility was excluded. Portes concluded that while commissioned reports are supposed to result in evidence-based policymaking this one is better viewed as rhetoric-based evidence-making. I want to come on to talk a bit about some of the emotional investments behind this this policy because it's not all just shallow cynical short-term politicking. So I've mentioned one of the forces driving a resurgence of public denialism of the colonial past is the current government's belief that reinforcing social conservatism helps to detach northern working class voters from labour in the Redwall seats. But as Gareth Bacon's comment from the Common Sense Manifesto indicates there is clearly something much deeper underlying whatever success the strategy might be achieving. As Peter Mitchell writes at bottom there is the sense of betrayal and the anxiety of replacement generational cultural gendered and racial. This terror is at the core of a frighteningly intense emotional charge a sense never quite articulated but always present that the stakes are personal and existential. The backlash against revealing often previously hidden stories of British colonialism has come overwhelmingly from those whose self-esteem seems to be closely tied to a group identity rooted in continually re-established exclusive ideas of Britishness. Research on the psychology of denial is instructive here as Joe Kendall writes quote when presented with information about historical episodes in which their group has taken the role of perpetrator individuals are likely to experience a sense of threat to their identity in the form of guilt or shame and may intuitively seek ways in which to avoid this threat. In such scenarios defensive reactions are often employed to negate the threat. These defensive reactions include denying the accuracy of the information provided blaming the victims of acts of violence, claiming that colonial rule in our case was necessary or enacted with good intentions, focusing on the sacrifices made by those who identified as Britons in the empire and above all one that you see time and time again what aboutary pointing out the bad things that other groups have also done in the past or are doing now. According to Kendall who's done experiments psychological experiments the reaction that quote we might be bad but at least we're not as bad as them is a common one. Experiments have shown that after people have been challenged with uncomfortable historical facts about the behavior of the group that they are identified with introducing the idea that other groups were just as bad can immediately restore their sense of pride. However as Kendall notes quote defensive reactions are not always instinctive and can easily be instrumentalized by political actors looking to gain from acrimonious culture wars. Groups like History Reclaimed which I'll come on to shortly serve this purpose of finding and disseminating worse examples of perpetration carried out by other groups. One of the side effects of the competitive innocence as Kendall calls it that they help to establish is a loss of empathy though with the victims of violent acts based on the notion that perpetrators in one's own national group must somehow have been justified in acting the way they did. Now for a scholar of British colonialism witnessing the explosion of polarised and simplistic argumentation over the Empire's legacies in the last few years feels like a glimpse I imagine of what virologists and vaccinologists must have experienced as public discussion of COVID-19 exploded. As with so much of our post-Brexit politics complexity honesty and integrity in public discussions of empire have become rare commodities. Relations between Britons and Indigenous peoples varied enormously across a quarter of the Earth's land surface at the early 20th century Empire's greatest extent and over 300 years. The indulged princes and merchants of post-up rising India experienced empire very differently from the Aboriginal people of Southern Australia for instance who resisted annihilation in the early 19th century. But everywhere colonial administration rested on an everyday distinction what part of Chatterjee calls the rule of difference between the different races. Black lives tended not to matter as much as white lives in the British Empire. The historians who draw attention to the racial thinking and discriminatory practice that fundamentally underpinned the empire are now condemned by populist right-wing culture warriors. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter challenge a relatively few but very well publicized commentators have managed to twist the practicing of history as censoring, trashing or even destroying our national past. Historians along with anti-racist activists have found themselves accused of being part of this imaginary woke conspiracy against all that Britain stands for. The most professional historians of British colonialism, of whom I know many, based their research on evidence while admitting its limitations. They strive for objectivity while recognizing that it's evasive and they're driven by curiosity rather than contemporary politics by and large. They seek to mitigate the ways in which the latter inevitably shapes the former. They're far from being the Marxist stroke CRT critical race theory inspired radicals portrayed by some journalists and politicians. Their implicit distaste for unprovoked invasion and racism stems from their humanity and basic morality. It's not directed solely and vindictively as they are often accused of against the British and it's not the result of a far left political disposition in most cases. For the most part they refuse to be drawn into the culture wars polarizing binaries. In the meantime however a wider section of society is being exposed to politicized caricatures of the British Empire that do an active disservice to the public understanding of history. And I won't deny and disavow that in response to that. Talking of politicized caricatures brings me down to the next part of my talk. Nigel Bigger's culture war and his book Colonialism on Moral Reckoning. Conservative denialism has unfortunately found pockets of vocal support in academia. I'll concentrate for the rest of this talk on one of the prime exponents who's gained considerable traction. Nigel Bigger, a CBE, the former regist professor of moral and pastoral theology at the University of Oxford. And I should just say I have no personal animosity whatsoever against Professor Bigger. I've never met him. There is about to be an exchange between us published in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth history online in which he presumes that I do and that I am as politically motivated as he is. I disagree. Bigger's writings on empire have been aligned with the common sense conservative factions politics. Despite having revealed the devoted remain in the Brexit referendum, before publishing Colonialism, Bigger contributed four articles to Briefings for Britain, formerly Briefings for Brexit. This lobbying group describes itself as, quote, a small group of volunteers originally academics with a firm conviction that Brexit was about reasserting popular control over decision making in the United Kingdom. Bigger's own participation in the government backed culture war has manifested more directly though in his founding role in the history reclaimed group of conservative scholars and his links with the Allied Restore Trust group. So in August 2021 a group of scholars including Robert Tombs who was appointed by Boris Johnson to a new Heritage Advisory Board to try and stop statues being taken down. Nile Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and Nigel Bigger banded together to create the history reclaimed project which is now a private company. According to the Daily Mail the group was established to battle Black Lives Matters quote, woke war on our great leaders. It's now, Bigger's new book Colonialism is really the culmination of the history reclaimed project. It contains many of the stock defences of empire and attacks on supposedly woke activists and academics that feature on the group's website. Restore Trust is a private, another private company whose mission is to reverse the National Trust's efforts to tell the full history of their properties. Its members were incensed especially by the National Trust's publication of a report authored by Corinne Fowler and others which highlighted the role of slave trading, slave ownership and colonial exploitation in its property-only source of wealth. Restore Trust has tried to get its candidates elected to the National Trust Council in order to reverse its moves towards greater inclusivity. Two of its candidates for the 2022 National Trust Council elections, Zuriya Masani and Jeremy Black, are also members of history reclaimed. Both groups are regularly backed by the Telegraph. He expressed the male and the spectator. The male in particular prompted the abusive trolling of Corinne Fowler while complaining ironically about council culture. Although Restore Trust has been obtuse about its funding sources there are indications that it's part of a network of conservative think tanks and lobbying groups associated with the premises at 55 Tufton Street in London. One of the six people in Restore Trust's Meet the Team webpage is Neil Record, a billionaire former currency risk manager and conservative donor who backed the Institute of Economic Affairs. That was the think tank which encouraged Liz Truss's disastrous mini budget in 2022. Record also chairs the Global Warming Policy Forum which is skeptical of human induced climate change. Bega featured in a piece in the mail aligning himself with Restore Trust and declaring that quote the National Trust has shot itself in the foot by publishing the report on slavery and colonialism. He continued, it has really got a lot of its members annoyed. I am one of them. He went on to ask what motivates people like Professor Fowler to apparently see racism everywhere even when it isn't there. So now I want to come on to the book. So in recent weeks, Bigger's new book on the British Empire colonialism or moral reckoning has become a bestseller listed at number 10 in the Sunday Times non-fiction sales list and topping Amazon's lists in a number of subcategories. Just like a scholarly monograph it has extensive ennegrote end notes rather stretching over 130 pages and a bibliography of 30 pages. It appears to be a rigorously researched account of colonial practices as well as an analysis of the ethics of those practices. It's received glowing reviews in the Sunday Times, Telegraph and Spectator not to mention other more niche right-wing leaning outlets. Already it's being used by right-wing deniers as their I told you so resource, their point of reference when arguing about what the Empire was really like despite what local people tell you. Amazon reviewers for example have titled their reviews quote imperious, brilliant historical research and at last a competent book on the subject. Colonialism the book begins with the story of its author's persecution at the hands of us domineering anti-colonial academics and activists. Historians of colonialism have according to Bigger combined with unruly anti-racist students to put the British Empire on trial. We have found it guilty without even properly analyzing the evidence. Why? Variously because we see quote anti-colonialism as fashionable opening doors to posts, promotions and grants or because we are brainwashed by Franz Fanon's quotes preference for barbarous vitality and irresponsibility over civilized reason and restraint or even because quote our degenerate Christian sensibility which allows us to focus exclusively on our own sins. I think I can at least disown that one. Worst in our motivations however is the effect of our work. Academic post-colonialism we are told quoting here is an ally no doubt inadvertent of Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia and the Chinese Communist Party which are determined to expand their own respectively authoritarian and totalitarian power at the expense of the West. Our studies of empire are apparently indicative of the moral decadence that always triggers the collapse of dominant powers. Bigger writes what is at stake in our writing of history is the very integrity of the United Kingdom and the security of the West end quote. So colonialism was written not just to set the historical record straight but to save a self-critical West from itself. It doesn't seem to have occurred to Bigger that arguing for the ethical justification of invasion and occupation of other lands might reinforce Putin's project a bit more directly than academic inquiry into colonial history and nor does it seem to have struck in that Putin's main allies and supporters in the West tend to be on the right fringes of politics rather than the woke. In many ways Bigger's tone that the writing of history is a vital part of Western morale echoes a body of literature that's produced by historians towards the end of the Second World War and in the immediate period of decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s and some of these historians are actually cited by Bigger including Frankel and Gannon Diagon. But they were writing in the context of the decline of fragmentation of the British Empire and the rise of a new binary world order between the U.S. dominated Western and Soviet dominated bloc to the east and vying for the loyalty and for the alignment of newly independent former colonies which it was felt would either fall into one camp or the other or strike out on an independent so-called third world path. Gannon Diagon and Frankel for instance were part of a neoliberal clique which began to write histories of the empire as a civilising project updated for the 20th century as a developmental project arguing that these newly independent African and Asian governments should owe their loyalty in the new binary world order to the west because of the developmental gains that colonialism had brought. So this was a kind of an early writing of Bigger's late 20 or early 21st century script. His context then is not just cultural it's also cold war with the new enemies of Putin and assertive China replacing the Soviet bloc of that earlier tradition. Despite Bigger's strawman caricature professional historians tend not to focus solely on the costs of colonialism while denying its benefits which is what he alleges. What we tend to have done in thousands of publications completely ignored by Bigger is specify benefits for whom appreciating that they were not universal. There are library shelves full of monographs on how for example Indian merchants and princes worked alongside British officials and businessmen to enhance their status and wealth and how sometimes fragile colonial administrations relied on negotiation and compromise with indigenous elites. There's reams of work on the emotional and effective ties that transcended racial boundaries we don't just speak in binary terms of race as colonial historians. There's also an enormous body of work on the developmental schemes that that earlier generation of neoliberal historians and Bigger tried to focus attention on on colonial schooling on agricultural and public health initiatives which tended to come late on in the later stages of imperialism and in response to nationalist demands from indigenous elites. When um so when Twitter trolls send me images for example of British sailors rescuing enslaved Africans from other nations slave ships after 1807 to point out the benevolent nature of British colonialism it doesn't actually come as that much of a surprise to me because myself and many other historians have written plenty about the so-called liberated Africans and their faces recaptured as society's unpaid labor to set this in colonies elsewhere. Much too big as annoyance we seek also to tell the stories though of those who experienced trauma and loss through the British takeover of their lands and assumption of sovereignty. We don't tend to shy away from the millions who died in British wars of expansion and the great famines that colonial governments did little to mitigate and we acknowledge the fact that colonialism guaranteed a readily exploitable labor supply to British settlers, planters and industrialists. We tend to recognize that racially organized hierarchies of wealth status and power were the norm maintained in most colonies most of the time. It should come as no surprise to anyone really to learn that benefits for some came at the expense of others. So as I mentioned before professional historians tend to write with an ethical code in mind one that we were taught in our undergraduate and postgraduate training I was actually trained as an historical geographer but it was still the same kind of meticulous attention to an ethics of research. We are of course influenced by our individual dispositions and politics but we try our best to set these aside and to develop our arguments through finding and reading all the relevant evidence. We tend to be curiosity as I've mentioned rather than politically driven we're interested in explaining phenomena not allocating collective virtue or blame that seems to be a redundant exercise for most historians. When we select quotations from a source we try to set them in the context of that source's overall stance rather than cherry picking from it to substantiate a predetermined argument. When we come across evidence that contradicts our general interpretation we either try to explain the discrepancy or we modify the interpretation. We read widely to try to take account of the work that other scholars have done on our topic and we're grateful for their efforts. In essence we try even if we don't always succeed to avoid writing tendentiously. Now let me come to Nigel Bigger's colonialism. This is littered with examples of what many of us would see as the most egregious misuse of sources. There's no space for me now, no time for me now to list all of the examples I've uncovered so I'll go through a few until I realise time's up actually and then draw to a conclusion. So to give one example, Bigger quotes the Canadian mate leader Louis Riel who gave a speech at his trial for treason. The fact that he was on trial for treason should give you a clue about how he felt about the colonial authorities. In 1885, Bigger suggests using this extract from Riel's speech that Riel recognised the right of British settlers to take matey and First Nations land that he saw at least the cogency of an argument that because they weren't using it productively others had the right to take it and use it more productively. The extract he uses from Riel's speech to the jury is this it's fairly long so bear with me please. British civilisation has the means of improving life the Indians or half-breeds have not so when they come into our savage country in our uncultivated land they come and help us with their civilisation but we helped them with our lands so the question comes your land you Cree or you half-breed your land is worth today one seventh of what it will be when the civilisation will have opened it. Your country unopened is worth to you only one seventh of what it will be when opened. I think it's a fair share to acknowledge the genius of civilisation to such an extent as to give when I have seven pairs of socks six to keep one so he uses that extract to suggest that Riel identified with this argument that because the matey were not using their land productively British settlers had the right to take six sevenths of it however bigger omits crucial sentences before and after this extract which drastically alter its meaning Riel led up to the extractive portion of this speech by saying quote when the British have crowded their country because they had no room to stay anymore at home it does not give them the right to come and take the share of all the tribes besides them in principle then he was saying that settlers were not in titles any of the land. Riel proceeded to note that at least the colonial the Canadian colonial government had agreed a treaty which nominally allocated one seventh of the land to the matey and released six sevenths for settlers hence this this fraction that was quoting Riel's extract. In bigger selected extracts Riel was actually paraphrasing that argument of the government not endorsing it and not vocalising it himself it was paraphrasing paraphrasing the government's rationale that seizing six sevenths was in exchange for the civilisation that British settlement brought. His point in paraphrasing it though was to say that even this nominal allocation of one seventh left for the matey has not been observed in practice. Bigger omits the next bit of Riel's speech he went on after that paraphrasing to say they made this treaty with us as they made the treaty they have to observe it and did they observe it no. So intentionally or not this may have been unintentional because bigger takes this source from another right-wing culture warrior in Canada and obviously didn't check the original source. Intentionally or not bigger uses a cherry picked extract to suggest that Riel recognised the right of settlers to take matey land when he was arguing precisely the opposite. The second example bigger consistently presents African people in my view and when I was writing the review for the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History I had to change the wording slightly it presents African people in my view as unfit to govern themselves as requiring British rule for their own sakes even to the extent of repeating slave owners original arguments against emancipation. He writes can we be sure that descendants of enslaved people would have been better off had their ancestors remained in West Africa some as slaves and sacrificial funeral fodder end quote. Bigger's methods of establishing the necessity for British rule in Africa include frequent seemingly innocuous asides which have the cumulative effect of reinforcing tropes of African savagery. Human sacrifice seems to be his favourite. He states that quote it continued to be a part of royal funeral ceremonies in the Gold Coast as late as 1944. However there's no evidence to support this claim what bigger's referring to was a singular and bizarre case of suspected murder that was discussed in Britain. Three suspects were hanged in the absence of a body but the sentencing was delayed by protests that no murder had been committed. And there were other isolated instances of murder some of which has been classified as medicinal or ritual but nothing like a pattern which would enable the statement of bigger's that they continued to be part of royal funeral ceremonies in the Gold Coast as late as 1944. So bigger converts an isolated incident that the historian Richard Rathbone notes may or may not have taken place in Southern Ghana on 28th of February 1944 into a barbaric cultural practice that justified continued British rule. A third example I'll make this the last example in his attempt to defend Cecil Rhodes bigger disputes three racist quotes attributed to the mining magnate and politician. Although all could be discussed further I'll focus on just the first. Bigger writes that in a 2006 book of views is quoting now that Ikea Adebarjo sought to substantiate Rhodes's alleged racism and genocidal intent by reporting him as saying quote I prefer land to the n-word. Appearance is however deceived bigger continues for Adebarjo had admitted to tell his readers that the quotation had been lifted from a novel by Olive Shriner it is fiction. Bigger later repeats quote the only documentary source is Shriner's 1897 novel where the words are spoken by a character that looks like Rhodes and again he says it is fiction. Well bigger is just plain wrong a little research would have alerted him that the quote is not fiction there's plenty of documentary evidence for it in sources including The Manchester Guardian, The Journal, The Illustrated London News and The Palmao Gazette. Rhodes even clarified that quote what he meant was that where there was a land bereft of natives and another swarming with natives he preferred the former because he considered the latter not to be the advantage of South Africa end quote. To add insult to the injury that Bigger inflicts on Adebarjo, Bigger's own book Colonialism frequently uses fiction rather than historical evidence of sources including and I haven't made this up a reference to what a character in the TV drama The West Wing says endorsing Bigger's point of view so I'll skip the further examples if you want to see them they'll be in this extended review in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History online soon and I'll come to some more general points about Bigger's book aside from the specific instances of misuse of sources thematic distortions and then I'll conclude aside from a dubious approach to sources there are further systematic flaws in Bigger's approach whereas other empires grew through conquest and invasion there's a strange lack of violence in his version of how the British Empire came about so he gives a kind of quick run through of how the empire expanded at the beginning of the book he doesn't actually come back very often to elaborate on on these incidents so he writes for example from 1757 for 100 years the East India Company came to rule vast swathes of Indian territory the British acquired Hong Kong by treaty with imperial China in 1842 in West Africa British influence grew along the coast and then into the interior the facts that many Indian states were conquered in battle some by the future Duke of Wellington as is very well known that the treaty ceding Hong Kong to Britain was signed only after China's defeat in the first opium war which bigger himself later admits was unjustified the only full-scale colonial war that was unjustified according to him and the fact that West African rulers were overthrown for a combination of armed force and deceit have no place in Bigger's explanation of how an empire seemed to just land in Britain's lap Bigger's claim that quote for the second half of its life anti-slavery not slavery was at the heart of imperial policy is simply absurd the post-emancipation anti-slavery lobby was real and as many historians have explained including myself it sought to influence colonial policy sometimes when it could mobilize public opinion sufficiently it succeeded so it was a political lobby and it did have some salience contingently but to claim that anti-slavery generally outweighed commercial strategic and private British interests and to infer that it was anti-slavery that prompted the over 60 colonial wars which Bigger neglects to mention during the period is ludicrously misleading to believe it is to accept that Britain's operated on some unique moral plane untouched by any other group in history the most problematic feature of all though is the books treatment of race Bigger does not see himself or the liberal imperialists whom he defends as racist because they do not believe that black or brown peoples are biologically inferior to white people they simply quote observe that these people's cultures were backwards compared to that of the British and other Europeans by Bigger's definition the attribution of quote cultural inferiority to a lack of development rather than biological nature end quote is not racist nor is his use of the word natives to describe all the diverse and multifarious peoples colonized by Britain's asserting a biological distinction as I probably don't need to tell anyone in this room may not be the only way of being racist however Oxford languages define defines racism as quote the belief that different races possess distinct characteristics abilities or qualities especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another simply substituting the word cultures for races in this definition which it seems to me is what Bigger does does little to change the dynamic Bigger's argument is that deployed by most British colonial officials from the early 19th century that while exceptional indigenous individuals might learn the benefits of British civilization rapidly most were so culturally backward that it would take generations for them to develop when colonized people showed evidence of their learning British ways and sorts of inclusion however as many did from the late 19th century onwards white people still maintained an exclusive right to govern with just a few concessions to local or advisory roles towards the end of empire this fact does not feature in Bigger's account and neither does the possibility that people of any culture stroke race might access technologies without being conquered dispossessed and subjected to racially hierarchical alien rule. Historian Michael Taylor sums up the general colonial situation well when he quotes the British planter and to quote preeminence and distinction are necessarily attached to the complexion of a white man. Failing to acknowledge everyday colonial racism seems to me like examining Nazi Germany without the anti-Semitism or modern Russia without the communism. Racism was a common-sense belief system that fundamentally underpinned the British empire and it's deeply concerning to me at least that there's now such an appetite to deny this with semantic differences between race and culture. Bigger's excuse for his lack of primary research or knowledge of the literature is that he's not an historian and he's not writing a history book but an analysis of ethics however he has to acknowledge that his ethical case relies on to quote him judging by what we have seen of the British case. Well what we have seen what he bases his ethical judgment on is a distorted and partial account determined from the start by the intention to excuse rather than to analyse. It seems that the only way one can defend the ethics of colonialism is to write unethically I think. It's just too tempting to turn Bigger's own words against his book to quote him of the woke. This unscrupulous indifference to historical truth indicates that the controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It's about the present not the past end quote. Okay I'll leave it there I was going to say a bit more about the politics of engaging with Bigger but I think that may come up in in discussion so I'll leave it there for now. Thanks.