An Honest Conversation About Colonialism with Nigel Biggar: Quillette Cetera Episode 41

On the 23rd of October, I sat down in Sydney, Australia, with the esteemed ethicist and theologian Nigel Biggar—Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford—to discuss King Charles’ visit to Australia, whether Australia should cut ties with the British monarchy and become a republic, what it means to be a patriot, far-left activism, cancel culture, and whether we should be ashamed of our colonial past.

I deeply enjoyed Nigel’s 2023 book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, which was reviewed in Quillette.

ZB: It’s your first time in Australia, and you’re here at a very special time because I believe it’s the first time that the King has ever visited Australia.

NB: As King.

ZB: Yes, as King. And, you know, yesterday we had around 8,000 people greeting the King—a quite big crowd. But as I’m sure you’d know, there’s a very vocal minority of people who think that the monarchy and the King represent all the evils of history: colonialism, genocide. And on top of that, there’s a quieter minority of around 30 percent of the Australian population who believe that we should have a republic; 45 percent want to keep their constitutional monarchy. What do you have to say to those 30 percent of people who want a republic?

NB: Yeah, OK. So the first thing I say is there are plenty of good republics in the world; it wouldn’t be the end of the world if Australia became a republic. Republics are places where people get to choose who governs them. So, in a sense, the people govern themselves. But I myself am in favour of the constitutional monarchy we have in Britain now and that you have in Australia now because I think it confers certain benefits.

NB: I imagine an Australian Republican would say, “Well, the British monarch is a foreign monarch. And in order for us to grow up and become fully ourselves, we need to be independent of the British past.” One response to that I have is this: Australia is an extraordinarily prosperous and liberal country. You’ve been independent for a long, long time. You’ve grown up, you’re an adult; you don’t need to sever ties with your parents. I mean, adolescents do that. Adults are confident with themselves and confident enough to recognise what they owe the past. They don’t need to sever ties. So that’s one thing I’d say.

NB: And the other thing is that the monarchy is not foreign in the sense that the British monarchy as it now stands represents political development over hundreds of years in which the power of the executive becomes ever more constrained and accountable. And that’s a long liberal political tradition that is shared by all of the countries of the former British Empire—the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Britain.

NB: Parts of the world that never belonged to the British Empire don’t have that liberal tradition—think China, think North Korea. And that tradition, that political tradition of the executive constrained by rights and by law, is a particular tradition. It belongs to Australia; it’s also British, and the monarch represents that tradition. I guess people probably think of a monarch as an absolute monarch who does whatever he pleases. That’s a kind of monarchy that the English have rejected for a long, long time.

NB: Way back in the late medieval period, French observers were astonished at the extent to which the English king was constrained by his council. And we all know what happened when Charles I sought to break out of those constraints—he lost his head. So it’s wrong to think of monarchies as absolute. The liberal tradition is Australia’s, and of course, the representative of the King in Australia is Australian. So this is not foreign, and it’s not contrary to liberal political tradition.

NB: Here’s one benefit and concern, which is practical. In a republic, you have a president, a head of state, who is elected. What that means is the head of state becomes politically partisan because some people want a left-wing president, some people want a right-wing president. So the head of state comes into question, as in the United States. In the United States right now, half of the country hates Donald Trump, half the country hates Kamala Harris. Whoever becomes president will be hated by half the country. And we’re not talking here about just the head of government; we’re talking about the head of state. And the head of state is supposed to be able to represent everybody.

NB: So one of the benefits of a constitutional monarchy is that the monarchy is above party politics and is able to represent the whole nation. So just to come back to the beginning, Zoe, I wouldn’t say that to have a decent government, Australia has to be a constitutional monarchy. I’m just saying it has certain benefits. And by the way, from at least the mid-19th century, some people were referring to Britain as a monarchical republic. So I’d like to sell the idea in Australia of being a monarchical republic. You are a republic, but you can have a constitutional monarchy and a regulatory monarchy that actually does some political good.

ZB: That’s an interesting idea. On Monday night, we talked with Margaret Cameron Ash, who studied the history of the French in Australia and that we were almost colonised by the French. Can you imagine an Australia which was colonised by the French? And do you think it was luck—it was a good thing that we ended up getting colonised by Britain and not France or some other?

NB: The idea of Australia being French—God forbid.

ZB: Hey, good food.

NB: Yes, no, very good food. Look, one of the really, really important things about thinking about what happened in the past is to set things in context. And one of the really unhelpful things about so much of the current political controversy is things are taken out of context. So the focus is on the British coming here and invading Aboriginal Australia, as if this was some kind of unique British sin.

NB: But if you set it in a global context—I mean, the phenomenon of peoples moving for whatever reason—sometimes to escape famine, sometimes to escape other invaders—displacing other peoples, overwhelming them, who then move elsewhere and displace other peoples, is universal. In the 1600s, the Iroquois Native Americans expanded northwards; they overwhelmed and displaced the Huron and moved westwards, who displaced other peoples and so forth.

NB: I think—I’m sure I’ve read—that Aboriginal Australians did the same thing because sometimes climatic changes made certain territories uninhabitable; they had to move. And if they were lucky they moved to a place where no one else was, but if other people were there, then they displaced them. So in that context, European expansion and settlement in far parts of the world was not exceptional. That’s one thing I’d say.

NB: The other thing I’d say is that I don’t think that any culture has a moral right not to encounter another—not to be immune from change. And Aboriginal Australia was going to find other peoples landing on its shores one way or another, sooner or later. If it hadn’t been the British, it might have been French. If it hadn’t been the Americans, it could have been the Maori.

ZB: Even Arab conquests, I believe.

NB: I mean, in order to invade Australia, you’ve got to have boats that will take you here.

ZB: They did sail around the Mediterranean.

NB: They did sail around the Mediterranean. I’m not sure they had the maritime capability to get here, but there were canoes too. Maori canoes were found on Norfolk Island—I think it’s halfway between Auckland and Sydney—in 1790. And when the Maoris did invade the Chatham Islands, what happened? They killed 10 percent of the population and enslaved the rest. If the Maori had got to Aboriginal Australia, the story would have been much worse for Aboriginal Australians.

NB: So tragically, Aboriginal people were often decimated by disease, which might have been brought by the British. It’s not quite clear where smallpox came from to Sydney Cove in 1790. But then the influx of settlers and moving out into the fertile plains led to conflict. So there was a lot of tragedy, and no doubt there were atrocities occasionally.

NB: But if you look at the character and the careers of the likes of Arthur Phillip, who landed in 1788, and Lachlan Macquarie, they were actually extraordinarily—before their time—humane people and sought to bring Aboriginal people into British culture. And not necessarily just to impose foreign stuff on them, but to help them adapt.

NB: So I guess in terms of what happened, in terms of the encounter between Britain and Aboriginals, there’s a lot of tragedy. There was some atrocity, but there was also a lot of mutual accommodation. I’d just like the whole story to be told, not just the atrocious bit.

ZB: Would you say that countries that have a British colonial history have more guilt than, for example, countries that were colonised by the Spanish or by the Dutch? I lived in Spain for a while, and I lived in Basque country. They’ve got their issues within Spanish—it was a great place to live, very interesting—but the Basques don’t really see themselves as Spanish. But in general, Spain still has a pride in what the Spanish Empire used to be.

ZB: Argentina and other countries in South America don’t seem to have as much—I’m not sure if there’s as much tension between the colonial past and the native past. Is it a uniquely British thing to have this tension? Was it a worse empire? Why do we have more issues than others?

NB: Yes, that’s a good question. I think in terms of what actually happened in the Americas when the Spanish got involved—on the one hand, when the conquistadors landed on Cuba and what’s now the West Indies, there was a lot of atrocity. But then you’ve got in the 1500s Spanish theologians like Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de las Casas arguing pacifistically in Spain that the Spanish have no right to invade sufficiently well-organised political communities such as they reckoned Native Caribbeans were, unless those communities were practising horrendously inhumane things like human sacrifice or that kind of thing.

NB: In other words, yes, you had bad stuff, but then you had people in Spain themselves being critical. And I think the English had a very poor view of the Spanish Empire. And when they noticed that some of the peoples of Eastern Canada were becoming extinct, they thought, “Goodness, my goodness, we almost became as bad as the Spanish.”

NB: But I think you’ll find revisionist historians of the history of Spain now think that the Spanish Empire in some ways was better at integrating native peoples than the British. But was the British Empire uniquely wicked? Well, in other terms, no, because as I suggested earlier, even though the British Empire in, let’s say, India or Africa wasn’t democratic, the Empire exported liberal institutions of a free press, an independent judiciary, and even though colonial governments were not elected, colonial governments were accountable to London.

NB: So you end up with various institutions where colonial government is held to account. And sometimes the press in India or Hong Kong, run by Indians and Chinese or Black Africans in Africa, could be fiercely critical of colonial government. And in the 1950s, during the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya, the judiciary was often fiercely critical of colonial government. And that’s a good thing because the government is then held accountable.

NB: I just point out that countries that were part of the Empire—like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US—all have those institutions. It’s not a coincidence we are amongst the most liberal countries on earth. To this day, China and Russia and Iran and North Korea don’t have them. So if we’re comparing ourselves to them, actually the British Empire was better.

ZB: Interesting. Okay, I’ll move on to my next—I could say one more thing.

NB: You did ask about why are we so obsessed with the sins of the British Empire? Why have we got things so out of proportion? What I’m trying to do through my book and here to try and spread the word is really to put things back in proportion and to say, yes, the British Empire presided over bad stuff—sometimes tragic, sometimes lamentable, sometimes atrocious—but you will not find a state on earth that’s lasted 400 years that hasn’t done that kind of stuff.

NB: And what the zealous decolonisers will not say and don’t want anyone to hear is there was also a very good story in terms of the abolition of slavery. The Empire was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish slavery, spent the second half of its life suppressing slavery from Brazil to New Zealand.

ZB: Many of them Christian, right? Abolitionists? Quakers, I believe.

NB: Well, the Quakers started off, then evangelical Christians. Very strong evangelical impulse brought to Canada. Arthur Phillip, the captain of the First Fleet, he insisted before he got here that slavery would have no place in Australia. And Lachlan Macquarie was equally opposed to slavery. But the British Empire was among the first states in history of the world to abolish it. Slavery was universal.

NB: And then the Empire led the world for over 150 years to abolish it all over the world. And that stands to the Empire’s credit. But why the focus on the negative stuff? The reason’s political. It serves the purposes of certain groups to big up the sins of the British Empire, to manipulate sensitive liberal consciences for certain political ends.

ZB: And you mentioned this in your speech on Monday night. It’s something that really stuck with me, which is that many of the most vocal critics who have a very negative view about history and want us to continue with that view have personal narcissistic goals in that they want to gain power. It’s not necessarily about the movement, but more about themselves.

ZB: And I believe that because I was part of these movements, and I know the naive sort of sense—while I was at university, I was in these spaces, and I know the sense of power that you get from shutting people down and telling them that they’re terrible people and really demoralising them in that way—not attacking their arguments, but trying to publicly shame them into feeling like a bad person.

ZB: All that to say that it got me thinking about Joseph Banks, actually, who was only, I believe, 26 when he came here on the Endeavour. And you mentioned that it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have personal goals or motivations.

NB: Exactly.

ZB: Young men do have these goals to go out and conquer. And back in the day, that was more acceptable, and people like Joseph Banks were celebrated for that. Now young men aren’t really encouraged to do that. Actually, on campuses, it’s seen as a very terrible thing.

ZB: I was wondering if those men perhaps have gone into far-left spaces to conquer those spaces. What do you think about that?

NB: That’s an interesting idea. Well, it’s partly young people, not just men. Young people are often typically idealistic and uncompromising. University campuses have always had particularly strident left-wing Marxist idealists—at least in my day, that’s where they were.

NB: Having a core—I’m myself religious, I’m Christian. And I plug my little life—I mean, yours truly, 69 now, will probably be dead in 20 years. Some will remember me, but within 50 years, no one will know who I was.

ZB: You’ve written books, and there’s Wikipedia. We’ll remember you.

NB: I guess the point is that most of our lives come and they go. Most people don’t know who we were. So I understand that there’s a spiritual need to plug your life into a bigger narrative. I think that’s part—I think there’s a spiritual dimension to the wokery, I mean, and you’ve just in a sense testified to it. I mean, the excitement, the exhilaration, the sense of purpose you get from being part of a mission and a crusade. And that’s all good.

NB: Not so good is the pleasure of power, particularly gratuitous power where the pleasures of shouting and screaming and succeeding and making sure that this event doesn’t happen or insulting someone in a personal way and provoking them to say things that ruin their career—that’s really malicious. It’s quite cruel. Really quite cruel. And there’s a mercilessness about it. Twitter is merciless. Absolutely merciless.

NB: So I think part of me doesn’t want to be too cynical about the motives that propel people to distort history for political purposes. But I find myself driven to wonder what on earth these folk really care about, because I don’t think they want to solve the problem.

ZB: Well, then they’d have nothing to be upset about, would they?

NB: I know. I guess I’d try and advise them to try and plug their lives into a better big narrative.

ZB: And I suppose you’d agree that it’s part of it that we’ve lost that big narrative. I was yesterday at the Australian meeting of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, and that’s been reported in the newspapers. A large part of what they’re about is trying to tell a better story about Australia. So there’s a good story about Australia to be told that should encourage people and exhilarate them and move them to join the national effort to make Australia an even better place and to try and solve some of the intractable problems, particularly with regard to Aboriginal minorities.

NB: So one could plug into a balanced, nuanced story about Australia that is not dishonest about the bad stuff, but is also not dishonest about the good stuff and resolves to do better than the past. And that’s an exciting thing to belong to.

ZB: And as you’ve written about in Quillette, it’s a mixture of pride and shame. And we’ve definitely got the shame down pat. That pride aspect—what happens when a culture loses pride?

NB: This is why I wrote my book; this is why I’m here really, because I was worried primarily about the cultural and political effects of the British—my own people—infected by excessive guilt and losing pride. What are the effects of that? Loss of faith in institutions, vulnerability to utopian revolutionary ideas. And revolutionaries are very good at pulling stuff down, not so good at building stuff back up again.

NB: Excessive expectations about the past, and because the past wasn’t perfect you damn it. And then you throw away institutions that were developed with great effort and sometimes with bloodshed over centuries. You trash them and then nothing’s put in their place. So I think it’s dangerous—the loss of confidence in your country in a wholesale, comprehensive fashion drives you either to give up entirely and just bury yourself in private life or inclines you to revolutionary activity that’s much better at trashing than it is at reconstructing.

NB: So partly that, but also I think if the British and the Australians and Canadians and New Zealanders and the Americans come to think that their 400-year engagement with peoples all over the world in the Empire, their engagement with Aboriginal peoples, was simply a litany of racism, atrocity, and exploitation, then when it comes to negotiating with foreign countries like China, or even internally with activist groups, Aboriginals or whatever, the tendency will be to yield because you’re guilty.

NB: And sometimes one should yield, and sometimes the other guys are speaking the truth, but not always. They have their own interests too. And an uncritical yielding can mean you then end up adopting really destructive policies.

NB: In 1976, a Jewish Baghdad-born historian called Elie Kedourie in Britain wrote a book called The Anglo-Arab Labyrinth. And what he was examining was whether or not the British in 1915 promised the Arabs that if they revolted against the Ottoman Turks in the First World War, that the Arabs would come to possess Palestine. But then subsequently, after the First World War, the British enabled Zionist immigrants into Palestine and thereby eventually they created the State of Israel.

NB: What Kedourie’s book is about is asking, did the British betray the Arabs? He concludes actually not. But he says lots of people in the British Foreign Office believed they had. And therefore their policies with regard to the Arab world were weakened by what he called the “canker of imaginary guilt.” I love that phrase. I’ll say it again: the canker of imaginary guilt.

NB: And what I was worried about and am worried about, both in terms of external policy and internal policy, is that our governments become misled by the canker of exaggerated and imaginary guilt.

ZB: Yeah, you mentioned Elie Kedourie on Monday night, and that stuck with me as well—the canker of imaginary guilt. It’s quite stuck in my head. And you also mentioned that nations come and go. And I think especially for people of my generation—I’m 29—I haven’t lived through ... unlike my grandparents who lived through the Depression and the World Wars, we take a lot for granted. And especially in the West, because we haven’t experienced war. I think, yeah, just simply that nations come and go.

ZB: I mean, theoretically and statistically, Australia, the UK, Canada won’t last forever, right? And what will come after that? I guess cultures stay, but nations don’t. It’s all a bit terrifying.

NB: Well, I think, yeah, we don’t know what the future holds. I can’t imagine a world without nations. I know there are many progressive folk who strive and look forward to a world government, at least in the form of international courts or with a national police force and army. Because if we had a strong global state, then there would be no more wars because we’d have police action rather than wars.

NB: The problem with that, of course, is if you have a strong global state which becomes tyrannical, there are no obvious external sources of resistance. So that’s dangerous. So I think—and actually, just in terms of ... given the variety of national interests, I think the chances of achieving a strong global state, even if it were desirable, is unlikely, and the progressive folk are just being utopian.

NB: So I think we will remain a world of states. Some states may join up with others in weaker or stronger alliances. Britain was part of the European Union until 2016. And if the European Union were to develop as some want it to, then in a sense it would become a European state in which national states would eventually be merged. And that’s happened in the past.

NB: The UK is a merger of two states, Scotland and England, although the Scottish state has remained somewhat distinct, has its own law, its own church, its own education system. But if you remember, I put this idea on the table that nations are not forever, because I’m in fact a proud patriot of Britain, and I believe in the United Kingdom, which is a remarkably successful multinational state, which enjoys even to this day a degree of internal solidarity the European Union can only dream of.

NB: I’m Scottish and English. And when there was a possibility of Scotland seceding from the Union in 2014, I was viscerally against it. But I felt, as a Christian, I have to admit that it’s possible the UK should disintegrate, as Scots nationalists say it should. And so I felt obliged to look at their arguments because nations are not forever.

NB: But I concluded in this case that there are very good reasons for retaining the United Kingdom. In the same way, here in Australia, I guess your analogous situation is the threat that a certain kind of Aboriginal nationalism might pose to the integrity of the Australian state. Among Aboriginal people, of course, there are a variety of opinions, both right and left, but there are some, I guess, calling for a degree of Aboriginal autonomy that might threaten the integrity of the Australian state, and the same in Canada.

NB: And again, I concluded in the case of Scotland that independence was a dogmatic solution in search of a justifying problem. Nationalists began with the solution and tried to justify why we should pursue that, whereas in fact the facts of the case do not present a problem that justifies that, in which case you should abandon that solution and find another one.

NB: And the danger is that some people get so hooked on autonomy and independence as a kind of—they assume it’s the solution, whereas in fact the solution to the social dysfunction of Aboriginal communities in remote places is not that; it’s something else. I’m no expert; lots of Australians differ as to what the solution is, but you’ll even find people on the left like Peter Sutton who are a bit sceptical about land rights and Aboriginal autonomy as being the solution and think the solution may lie elsewhere.

NB: I guess, in a nutshell, what I’m warning against is let’s not get hooked on independence as the solution. It might be. It might be a big problem.

ZB: Okay. So it sounds like alliance is—well, you believe that alliance is a better option than independence, which leads into another question I have about—you say you’re a patriot, and a lot of people associate that—well, people on the left don’t like that. But even in the centre, where I sit, patriotism, at least now, maybe post-Trump, has been seen as a populist idea, which means isolationist, which means we should not be helping Ukraine, we should not care about Israel, you know, John Mearsheimer, if you’re familiar with him, and other realists have popularised this idea that there are foreign lobbies.

ZB: Whereas the other idea is that we have similar values—the West has similar values to Ukrainians or Israel—and that we should work together. What do you think about this?

NB: I’ve only come to describe myself as a patriot in the last few years. I’m well aware that in my middle-of-the-road political circles—and I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s—patriotism became increasingly suspect. Because in the ’60s and ’70s it was the fashion to begin to mock the kind of, perhaps, the unthinking patriotism of the early decades of the 20th century.

NB: So I’m well aware of what it connotes. And when I say it, and when some people hear this podcast, I can imagine them sucking their teeth as if patriot equals fascist equals whatever. I’m taking that risk because I want to give voice to something that is not only natural but morally obligatory—caring for your people, caring for your country.

NB: Now, you can care for it in different ways. You can have a left-wing patriot or a right-wing patriot, but not caring is not good. So let’s have patriotism, and let’s quarrel about what’s good for our country, but let’s all care for our country. That’s my view. And I guess most of my life I have cared a lot for my country, but I have been hesitant to say it because other people find it embarrassing to hear.

NB: And one of the great advantages of older age, Zoe, is two things, and it’s a dangerous combination. One, you finally figure out what you think. And two, you no longer care what other people think so much. So you say it. I have nothing to lose.

NB: But let me just be clear here. If you care for your country, you are capable of being deeply disappointed because your country doesn’t live up to what it should be. And so I suppose the caricature of a patriot is someone who has an uncritical love for their country—it’s my country, right or wrong. I’m not that kind of patriot.

NB: Because I care, I’m very critical because I want my country to do better. And by the way, you know, it’s not just my country. A good patriot is not a xenophobe. I admire Germany. I think Australia is fantastic. So loving your country doesn’t mean you have to despise other countries. And in fact, if you’re a good patriot, you’ll recognise the good in other countries and want to import it to your own to make it better.

NB: I think nowadays, a lot of people think that patriotism is narrow and we should be globalists and love the world. My response is, well, yeah, but you need to care for what’s at home because someone’s got to do that.

ZB: I guess my question is, is there a benefit in having a global alliance of countries that have similar values that support each other? Is that part of being a good patriot, caring about protecting Ukraine or Israel to some extent?

NB: I’m all for alliances, and those can be stronger or weaker. The British Empire was an alliance which started off stronger and then dissolved into the Commonwealth. And my own country has had a very strong alliance with the European Union, and we’ve now decided to make that weaker.

NB: Alliances are—they can serve the interests of a country, and they can serve the interests of the world, and they’re really important. So being a patriot does not mean being isolationist. In my view, it means the opposite.

NB: And right now—and here’s another reason I wrote my book—around the turn of this century, 2000, the Cold War had ended. It seemed as if liberal democracy had won. And we didn’t have to think about NATO. In fact, people were saying, what’s NATO for? Sadly, we’re not there now. There are major threats to the liberal West from authoritarian regimes in Beijing and Moscow and Iran.

NB: And so those of us who are liberal democrats—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United States, Western Europe, and others, Japan even—we do need to ally ourselves in order to face off threats. And although when I wrote my book on colonialism, I had my own British fellow citizens primarily in mind, I also had citizens of former parts of the British Empire like Australia because Australia is not Britain—you know that—but we share an awful lot in common.

NB: And you’re right; because we share the same language and institutions, we take it for granted. But we need to remember what we have is not universal and therefore needs to be cherished, and our alliances need to be cherished. And that’s one reason why I’d like to encourage Australians to embrace the Australian monarchy, because that’s another historical link we have in common, and I can’t myself see what’s to be gained from trashing it.

ZB: I’d also encourage Australians and all people to read your book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. I’ve read it myself. It’s also available on Spotify if you’re a premium member, so you can listen to it. I’m not sure if you knew that.