Recent years have seen ferocious battles about ‘empire’: statues toppled, books cancelled, scholars infuriated, insults hurled. What is going on and, more importantly, why? What is it about our cultural moment that has caused so many people to get so angry about the past? And what has this all got to do with the Byzantine empire? In the latest of his longreads on the big ideas of our time, Nick Spencer looks at the empire wars and finds a guide to the future in our distant past. 20/08/2025
When empires fall
In 628, the Roman empire was jubilant. Having long been the dominant civilising force in the known world, at least as they saw it, recent decades had seen them face a serious rival in the east. They were forced into a defensive position and feared for the future. In a surprisingly short period of time, however, that evil empire had crumbled and was now disintegrating. Hence the jubilation.
The moment of triumph was short–lived. Within a very short period of time a new, unforeseen and hostile force had appeared on the empire’s southeastern border, and within a few decades, it was threatening the imperial capital. The effect was shattering. Euphoria turned to disarray and soul–searching. How, and why, had this happened?
This being earlier, more primitive times, the answer was obvious. It was God. “These people came by God’s command”, wrote the monk John bar Penkaye in his Book of Main Points. “The Lord in his wrath… will stir up kings and mighty armies… [and] nations will be subjected before the marauding people”, bellowed a homily attributed to Ephrem the Syrian but in fact delivered in the 640s, as the Arab armies marched through Palestine. Everything could be explained as divine punishment or, at least, divine permission. “God has given dominion over the world at this time [to] these Nomads”, wrote Isho‘yahb III, the most senior figure in the Church of the East in the 650s. Either way, it was no surprise that there was an intense apocalyptic smell in the air, and that writer after writer claimed they were living at the end of history. Warfare and earthquakes and catastrophic climate events and pandemics were clearly a sign that, as (Pseudo–) Ephrem the Syrian lamented, “the end–times have arrived.”
Such explanations, it is fair to say, are not popular with historians today. ‘God did it’ is not a safe answer to any exam question about the decline and fall of the Roman empire. “In old times,” wrote the historian Peter Turchin in a book applying data sets to explain political disintegration in the 21st century, “such major calamities [such as an epidemic or invasion] were taken as a sign that God had turned away from the ruler, or that Heaven had withdrawn its Mandate. Today, we tend to think in more materialistic terms, blaming the government for dysfunction and failure to take effective steps to stop the epidemic.”
The manner in which historians of late antiquity (and, indeed, many other times) invoked divine judgment as a decisive factor in history is one of the things that marks them off from us, wiser, moderns. Whereas we invoke political corruption, elite overproduction, economic stagnation, social inequality or, increasingly, environmental pressure to explain the rise and fall of great powers, our ancient forbears steamrollered this complex historical landscape under the mysterious machine of divine intervention. When historians today explain the fall of European empires in the 20th century, or the impending decline of the American one in the 21st, they rarely deploy the language of theology.
The new age of empire
Recent popular interest in empire tracks a parabola. In the 19th century, at least according to Google’s Ngram viewer, discussion of “empire” and “imperial” was common. It fell steadily through the 20th century, hitting a low point in the decades after European decolonisation, but began to rise again in the 1990s and is now at its former height.
Professional historical interest tracks a similar path. The historiography of British imperialism (and presumably that of other European empires) was once essentially practical, mining the past for insights that might “inform and inspire contemporaries to shoulder their obligations as rulers.” As European empires vanished, so did the need for imperial instruction.
Some argued that this made the discipline ripe for dispassionate evaluation. The editor–in–chief of the five–volume Oxford History of the British Empire, published in 1988–89, remarked in his preface to the series, “the passions aroused by British imperialism have so lessened that we are now better placed than ever before to see the course of the Empire steadily and to see it whole”. Others doubted whether the discipline had any future at all. Under the title, ‘Can Humpty‐Dumpty be put together again?’ the historian David Fieldhouse published in influential article lamenting how British imperial history had disintegrated as a distinct and coherent field of study. Either way, there was little sense that imperial history was about to explode.
As it happens, the fuse had already been lit. From the 1970s, academic disciplines like anthropology, and feminist, cultural, and literary studies entered the mix, and in 1978 Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism was published, helping to popularise the discipline of post–colonial studies. A new perspective, and with it new and often opaque concepts and vocabulary, at first bewildered and then seemed to revitalise the field.
What really transformed it, however, was the emergence of an American imperial mindset around the turn of the millennium. Having seen off the evil empire in the east, America was the world’s only remaining superpower – a “hyperpower” according to the French philosopher and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hubert Vedrine – with the capacity to remake the world in its image. “What’s the point of being the greatest, most powerful nation in the world and not having an imperial role?” asked the neoconservative thinker Irving Kristol, somewhat rhetorically, in 2000.
Accordingly, the 90–page report Rebuilding America’s Defences, published in 2000 by the neo–conservative think tank The Project for the New America Century, argued that US military forces needed not only to defend the American homeland (the report’s title was somewhat misleading) but to fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major wars and to perform “constabulary” duties across the world. That meant, among many other things, moving on from “a decade of defence neglect” by increasing military spending “to preserve American geopolitical leadership”, and by repudiating those treaty commitments and international obligations that might prevent America from acting “as the world’s sole superpower and the final guarantee of security, democratic freedoms and individual political rights.” It was, in effect, a blueprint for a new Pax Americana, which is what many called it.
George W. Bush had repudiated the label of “empire” during his election campaign – it had never been a positive concept in America’s psychology for obvious reasons – but when an unforeseen and hostile force committed mass atrocities on American soil on 9/11, it was not only Bush and the neo–cons who embraced an imperial role for America. “America’s empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man’s burden,” wrote Michael Ignatieff in the New York Times. “The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy.”
The ensuing invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq displayed American imperial might at its mightiest, even if it failed to deliver on the promise of free markets, human rights and democracy. Imperial history was suddenly highly relevant. The National War College in Washington DC began offering its students study programmes on empires. Books and TV programmes on the topic, such as Niall Fergusson’s Colossus (on the American empire) and Empire (on the British), were salient and popular.
A decade later, it was the UK’s turn. The Brexit referendum kindled a ferocious debate about Britain’s past and future role in the world. In amongst the ensuing noise, there was much discussion about the purpose and potential of the Commonwealth and the Anglosphere, and the UK’s role in creating, nurturing and reinvigorated both. Jacob Rees–Mogg indulged in imperial nostalgia as he championed the Victorian Titans in his book of the same name, while then Foreign Secretary turned Prime Minister Boris Johnson struck a defiantly imperial tone in his pronouncements.
A few years later, Putin invaded Ukraine in his longstanding desire to recapture a “Greater Russia”, Xi Jinping said that the issue of Taiwan, part of “China’s sacred territory”, could no longer be passed from generation to generation, and Donald Trump claimed a right to determine the future of Greenland, the Panama Canal, and Gaza, while declaring, in his inaugural address, that America would now “once again consider itself a growing nation — one that increases our wealth, expands our territory”. Empire was everywhere.
Crucially, however, it wasn’t just the story of empire – its objectives, strategy, and implementation – that was back. So was the question of its morality. This had never not been important, of course. When the popular historian Lawrence James published his Rise and Fall of the British Empire in 1994, his book had no chapter, and rarely any page, that was free from some morally significant detail. But James felt no obvious need to offer any form of moral adjudication and chose to “sidestep the quagmire of post–imperial guilt” and “avoid… joining in those battles between armies of the night who contend over the rights and wrongs of empires”.
There is a powerful logic to this. Almost everyone who writes on empire acknowledges that the term is sprawling and vague and possessed of almost no analytical rigour. Empire is “a pervasive but elusive” historical term, wrote historian Dale Kennedy in The Imperial History Wars. The “sheer variety of past polities that have been characterized as empires frustrates efforts to formulate a definition or typology that applies to all cases.”
Early on his book Empireland, as he is educating himself about the nature of empire, Sathnam Sanghera says more or less the same thing about the British empire (all in bold, which I shall spare the reader here): “Britain’s relationship with its colonies varied across the globe and over time… The culture and tone of empire varied wildly during its history… Empire was never unanimous… There was no clear motivation for the establishment and development of empire.”
That being so, offering a moral evaluation of (an) empire is a fool’s errand, and one would have thought the genre might have died a natural death. A cursory glance at the relevant shelf or table in any bookshop soon disabuses the reader of such hopes. Moreover, not only is moral evaluation of the (British) empire a flourishing genre, but it is one that has already come to a strong and clear conclusion. The selection of books in my local Waterstones – Caroline Elkin’s Legacy of Violence, Said’s Orientalism, James Walvin’s Britain’s Slave Empire, David Veevers’ How the world took on the British Empire, Akala’s book on Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, Shashi Tharoor on Britain’s Inglorious Empire, William Dalrymple on the East India Company, Kojo Koram on the “little known and shocking history of how Britain treated its former non–white colonies after the end of empire” – is highly instructive.
If, as the former high court judge Jonathan Sumption wrote in his review of Nigel Biggar’s book Colonialism, “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,” recent publishing history suggests that the British Empire is an exception to this rule.
The serious shit of ethics and empire
Into this atmosphere, Nigel Biggar, then Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, launched a project, in 2017, entitled ‘Ethics and Empire’. Biggar had recently “offered a qualified defence” of the arch–imperialist Cecil Rhodes, and had referred approvingly, in a Times column, to an article by the political scientist Bruce Gilley entitled ‘The Case for Colonialism’. His project was intended “to develop a nuanced and historically intelligent Christian ethic of empire” – the Christian element was, significantly, subsequently dropped – in order to “enable a morally sophisticated negotiation of contemporary issues such as military intervention for humanitarian purposes in culturally foreign states, the cohesion of multicultural societies, and settling imperial pasts.”
The response was not immediately encouraging. “OMG, this is serious shit. [John] Darwin [former Professor of Global and Imperial History at Oxford and, at the time, co–leader of the project] is an old imperial apologist of a sophisticated sort, of course,” tweeted Cambridge University’s Priyamvada Gopal. “We need to SHUT THIS DOWN,” she continued. Other responses were equally hostile, if less vigorous. “Professor Biggar has every right to hold and to express whatever views he chooses or finds compelling, and to conduct whatever research he chooses in the way he feels appropriate”, began an open letter signed by 58 academics, before going on to imply in more words what Gopal had stated in six. “But his views on this question, which have been widely publicised at the Oxford Union, as well as in national newspapers, risk being misconstrued as representative of Oxford scholarship.” Presumably Professor Biggar had the right to express his views in the way he feels appropriate just so long as it wasn’t in print or in public debate.
Their attack, on a project that had yet to begin, was comprehensive. Biggar’s project “asks the wrong questions, using the wrong terms, and for the wrong purposes”. Historical scholarship should inform public debate but not “through simple–minded equations between ‘pride’ and swaggering global confidence, or between ‘shame’ and meek withdrawal.” The project was taking aim at a caricature (“imperialism is wicked”). The terms good and evil, the epistolarians claimed, “are useless to historians”. “We welcome continued, open, critical engagement in the ongoing reassessment of the histories of empire and their legacies both in Britain and elsewhere in the world,” the signatories ended unconvincingly – “just not this kind” they didn’t add. A second letter, a few days later, now signed by about 200 academics from around the world, requested Oxford withdraw its support from the project.
Oxford’s Centre for Global History duly announced that it was not involved with the project. Junior academics who had been hoping to work on it approached Biggar in private, apologised and withdrew, saying that to do otherwise would have been career suicide. John Darwin stepped down. Others resigned from the advisory council. The project was delayed. Biggar persisted, the project finally got underway, and six years later he published his own book on the British empire, entitled Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning.
Its path to publication was no more straightforward than the project’s had been. A Bloomsbury editor, Robin Baird–Smith, had suggested the book in 2018, and wrote to Biggar three years later, once the manuscript had been delivered, telling him how much he admired it. Two months after that, however, Biggar received an e–mail from the head of special–interest publishing at Bloomsbury telling him that they had decided to postpone publication (indefinitely) because “we are of the view that conditions are not currently favorable to publication”. When pressed what this meant, they responded that they felt “that public feeling on the subject does not currently support the publication of the book.” When pressed further on which public feeling, in what sense was is ‘unfavourable’, and what would need to change to make it favourable again, Bloomsbury responded that they “find this very difficult to define objectively rather than subjectively” and “released” Biggar from his contract. William Collins quickly picked up the book, which was published in 2023. To date it has sold 60,000 copies. Baird–Smith was subsequently eased out of Bloomsbury.
A moral reckoning of a moral reckoning
Given this messy and difficult birth, it was hardly a surprise that the book received mixed reviews. The commendations were glowing, as commendations are. (Or usually are: it’s a real shame more authors don’t take a leaf from the literary critic, John Carey, who, on the paperback cover of his book What Good are the Arts?, quoted the novelist Jeannette Winterson, who called it “Idiotic”, and the art critic Mattew Collings, who described it as “Taxi driver bollocks.”) Professors Vernon Bogdanor, Niall Fergusson, C.R. Hallpike, Krishan Kumar, Andrew Roberts and Tirthankar Roy called the book “scrupulous”, “fair–minded”, “exemplary”.
Press reviews were somewhat more negative. Those that commended it did so for its balance. “Biggar acknowledges wickedness in our nation but his version of history calls us to accept the messiness and moral compromises inherent in liberalism,” wrote Trevor Philips in the Sunday Times, while in the (weekday) Times, historian of post–independence India, Pratinav Anil, called it “a salutary corrective to a clutch of recent ‘decolonial’ histories of empire, brimming with hyperbolic claims of racism and genocide”.
Others, however, tended more towards the Winterson/Collings end of the spectrum, reckoning that there should have been better reckoning with racism and genocide in Biggar’s moral reckoning. The postscript of the paperback edition responded to ten of those reviews, ranging from the loosely critical to the relentlessly hostile. None of them was quite “taxi driver bollocks”, but those towards the end were not far from it.
Evaluating these verdicts and offering a reckoning on a reckoning is far from straightforward. Some things can be said with certainty. Colonialism is more impressive than many of Biggar’s critics allow. The book is clearly scholarly, with over 130 pages of footnotes and a 30–page bibliography. It eschews bombast or jingoism. The idea that it is a straightforward defence of empire is ludicrous, as is the idea that Biggar is deaf to its sins. He is, for example, clear–eyed about the grotesque inhumanity of the slave trade and he begins his conclusion with a list of the evils, both intended and unintended, of British colonialism, citing in addition to slavery, the spread of devastating disease, economic and social disruption, displacement of natives, failures of colonial government to prevent settler abuse and famine, racial alienation and racist contempt, policies of wholesale cultural suppression, miscarriages of justice, unjustifiable military aggression, the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force, and “the failure to admit native talent to the higher echelons of colonial government on terms of equality quickly enough to forestall the build–up of nationalist resentment”. All these evils, he concludes, are lamentable and “where culpable, they merit moral condemnation”.
This is, one would have thought, a list to satisfy even the fiercest critic of the British empire, but the problem (for such critics at least) was that Biggar also made a strong case for the good that the British empire delivered. Later on in the book’s conclusion, he credits to the empire the abolition of, and subsequent attempt to suppress, the slave trade; the promotion of a worldwide free market; the creation of regional peace by means of imperial authority; the representation of native peoples “in the lower levels of government”; attempts “to relieve the plight of the rural poor and protect them against rapacious landlords”; a civil service and judiciary “that was generally and extraordinarily incorrupt”; the development of public infrastructure, albeit usually through private investment’; the dissemination of “modern agricultural methods and medicine”; and resistance against fascism.
In as far as I am in a position to judge, this seems to me to be a reasonably balanced assessment. That said, I am unclear about the vantage point from which Biggar takes his moral reckoning. “We should not expect sainthood of any state, imperial or national, any more than we should expect it of ourselves,” he says towards the end of the book. “What we may expect is moral learning, repentance and improvement… what Margery Perham called a ‘progression in virtue’ … [which] is what I think we find in the British Empire”.
I am not entirely persuaded that that is in fact what we find in the British Empire. Other accounts I have read repeatedly claim that there was in fact a hardening of racist views over the duration of the empire, as the 18th century mixture of greed, self–interest, expediency and curiosity gave way to an evangelical humanitarianism which was itself superseded by more formalised categorisations and stratification of colonised people in the 19th, based on ‘racial science’.
More substantively, I also wonder whether Biggar sets the bar too low. This is where Biggar’s dropping of “Christian” from his original project is telling. The epithet would no doubt have done him no favours among his critics, but it would have been a clear statement of his moral vantage point, a vantage point that was conspicuously high and challenging. The biblical authors are consistently hostile to the idea of empire, the minor exception being Cyrus the Persian emperor who allows the Israelites back from exile. Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Rome repeatedly symbolise indifference to and/or coercion of the human person. Christ’s example and teaching (more or less) totally forbid the use of force, and Paul’s treatment of it is highly restrictive. Most Christian ethicists have rejected the use of force as a means of improving the world (as opposed to restraining evil). From this point of view, it doesn’t seem that unreasonable to expect a kind of “sainthood” from the British empire, not least as that empire repeatedly justified its actions on Christian moral grounds (at least in the 19th century). There is a danger that Biggar is too willing to acquit certain imperial actions on the basis of realpolitik, of having to engaging with the world as it is.
Let me give an example of this, not least because Biggar is himself admirably precise in his arguments. In his discussion of Kenan Malik’s criticism of him for exculpating the empire for the “‘savage punishment” of blowing rebels from the mouths of cannon” during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, Biggar writes: “I do not exculpate; I mitigate. However brutal, the practice was not peculiarly colonial: it was Mughal before it was British.” He goes on to insist that the use of “violence can be morally justified”, citing Ukraine’s defence again Russia in evidence, and then says, “I observe that those blown from cannons in 1857 had been judged guilty; that unlike forms of execution practised elsewhere at the time – for example, the Qing empire’s ‘death by a thousand cuts’ – the killing was mercifully instant, not cruelly protracted; and that the rationale was deterrence, not sadism.” This is not an incoherent defence, but it is hard to see how the Mughal practice of firing criminals from cannons or the Qing empire’s torture of ‘death by a thousand cuts’ would be in any way relevant to a moral reckoning of empire if that reckoning adopted an explicitly Christian vantage point. There is no conceivable justification for such punishment anywhere in Christian thought; the exercise of it (or things like it) in other empires is irrelevant.
This judgement on Biggar’s overall moral vantage points is contestable, of course, as indeed are many of the crimes and benefits that might be laid at the empire’s door. That, however, is the nature of history: evidence–based and reasoned disagreement about the motivations, objectives, actions, and consequences of men and women, and the groups and institutions they form. To expect agreement, especially about a phenomenon as long–lasting, vague and complex as empire is fantastical. Historians and moral philosophers should be disagreeing about these things.
And so it is that, well–argued as Biggar’s book is, it is actually the strength – the passion, the anger, the sense of “OMG, this is serious shit” – of the response, of the disagreement, it provoked that makes it such a significant cultural artefact, one worth considering as we “read our times”. That passion, that anger is highly instructive and can, I think, be helpfully analysed through the lens with which this essay started.
Back to Byzantium
We do Byzantine chroniclers, historians, and theologians a disservice if we think they imagined that “God did it” (or “God allowed it”) was really an explanation for the rise of Islam and the near collapse of their empire. The God of that empire had long been the God of the Hebrew Prophets, who judged the nations according to justice. He was a God who, it was claimed, was both good and trustworthy, rather than malign, arbitrary or indifferent.
In reality, “God did it” was a cipher for a more complex set of explanations that integrated human agency. “On account of our sins they have now unexpectedly risen up against us”, wrote Sophronius of Jerusalem in a Synodical Letter in 634, as Arab armies took his city. It was because of “our countless … grievous offences”, he repeated in a Homily on the Nativity delivered the same year. God allowed this to happen, remarked John Moschus in his book The Spiritual Meadow written in about 640, in order “to discipline our wickedness.” The Saracens went forth from their own land, wrote the monk Anastasius of Sina in his Edifying Tales, “according to God’s righteous judgement.”
Sin, wickedness, offences, (un)righteousness, judgement: such concepts are unlikely to strike modern historians, for whom the terms good and evil are apparently useless, as any more credible than the blunt ‘explanation’ that God did it. But to Byzantine Romans struggling to come to terms with recent events, these ideas were helpful, and potentially salvific.
Belief in God’s final sovereignty affirmed that there was an order to history, that human affairs were not simply a matter of might, but that there was a moral orientation to the world. History was not just an ancient rubbish tip blown around by the wind. It had a direction. Moreover, belief in a God who cared about humanity (and, in particular, the faithful) meant that history had a direction with which humans could co–operate, or resist, if they chose. The idea that divine sovereignty was connected, however obscurely, to human belief and behaviour afforded humans some small agency, a sense that they could shape the course of events, even (especially) when that course looked helpless. Understand the pattern of sin, failure, and righteous judgement and you understood not only the past, but also the way of the future.
There is a good argument that the incursion of the Arab armies was the point at which the Roman empire of late antiquity changed cultural direction. The empire had experienced trauma on multiple recent occasions, such as the so–called plague of Justinian in the 540s, or the massive earthquakes in Antioch in 526 and in Constantinople in 557. It had known military threat from the Sassanian empire in the east and the Slavs and Avars from the north for decades. But the rise of Islam was something different: a complete surprise, astonishingly rapid, and possessed of a spiritual confidence and theological coherence that made it more troubling than mere ‘natural’ disasters.
Theologians had talked of a kind of “imperial providentialism” since the time of Constantine. By this logic, the emperor’s personal piety and his role as guardian of orthodoxy prevented, or permitted, military defeat or other forms of collective trauma. But, according to Byzantine historian David Gyllenhaal, this kind of providentialism now gave way to what he calls “pastoral providentialism,” more in keeping with those Hebrew prophets who had held the people, rather than just the king, as accountable for the moral failings of all nation. God’s anger, and with it the course of history, might still be altered but it would take collective repentance, through penitential ceremonies, petitionary prayer, and moral reform.
The shift helped speed the on–going Christianisation and scripturalisation of life in late antique culture, in which peasants were disciplined out of their persistently pagan habits and elites saw the plot of imperial life grafted firmly onto the biblical narrative. So–called “rebuke homilies” flourished, in which preachers admonished their flock – directly, severely, starkly – for the sins of their past, and warned them of the need to confess, repent and make restitution, for fear of further divine judgement.
Much of this penitent energy was directed to the visual representations of what the Romans held holy. The invading Arabs disliked human images, let alone divine ones. Accordingly, some Romans began to think that the imperial sins lay here (although it must be admitted that our understanding of the whole affair is limited by the way in which many accounts were subsequently destroyed by their opponents). Within about a decade of the 717 Arab siege of Constantinople, Emperor Leo III threw his support behind the anti–icon arguments, and holy images started to be removed, defaced and destroyed. The dispute would last over a century, waxing and waning between those who wanted to retain these sacred images and those who now saw them as symbolic of the empire’s disastrous theological and moral failings. The combination of history, morality, and images proved to be combustible.
Rebuke homilies and repentance
Many people, including Biggar, have pointed out that the empire history wars that have flared up so viciously of late, are about the future as much as the past. Philosopher Susan Neiman has written: “The history wars are not about heritage but about values. They are not arguments about who we were but who we want to be”. She is right.
What the traumatic events of late antique Byzantium remind us of is how exceptionally angry that debate can be when people find themselves at a moment of intense historical anxiety, doubt and fear. Early 21st century Britain (arguably the West) is one such place, an uncertain place, out of joint, lacking in a confidence that was once its apparent birthright. Britain enjoyed the fin de siècle triumph of Fukuyama’s end of history. Indeed, it was partly responsible for the abrupt collapse of the eastern “evil empire” and the apparently unequivocal moral victory that followed it.
And then everything began to reel. Russia changed track. China refused to liberalise politically. The entire Western capitalist system quaked under the weight of its own greed and mismanagement. A hostile force emerged and shed blood in New York, London, and other Western capitals. Mass immigration provoked anxious and sometimes aggressive nationalism. Liberalism began to eat itself in the groves of academic freedom. The climate noose slowly tightened. And a pandemic struck. The effect was shattering. Euphoria turned to disarray and soul–searching. How, and why, had this happened?
Not being a religious people, of course, we did not dream about ascribing any of this to the action or permission of God, or to such vague and antiquated ideas like sin, wickedness, offences, righteousness, or judgement. After all, historians have no need for terms like good and evil. We have moved on from the eighth century.
But what we did get instead were a series of “rebuke homilies”, bringing to light our collective past and showing how wicked it had been. “Violence was not just the British Empire’s midwife,” Caroline Elkins tells her readers in the introduction of her book about the British empire and violence. “It was endemic to the structures and systems of British rule… not just an occasional means to liberal imperialism’s end; it was a means and an end for as long as the British Empire remained alive.” Good governance, she insists, heading off any counterargument in advance, was merely a “fever dream.” The empire’s alleged “rule of law” in fact “codified difference, curtailed freedom, expropriated land and property, and ensured a steady stream of labor for the mines and plantations that fed Britain’s domestic economy.” To be fair, many writers on the topic say that it is perfectly acceptable to be proud of empire. In his foreword to the collection of essays entitled, The Truth about Empire, which is effectively a 300–page riposte to Biggar, Sathnam Sanghera writes how “there is nothing… illegitimate about British historians wishing to justify and defend imperialism.” And yet, you don’t have to read many modern books on the British empire (including Sanghera’s own Empireland, which is written with wit and generosity and is far from the most critical of such texts) to come away with the clear impression that, for all its complexity, the British empire was characterised almost entirely by prejudice, racism, violence, greed, exploitation, hypocrisy, and unreflective self–righteousness.
What we got was a renewed “pastoral providentialism”. Modern rebuke homilies were clear that the sins of the nation are those of the nation, and not simply of its rulers. Of course, much could be laid at the door of Clive of India or General Dyer or any number of the elite who extracted, cheated, or killed their way to prosperity. But one of the repeating themes of modern histories of empire was how widespread the imperial sentiment was. The British people were imperialists, not just their leaders, and in ways they don’t even realise, they still are. Hence the repeated reference to (and obvious shock at) the 2014 YouGov poll that reported that 59% of British adults “thought the empire was something to be proud of” compared with 19% who were ashamed of it. Imperialism continued to “shape modern Britain”, to pick up on Sanghera’s subtitle. This wasn’t good enough. The people needed to own their sin. “We badly need to understand… that for much of history we were an aggressively racist … force responsible for violence, injustice and war crimes,” said William Dalrymple. No Byzantine preacher put it better.
And we got a summons to repentance, which, if it were to be true repentance needed to be serious, matched with action, a genuine striving for real atonement. Leaders and institutions were summoned to say sorry, to apologise for the wickedness of the past. The Christian ethicist, Michael Banner, suggested “a national day of mourning”. Some institutions – the Church of England, the University of Glasgow, Lloyds of London, Trinity College Cambridge – pledged payment for their involvement in the slave trade. Banner suggested, in his book Britain’s Slavery Debt: Reparations Now, that the country as a whole owed somewhere between £105–250 billion for its role in the trade. The subsequent “Brattle Report” on Reparations for Transatlantic Chattel Slavery in the America and Caribbean estimated that the UK’s true debt was in fact approximately $24 trillion, part of a bigger Western debt of somewhere between $77 and $108 trillion. Repentance was necessary, and repentance was serious.
And of course we got our very own movement of iconoclasm. True penitents took to the streets. They pulled down or defaced statues of the figures who had heretofore been held as almost sacred, but who were now just icons of our sinful past. Edward Coulson was toppled in Bristol, Robert Milligan was removed in London, Queen Victoria and Churchill were defaced, and, perhaps more surprisingly, an on–line petition for the removal of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Leicester, on the basis that he was racist, attracted over 4,000 signatures. For some, it was only by cleansing our present of our past that we could face the future.
In spite of what this might sound like, I am not passing judgement against these calls. There is a fair amount of suffocating self–righteousness and wearisome liberal self–loathing in these modern–day rebuke homilies, calls for national repentance and demands for statue removal, but that doesn’t mean they’re always wrong. Many a thundering Byzantine preacher might have been hypocritical or morally simplistic, but that didn’t necessarily render their homilies mistaken.
Indeed, there is, equally, something a bit morally grotesque in the way the British have, at least until recently, celebrated the abolition of slavery but said comparatively little about the century–long period in which around three million African men and women were abducted and worked to death in what Michael Banner has (rightly) called “slave labour death camps”. No wonder the historian Eric Williams complained, in his 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery, how “British historians wrote almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.” In the light of that, it is hardly outrageous to call for a museum of colonialism, as Dalrymple has done, or to seek to pinpoint quite how much British families, institutions, and stately homes owed (and owe?) to descendants of those slaves. When sin is culpable, repentance is necessary.
But is it also necessary that we acknowledge what we are doing here. The empire wars are about the future direction of the country, and they have acquired their virulence because they are taking place at a moment of geopolitical uncertainty and anxiety, when history seems to be changing its tracks. Ultimately, people are disagreeing not about how good or bad our great– great– great– (great– great–) grandparents were, but about how good or bad we are; indeed, about who we are and where we are going. No matter that the country is less religious now than it has been for a millennium. This is a religious argument, every bit as much as it was in eighth century Byzantium, and there is no sign of it letting up soon.
A shorter version of this essay was published in Comment magazine.
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