The Truth About Empire They Don’t Want You To Hear - Oxford Prof Nigel Biggar
3 Things I Learned + Bonus Video
Nigel Biggar is a professor of ethics and a priest who spent six years running a research project at Oxford examining the moral record of the British Empire - and was nearly destroyed for it.
When a Cambridge academic tweeted “we need to SHUT THIS DOWN” about his work, three mass petitions followed, his co-author resigned under pressure, and a major publisher cancelled his book two and a half months into copy-editing, citing “unfavourable public feelings.”
In this conversation, Biggar makes the case that Britain’s obsession with imperial guilt is historically unique, deliberately selective, and politically motivated - and that the people driving it are less interested in solving racial disadvantage than in building careers and movements around the crusade itself.
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3 Things I Learned:
1. Empire was universal - the guilt is not. Every civilisation in history practised empire: the Comanche in 18th-century America, the Maori in New Zealand, the Fulani in Nigeria. Ancient Chinese and medieval Arab scholars did not write critiques of empire because it was so unremarkable as a form of political organisation. The obsessive focus on British imperial guilt, Biggar argues, is a recent and unique phenomenon - and one that is being deliberately manufactured rather than naturally felt.
2. Britain traded 3.2 million enslaved Africans. Arabs traded 9.5 million. Africans traded 12.5 million across the Indian Ocean. A book by a left-wing author called Unbroken Chains estimates at least 40 million Africans were enslaved and traded in total. Britain’s share was 3.258 million - nothing to be proud of, Biggar says, but a fraction of the whole picture. In 1850, in what is now northern Nigeria, the Fulani ran slave plantations employing 4 million people at one time - equivalent to the entire slave population of the United States. The African Union is now seeking reparations from Britain while this history goes unacknowledged.
3. The people pushing the anti-racist crusade may not actually want to solve the problem. When the government-commissioned Sewell Report on race and ethnic disparity was published in 2021 - with nine out of ten commissioners being non-white - the progressive response was instant dismissal with no serious engagement. Biggar’s conclusion: if you genuinely wanted to address racial disadvantage, you would engage carefully with the best available evidence. The knee-jerk rejection suggests the goal is not solving the problem but sustaining the crusade - because careers, social circles and movements have been built around it.
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