Good and Evil in the British Empire | Dr. Nigel Biggar | EP 359

There ain't nothing wrong with power; we all want it. I mean, if we don't have power, we can't do anything, right? So, let's stop assuming that power is always bad. The only question is whether we use power well or badly, justly or unjustly.

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Hello everyone. Today I have the privilege of conversing with Professor Nigel Bigger, a distinguished British theologian and ethicist. His controversial book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, was recently published and hit the non-fiction bestseller list in the UK. It's now available in North America and the English-language world. We discussed the ethics of the colonial enterprise, the reality and falsehood of the idea of privilege, the purposeful and pointless miseries of cancel culture, and the separation of good from evil in the process of historical analysis.

So, Nigel, we're going to talk today about your book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, which has just been released a few weeks ago and which, as I understand, is doing quite well. I would like maybe to start with the story of why it was that you got drawn into this historical inquiry—why you decided to write a history of this type. It's not precisely in your bailiwick as a professor. So, why don't you outline the circumstances that led to your undertaking this endeavor?

Yes, Jordan. So, I'm an academic, a professor of ethics, Christian ethics, and over the years I have been in the business of trying to make moral sense and come to moral judgments about complicated moral issues—for example, the moral problem of war. My first university degree and my first love has always been history, so all of my life I've read history and I've been reading British imperial history for 20 to 30 years. The moral questions that have been raised by the European colonial endeavor around the world, especially the British effort, have always interested me.

In 2010, 15, and 16, there was agitation in Oxford imported from South Africa to have a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the late 19th-century imperialist, which stands over Oxford's High Street on the back of Oriel College Oxford, to have it dismantled because it was said Rhodes was South Africa's Hitler. As it happened, at the time, December 15, I was reading the standard biography of Cecil Rhodes. I thought to myself, "No, that's just not true."

So, in early 2016, I published articles and took part in the debate in the Oxford Union, opposing the dismantling of Rhodes' statue, because what was being projected onto him just seemed to me to be untrue. That was my first “as it were” public performance on this issue. Then, in 2017, to pursue my interest, I launched a research project here in Oxford called Ethics and Empire with a very eminent historian of empire globally, John Darwin. The aim of the project was simply to look at how people across time, from ancient China to the modern period, have regarded the empires of their day in moral terms.

Finally, in late November 2017, I published an article in The London Times in which I made what I thought was the completely unobjectionable, rather bland point that we British can find both cause for shame and pride in our imperial history. About a few days later, I published online an account of the Ethics and Empire project. As my wife and I were waiting at Heathrow Airport to fly to Germany to celebrate our wedding anniversary, I got word from the university that a group of students had published an online denunciation of me and my project. I thought nothing of it.

Four days later, three days later, my historian collaborator, John Darwin, resigned from the project, and then within the space of five days, two more online denunciations appeared—one from 58 Oxford colleagues and the second from about 170 academics around the world. So, that was my inadvertent baptism of fire. I wasn't expecting it. I just pursued a research project I thought was interesting and important and published an article saying things that I thought to be true.

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And that was, you said that was in 2017 that all blew up around December?

That's right.

So, why did your collaborator—was that John Darwin who resigned?

Yes.

And if it was, why did he resign? I mean, he had obviously thought through participating in this project, I presume, although you can fill us in that you were working well together and that he felt this was a worthwhile project. Why did he feel compelled to take this route?

Well, Jordan, I don't want to be liable to accusations of defamation here, so I want to be cautious. What John told me that weekend was that he had pressing personal problems and just felt he needed to withdraw.

Okay, so I have some comments about that. I've talked to about 200 people now who've undergone, let's say, a trial by fire of the sort that you describe. Now, it's easy to pillory people who withdraw in the face of opposition, but my experience has been that most of the people, virtually all of the people that I know who've been subjected to this sort of treatment react to it in a manner that's analogous to either facing a very protracted lawsuit or divorce or a very serious illness on their part or a serious illness on the part of someone close to them. It's devastating.

Jay Bhattacharya, for example, at Stanford, he was ripped over the coals for his attitude toward his scientific discussion of the problem of the epidemic response and his skepticism about the COVID lockdown. He lost 35 pounds in three months. I know other people who've ended up all devastated, sufficiently to receive psychiatric treatment, and who've withdrawn into their own personal lives, who've been abandoned by their professional colleagues. It's absolutely brutally awful. It never surprises me when I hear that someone has in fact withdrawn when they've been mobbed because it's a stunningly effective tactic from the psychological perspective.

And you said Dr. Darwin had indicated to you that he was having trouble in his personal life at that point as well, and obviously either couldn't tolerate or didn't need the stress. And that's interesting too, you know, because lots of people move forward professionally despite the fact that they're having all sorts of trouble, right? If you complicate that so that moving forward brings with it a tremendous psychological or personal cost, then you can bring the whole enterprise to a shuddering halt, which we seem to be hell-bent on doing at the moment.

So, I have some sympathy for Dr. Darwin, but it put you in an awkward position because, you know, your collaborator had disappeared.

I was stunned frankly. I mean, I didn't know what was happening, but I was stunned because our collaboration to that point had been very congenial, and we were both very happy. We launched the project in July ’17; it went very well. I was aware there was a connection between this student protest and John's sudden abandonment of the project. It wasn't clear to me what it was. He said there were personal reasons. Given the timings, that seemed to be less than the whole story. I was told by a third party that he did indeed have domestic concerns that were preoccupying him. But later, I discovered on an obscure part of the Oxford University website a statement by him saying that he had withdrawn from the project because its aims had changed.

I have to say, as far as I can see, that wasn't true. To your points—I mean, my experience, not just with John, but with others too— even some very old good friends, was that one friend described the issue of colonialism as toxic, and as a consequence, he was involved in a research center I ran, and he also withdrew. So, my experience was a feeling as if I'd suddenly become diseased and people were stepping back.

Right, right. I think that, yeah, I think that's the right metaphor, you know, because I think the psychological mechanisms that underlie shunning and isolation are an extension of—they describe it as a consequence of the operation of the behavioral immune system. People who are shunned are treated with contempt and derision as if they are infectious pathogens.

Now, one of the things I learned—for example, I read a book called Hitler's Table Talk, and it was transcripts of his spontaneous discussions over meal times over about a three-year period. I was very interested in the psychology of contempt and derision. Hitler never used language that was associated with fear in relationship to the Jews. You hear this notion that Hitler was afraid of the Jews, but that isn't the case. The language he used was all parasite-host language, contempt and derision. It's a much more toxic emotion to have directed at you than fear because you destroy things that are pathogens; you burn them out; you show them no mercy. To be targeted with derision and disgust, as you said, you end up contaminated. It's about the worst thing that can happen to you socially.

Yeah, I think in the cases I'm talking about, I think it was more fear than disgust. Of course, I've had plenty of hatred and hostility directed from other quarters. In this case, it was more—I accept now there are people out there who really, really hate what I say and think and, therefore, hate me. I know that. But the other phenomenon is of people who are friends or colleagues who don't hate you. But I think they're more scared of the way I interpret it. They step back from you because they're scared of what other people think of them if they're associated with you.

Well, they're afraid of becoming the target of that contempt.

Yes, okay, it's a catch-22.

Yes, yes. The fundamental problem is that you become a target of disgust and contempt, and then people are afraid of being contaminated by that and thrown into the same social category.

Absolutely. You know, another problem you had, I presume, is that you're in some ways the perfect poster boy for the kind of mobbing that might occur in relationship to colonialism. While you're a professor at Oxford, you're a professional professor of Christian ethics, you're Caucasian and, you know, you are a male.

Yeah, well, there's that too. So that begs the question. You know, it might be that it's easier for people to believe ill of you because they might say, "Well, Dr. Bigger is only justifying the structure that gave rise to his incredible privilege, his tenured luxury at Oxford." And so he's inclined psychologically to support the colonial enterprise because he's a prime beneficiary of it.

How would you—how have you responded to that sort of psychological analysis typical of the mobbing types?

That's a really important point, and I've thought about this. My first response is, yes, you could be right. I mean, all of us have social and economic interests, right? Sometimes those interests can determine what we decide to research on, and it can shape the adjustments we come to. So, yes, it's possible that my views on colonialism are indeed shaped by my private interest.

Of course, not all interests are legitimate, but it could be that I'm defending my privilege. But, of course, that goes—in my view, that goes for everybody, including my critics. So, in principle, yes, it could be the case.

So how do you, as an ethicist, protect yourself against that? I mean, methodologically, it's easier in the scientific domain, at least in principle, because there are strict methods for separating out personal interest from the facts at hand, even though they're not 100% reliable. But it's a lot harder when you're investigating history.

I think, speaking as not just a theoretical ethicist but as one who thinks themselves bound to practice a bit of what he preaches, I think we need certain virtues. I mean, I think one needs to have a sense of responsibility to be honest, and that means a sense that one is morally bound to expose oneself to criticism. I'm sure I'm not perfect on that, but I think I do that.

In my book—you tell me if I'm wrong—when I'm coming to a judgment about the British Empire, I don't shy away from the really bad bits, and insofar as I identify as British, those are painful for me to admit. But I do admit them. So, one response I have is it is possible to be honest, and there are certain marks for an honest person: that they are willing to face criticism; they are willing to think about it; and sometimes even willing to concede.

I have to say, compared to my critics, as I've experienced them, I do more of that than they do. No doubt I've got things to learn.

So, to go back, please go ahead.

The tactic of psychologizing people you disagree with and saying, "Well, he's only doing that or saying that; he would say that, wouldn't he? Because he is white and male and privileged," so one thing I say is, well, it’s possible in principle, let's see if it is the case in practice. The other thing to say is, it's a dangerous tactic to deploy the psychology of the opposition because what it allows you, that psychology, to do is to say, "Well, because he's only doing that because he's white and male and privileged, I don't have to listen to a damn thing he says."

So I immediately exempt myself from any responsibility to listen to what he says and to respond to it rationally, giving reasons. So it kind of immunizes myself against any responsibility actually to be honest and open to the criticism and present what he says.

It's a danger that the psychologizing dismissal of opposition allows you to be dishonest. That casual kind of moralizing—you know, the only reason you think the way you are is because you're trying to justify yourself—first of all, that cuts both ways. And I think it is worth taking it seriously; you have to examine your own bias in order to think straight.

I used to tell my graduate students to triple, double, triple-check their statistics and to try to make the results they obtained go away because if they were motivated by the necessity to develop their career, to publish something that wasn't true, number one, they would warp the whole research enterprise and send other people chasing a red herring, and number two, they could spend the rest of their life investigating something that simply didn't exist.

And then there's the other complicating issue of just being wrong. If you're a sensible thinker and if you're a critical thinker, you should subject your own thoughts to the most intense critical analysis possible, knowing that if you put forward second-grade thoughts, you'll act them out, and that will cause you no end of grief. Part of what we're supposed to do in universities is teach people to subject their own thoughts to a multiplicity of critical perspectives so that there's nothing left but wheat, right? So the chaff disappears.

And so when you're writing, you said you take an even-handed approach as much as possible to the catastrophes and benefits of the British colonial enterprise. I mean, how do you—again, how do you—what do you do to try to ensure that you're surveying as broad a range of the evidence as you possibly can, knowing your own potential bias?

Well, there are a number of things. I mean, I teach my students the virtues of being scrupulously just to what someone says in the text and even to be charitable; it's to say before you start to criticize what they say to construe it in the strongest possible form and then dismantle it. So, I applied that same thing to myself.

So, when I come across material in history that I read about that is negative about the British Empire, I report it in my book. There are a number of pages that deal with the 150 years' worth of abundant involvement in slave trading, slavery, in the second chapter, I think. I quote descriptions of what was done to slaves who tried to escape, for example; it's horrific. But it's there on the page; I let the reader see it. It's a matter not just of critical skills. I mean, as far as I say this, it's a matter of personal virtue; you have to become the kind of person who just does this—one feels obliged to do it.

But in terms of my own work on this topic, for example, I have read a number of books on controversial issues written by the kind of people who are very hostile to me. I've read them, and on the whole, there are a number of cases in the book where I lay out what they say, and then I take it apart, and most of the time, in my view, it falls apart. But as I said, the reader can see what I'm doing, exactly; and if the reader thinks I'm not playing fair or I'm cheating in some way or I'm overlooking something, they can see it, right? So they can check—I put enough of the process of the inquiry into the work itself so that people can follow along and double-check for themselves whether you're playing a straight game.

Absolutely. Absolutely right. And you pointed to something that's extremely important in this regard, given your position also as a professor of, say, Christian ethics. I mean, one of the—I’ve been investigating the metaphysical presumptions of science, and there are metaphysical presumptions that have to be accepted before you can start to operate as a scientist.

So, for example, you have to believe that there's a logos or a logic in the objective world. You have to believe that there is an objective world. You have to believe that that logic is apprehensible. You have to believe that apprehending that logic is a moral good because otherwise, why would you bother? And then you have to believe that truth in relationship to that apprehension is the most important orienting principle.

Those are all metaphysical presumptions. I actually think they're metaphysical presumptions that are derived from Christianity itself, which is why science emerged in Europe and not elsewhere. But you said you have to live your life in a manner—if you're going to tell the truth when you write, you have to live your life in a manner that indicates respect for the truth.

How do you justify the claim that that's what you do in your life, and why should people take that seriously?

That's a very germane question given your position as a professor of Christian ethics at Oxford, right? I mean, you, above all in some ways, are required to not only make that case but to walk the walk.

That's a deep question, Jordan. So, what's my answer to that? I think it's first of all to say, we human beings, our lives are, you know, taken by themselves, taken in isolation. Our lives are little and meaningless. I mean, we come, we go, and you know, I mean, unless we plug ourselves into some larger narrative, what's—what on Earth does it matter what I do or say? So partly, I’d say that if you think of your life, as I do, as a kind of pilgrimage or an adventure and the goal is to approximate oneself to what's good and true and beautiful, you might say God, then in a sense, my little life, in this place, this time, takes on a larger, deeper significance.

So I think of myself, I mean, I don't know the truth; I know fragments of the truth. But I think of myself that the point of my life is to bear witness, in the way that I can, to what I think is true and worthwhile. I mean, God knows, and I mean that literally, God knows alone how anything I say or do or achieve will last or what effects it will have; I don't know. But here now, I've I have a limited task, and that's simply to bear witness to the truth, as I see it.

That's one thing I'd say.

Okay, well what was it in your life, do you think, that drove you to conclude that alignment with the truth was the appropriate way to conduct yourself? Because there are alternatives, obviously, like manipulation and the pursuit of short-term gratification, the use of deception, for example, to get what you want. And why did you decide—what drove you to decide that you were going to at least attempt to align yourself with the truth?

That's a really good question, and to me, it's a bit of a mystery. I mean, I wasn't brought up in a Christian household. I was attracted to Christianity, and I think that has something to do with the question you're asking.

So, I mean, for a long, long time, I found myself fascinated and admiring individuals who stand up for what they believe to be true and right, even though the whole world turns against them. I mean, I'm quite aware that I seem to have become such a person in some respects, but I remember, at the age of six, seven, or eight, when the movie King of Kings, produced by Cecil B. DeMille, came out in 1963, my father took me to see it at the local cinema. I was so moved by the story of Jesus and his crucifixion that, at the age of seven or eight, I came back home, was put to bed, and lay there staring at the ceiling weeping, saying to God—here I was praying, though no one taught me to pray—“Take it off Jesus and put it on me.”

I mean, it's a bit Messianic for that age, so I think somehow the idea that one is bound—and, you know, talk about being bound or obliged, it sounds like a burden. Yes, it is, but it's also a fulfillment. Shortly after that, this was, I was talking about age six or seven, age ten; when I was young I used to steal. I remember an occasion when I was at a boarding school at the age of, I don't know, 10, let's say, and I used to steal toy soldiers from some of my schoolmates. One evening, I was doing this again, and I suddenly thought to myself, "No, this is not satisfying; I don't want to do this; I don't want this stuff." And I put it back; I never stole again.

Now, again, why did I do that? In that case, it was a sense of this is not what I really want; it's not worth it.

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So, what makes you so—the radical claim then? We'll get to your book, but I want to go into the trustworthiness of its source, let's say, and how that might be established. The radical postmodern slash neo-Marxist claim is that all claims to truth are essentially masks for an underlying drive to power—a sort of demented Nietzscheanism. And that there's really no escaping your motivation; that even if you claim to be, as you're claiming now, to be the representative of a higher truth, all that is is a particularly subtle and insidious justification of your underlying motivation.

What makes you believe—or do you think—there is a truth that can be pursued independent of the subjective striving for dominance and power?

You quite rightly noted the neo-Marxists and the postmodernists say that it's all about power.

What they mean is they're all about power.

Yes, but the assumption they're making is that they, the neo-Marxists, know the truth and they have it right, which is why they want to dismantle that power. But what's missing here is any sense of self-criticism and any kind of self-awareness because the cynicism is directed completely externally. The cynicism with regard to other people implies, actually, an oblique affirmation that there is truth and there is morality; it is that we have it.

That's very interesting because the other problem with that, so essentially your observation is that the postmodern types, especially with more neo-Marxist twists, accuse every system and every other person other than themselves, let's say, of being motivated by nothing but power; yet they claim that that doesn't apply to themselves. And they implicitly claim that objection to the use of power is moral, but they absolutely never, as far as I can tell, explain why, which is actually why I was asking you that question.

It's like, well, if it's self-evident that power is wrong, and it's self-evident that you stand for something other than the use of power—which is obviously something both transcendent because it can unite people who are united against power, and higher in that it's morally preferable to power—then, exactly what the hell is this?

And that postmodernists simultaneously disavowed the existence of anything like a unifying meta-narrative, and they do that explicitly, even though they seem to have a unifying narrative in their objection to the use of power. But it's all left implicit; it's like an unconscious God as far as I can tell.

It's something like that. And so you elaborated out your relationship to transcendent truth in the confines of conscience, you said, with regards to the theft, but also to the feeling of admiration that overcame you when you were six or seven years old when you saw this particular movie.

And that's an interesting observation to me because I think often that our moral intuition is grounded in something like admiration, right? And that comes upon us; it's not something we create. You said that happened to you when you were six or seven. You learned that there was something to admire, and you didn't come from a religious background, and yet you became a professor of Christian ethics.

So, how did that unfold across time?

About this business of admiration—another reason I would give for justifying why I think of human life properly as being about the acknowledgment and the approximation and the calling towards truth, goodness, and beauty is that it makes those who adopt that position more beautiful. So, they become, you know, they—themselves—those who, and I think even postmodernism might agree with this if they were willing to be thoughtful—when you look upon, as it were, exemplars of the moral position you hold—those who have risked all for justice or for the truth, there's a beauty about them that is fascinating and draws you to them, and that is the question, you know.

I don't suppose cows or slugs react this way, but where's the question? Why is the cosmos so constructed that we're human beings who are really moved by people who do such things and sometimes moved to risk all to follow them and to do it likewise? That must tell us something really important about the cosmos.

Well, it seems to me, and I think your level of analysis is correct, that it's a truth that's metaphysical and objective and theological all at once—that the proper pathway forward, all things considered, is to be found in the establishment of a relationship with the truth. You might say, well, that's because if you're in accordance with reality, you can dance with reality in a much more effective manner than if you set yourself up in opposition to it.

Then you might say, well, that's such a fundamental truth that we're actually oriented instinctively to apprehend its presence when we see it. I think the reason that heroes in movies and heroes in literature—I think the idea of the King of Kings, that idea of a King of Kings even emerged—is it's the hierarchical ordering of that which is most admirable.

And what you have on the Christian front is this peculiar proclamation that what's most admirable is the union of what is highest with service to what is lowest and most helpless. You see that—I’ve been looking, for example, at shepherd imagery in the Old Testament because the shepherd is a common trope for, well, obviously for Christ, but also for David, who is a shepherd, and Abel, who is a shepherd. And a shepherd's a very interesting character because a shepherd back in more archaic times was a very brave person because the sheep that he guarded were preyed upon by vicious predators. Lions and wolves were very common in the Middle East, and shepherds were often called upon to defend their flock from very vicious predators with very primordial implements.

So, David, for example, obviously used a slingshot, which he also used to kill giants. The shepherd, at the same time, has to be the person who, despite that monstrous capacity to kill even wolves and lions, is capable of paying attention and caring for the most vulnerable possible creatures. In the shepherd's story, it's obviously lambs, but the idea that that's the lost among human beings or infants is an easy move from that position.

You look at David, Michelangelo's statue of David, and you see this combination of masculine capacity to stand firm in the face of terrible opposition and this ability to care for what's vulnerable. It seems to me that that idea is core to the Christian, like the Christian set of images and stories and it calls out admiration because it calls to the instinct to emulate that, and that's not a cognitive—it’s not exactly a cognitive process; it's way deeper than that.

Yes, yes. I became a Christian ethicist. Just to tell you that about—I said my first love was always history. I studied history at university in Oxford in the early ‘70s, but that period of history in this country—in Britain—was extremely disturbed.

My first term in Oxford, in October '73, I had to learn to drink my tea without sugar because the docks were all closed because the dockers were on strike. I had to prepare for my first set of exams by candlelight because the power stations were shut down because the coal miners were on strike. And that was when the violence in Northern Ireland was at its height.

So, there was an essential sense of national crisis. As a young Christian, I had decided to become a Christian when I was 13, and I was now aged 20 or so, I was asking myself what have the theological and moral resources of Christianity got to say to this national crisis. Looking back, I ended up pursuing a career as a professional ethicist because I wanted to work out my answers to those questions.

In some ways, Jordan, the book I've just written on colonialism, I feel that all that I've written, that probably is the book I was born to write.

You use this language of possession, you said, and insisted upon that. What do you mean by that and why did you use that terminology particularly?

Well, again, because it's not true that the experience—the phenomenons were not I chose to do X. The story of when I finally decided I didn't want to steal anymore; it was a sense that something came to me that was—the experience came to me and said, "Nigel, you don't really want to do this." I said, "No, I don't really want to do this." So, the sense of which, the word—talk of possession—being possessed is a more accurate description of the experience.

Right, right. Well, that seems to me to be a reflection of the intrinsic logos of being, and it's partly—you see that in science because there are phenomena that scientists study, but those phenomena are also those phenomena that call to the individual scientists, right—they'd pursue an interest that makes itself manifest to them in some ways independent of their will. That grip of interest—it manifests itself as the problems that beset you that will not let you lie in peace, and it manifests itself as the set of opportunities that beckon to you.

You know, I don't know if you know this, but the word phenomenon itself is derived from a Greek root, phainesthai, and it means to shine forth. There is this autonomy of problem and interest that's quite the mystery. If something bothers you, you can't just easily shake it off voluntarily. And if an opportunity compels you forward, you can capitalize that and use it as a source of motivation, and you could object to it and put it off to one side, which is a big mistake, but it's very, very difficult to convince yourself that you're interested in something that doesn't call to you.

So, there is that autonomy, right? And that's related to that idea of possession—that something seizes you and directs you, and you can act in concert with it or reject it. Those seem to be your options.

I was looking at the story of Jonah the other day, trying to sort it out. What an interesting story because it's very germane to what we're discussing. Jonah hears a call from God, and he's basically called upon to go to a city, Nineveh, and tell the people of Nineveh that they've wandered off the path and that they're going to be in serious trouble if they don't get their act back together.

And Jonah, being a wise man, just like most professors, let's say, decides there's no damn way he's going to go to a city and tell everyone there that they're wrong because that's not going to turn out very well for him. So, he decides to get the hell out of there and jumps on a boat, goes in the opposite direction, and then the storms rise around him.

The sailors conclude that there must be someone on board who's offended the gods or God, and they go to each person and inquire, and Jonah finally admits that God told him to stand up and say what he had to say to the demented citizens of Nineveh, and he decides he was going to escape. The sailors throw him off the boat, at which point the waves cease.

And that’s pretty—it's so interesting psychologically because what it implies is that if you are called upon to say something to set things right, even at the social level, and you don’t, the storms are going to rise around you. But that isn't all that happens to Jonah, right? The next thing that happens is that this terrible beast comes up from the abyss and swallows him and pulls him all the way to the bottom of the world. It's like the harrowing of hell in the Christian story.

The further inference there is that if something calls to you to speak the truth when things are corrupt, and you ignore it, not only will the storms rise around you, but you will end up somewhere so dismal you can hardly possibly imagine it. I can't help but think about that in light of the rise of totalitarian states in the 20th century because people in totalitarian states lied to each other and to themselves 100% of the time, and that's why they ended up in hell.

You know, when Jonah repents and decides to go to Nineveh, the whale spits him back up on shore. Because of that, he goes there and tells the truth. God then decides to not destroy the city. What that also implies is that if Jonah would have permanently abandoned his ethical responsibility to say what he was called upon to say, then an entire city would have been devastated.

That's a hell of a good lesson for the current times.

Yes, I mean, I guess my so—something that puzzles me—I don't know the answer to it—is why are some people so made that they respond to the call?

I mean, you caught Jonah. I'm thinking of a passage in the book of the prophet Jeremiah where the prophet is complaining to God. He's saying, "You give me your word, and I speak it, and everyone hates me and insults me. Bloody hell, I'm not going to do it anymore!" He says, "I'm sulking; I'm not doing it anymore." But then he says, "But when I do that, this thing burns within me; I cannot hold it in." So, some people are like that.

But there are others who are not like that, who somehow, when the flak arrives, they distance themselves; they keep themselves safe.

I don't know what the secret is.

Well, I think part of it is the consequence of a million micro-choices. There's this old idea that the blues singers in the U.S. had that you meet the devil at the crossroads, and the crossroads is obviously a choice point. What I saw happening in universities is that whenever the faculty were called on to withstand the pressures of the administration—especially as the administration became more and more woke—they retreated. It was a micro-retreat.

Yes, and so it was a failure to—and the rationale was, "Well, I don't need to make an issue out of this." But if you fail to make an issue out of a million micro-catastrophes, then it's a macro-catastrophe, and you're weak.

Now, it doesn't completely address the question because you might say, "Well, why do people turn to the right or the left in the initial stages of that decision process?" Like in childhood, in principle, when you were faced with your conscience in relationship to stealing those soldiers, you could have continued to steal them. You could have upped the ante; you could have doubled down like the Pharaoh, let's say, and pursued that pathway.

You know, the classic Christian response to that is that, well, we have free will. Whatever that means is our soul is granted the capacity to freely choose between up and down, and, you know, barring a better explanation, that's a pretty good one. Otherwise, you end up with notions of predestination and so forth.

So, I think there's a mystery there that we can't completely resolve. I certainly can't. We can observe it.

Shall we turn to your book itself?

Yes, please.

All right. So, there's eight chapters in the book, and you associate each of the chapters with a question. I thought we would just go through the chapters and the question.

So Chapter 1: well, let's start with the introduction—you already laid out the opposition to your work that arose when you started to investigate the ethical pros and cons of colonialism.

You decided to undertake a moral assessment of the British Empire project; you lay that out in the introduction. In Chapter 1, you start with motives, good and bad, and the question you put forward was: "Was the imperial endeavor driven primarily by greed and the lust to dominate?"

Well, that's the ultimate in postmodern questions, you might say, allied in that sense we discussed with the Marxists. And so was the imperial endeavor driven primarily by greed and the lust to dominate? Tell us what you concluded and why.

Yes, so this phrase "the lust to dominate" is the one that Saint Augustine used in the early 400s to describe the Roman Empire—that's why I used it. If you take your cue from Augustine, then that was the essence of Roman Empire. When I came to think about the history of the British Empire, that was in my mind. It seemed to me, certainly as far as the British Empire goes, to be completely inadequate to describe it as driven by either the simple lust to dominate or greed.

In fact, if you look at the variety of motives that moved Britons to travel over the world and to take control of various territories, the reasons are various. I make a point here that no one woke up in London one day and thought to themselves, "Oh, let's go and conquer the world." It wasn't like that; it was much more ad hoc in response to circumstance. I mean, there may be empires where someone wakes up in Berlin and decides to go and conquer Eastern Europe, but it wasn't always so.

There may be empires that are entirely but lost to dominate—maybe Genghis Khan was of that, and his Mongols were of that kind. But we need to be careful, very careful, I think, not to import a kind of one-fits-all theory and to say, "Well, this was an empire; this must have been like that."

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Okay, okay, so we could perhaps assume as a rule of thumb that the motivations of our ancestors were just as complex as our motivations. And then we could assume that the tendency to monomaniacally reduce all motivations to a single one is probably more reflective of the refusal to think in complex ways than it is—and what would you say—a manifestation of accuracy and diagnosis?

I see, I mean, I'm an admirer of Freud in many ways, but he was rather maniacal about sex. And the Marxist types and the neo-Marxists are absolutely monomaniacal about power. They assume that all human relationships are structured by power, except theirs, as we pointed out before. They extend that analysis to the economic and historical domains, and that really does simplify the endeavor, right?

It's also interesting from a religious perspective, I would say, because the atheist neo-Marxist postmodernists have elevated power to the status of a god. And I would say if the spirit of power is your god, that's about as close to an antichrist as you could possibly formulate. And that's a very interesting phenomenon as well. You might ask, well, in the aftermath of the Nietzschean death of God, what arises to replace that Central unifying tendency, let's say?

One possibility would be nihilistic disunity, which Nietzsche did describe as a looming danger—but the other is that another kind of monotheism will arise, and it does seem to me to be very self-serving because once you have decided that power is the only motivation, you never have to think about anything again. You can just interpret everything that happened in terms of oppression and victimization. And if you're smart, you can do that well. But that doesn't mean that it's helpful.

Yes, I just stick in this issue of power for a moment, Jordan, because I realize in retrospect a major—not the articulate theme running through my book and in fact all my recent thinking and writing is what I would call a certain realism. Taking the issue of power, my view is there ain't nothing wrong with power—we all want it. I mean, if we don't have power, we can't do anything, right? So, let's stop assuming that the power is always bad. The only question is whether we use power well or badly, justly or unjustly.

The postmodern critics obviously oppose certain kinds of power, but they need to be honest about the fact that they oppose it because they want power for themselves. The question posed to them is, "Will you use it well or badly?" My experience of them, insofar as they've criticized me, is that they abuse power very broadly and very casually. But, well, if it's the only motivation, then why not use it?

I always think of it as self-justification for the use of compulsion. I think we could also distinguish two kinds of power: there's ability and there's the use of compulsion. And you pointed out, as one of the motivations that drove the British Empire, you pointed out the desire to trade.

Now, a skeptical Marxist would say, "Well, there's no difference between trade and greed," and so you've undermined your own argument. But if I have something valuable to offer that you can't produce and vice versa, and we trade, in principle, we're both better off. I mean, that's the classic free market argument. And I don't see anything at all that reeks of compulsion in that endeavor.

I think you have to be damn cynical to think that all production and exchange can be reduced to mutual exploitation. It doesn't account for productivity, right? There's no productivity there, so it's a foolish theory.

Greed is excessive desire for whatever it is; it's a lust. And the question of when we all—everybody, I think, wants to flourish. We want to profit in some way; nothing wrong with that at all. But yes, our desire to flourish and profit can become excessive when it's at other people's expense or when it's unjust. So, let's distinguish the desire to profit or flourish from greed.

Well, and so I would also say we could point to a natural ethos that emerges as a consequence of repeated trade. We're trading repeatedly in this conversation, and hopefully, I'm not dominating, and hopefully, you're not dominating. And what would happen if one of us did is that the conversation would degenerate.

If we can exchange mutually and reciprocally, then we can play a game that's self-sustaining and that's growing. The same thing applies on the trade front. So, I would say there's a natural limit—an intrinsic natural limit—to the use of exploitation in economic exchange because if you do nothing but exploit your trading partner, the next time you come to trade, you're going to fail.

Yeah, and in the early decades, centuries of overseas colonial endeavor, the British Europeans were on the weaker side. Indian merchants—Indian, in fact, the East India Company only got a foothold, a toehold in India because it was granted them by native Indian rulers. So, at that point, the British were the weaker, not the stronger.

So that the role of the mercantile impulse, which is an impulse for mutually beneficial trade in the expansion of the empire, is radically understated by the Marxist types. Partly because they don't distinguish trade in any other economic enterprise from greed and power.

Yeah, I think, you know—

Go ahead.

I mean, let me be honest here and say, for example, in the use of native African labor in southern Africa and elsewhere in the British Empire in the 19th century, there was no doubt—well, it's highly probable and one needs to examine each case—that native labor was exploited—that's to say the terms of their employment were unfair, and they were forced to do things they didn't want to do, to which my answer is, well, yes, I'm sure that happened.

But it also happened in Britain itself, and it happens, no doubt, in contemporary India and Nigeria. So, the exploitation of labor through unfair terms and conditions wasn't a particularly colonial sin.

So, okay, so now let's go to Chapter Two: From Slavery to Anti-Slavery. The question you posed there was: should we speak of colonialism and slavery in the same breath as if they were the same thing?

Now one of the weird tensions that emerges for me there—and I've tried to think this through clearly—I'm reading at the moment a multi-volume history of slavery put out, I think, by Cambridge University Press. My sense historically—and you can correct me if you think I'm wrong here—is that slavery is a ubiquitous feature of human societies, and the conscious realization that slavery itself is intrinsically wrong, even in the case, let's say, of prisoners of war or debtors—that notion emerged with great difficulty. It manifested itself most profoundly in the UK probably in the person of Wilberforce and the Christian Protestant evangelists who made a very strong case that slavery itself was intrinsically immoral.

The consequence of that was that eventually the British Navy fought for about 175 years on the high seas to make slavery a counterproductive enterprise. One of the things that terrifies me about the radical leftist enterprise is that they really risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater because whatever it was that impelled Wilberforce and then the entire UK to stand against slavery is the only thing we know of in the entire history of the world that actually did stand against slavery with any degree of success.

So, what other cases do you think can be made that colonialism and slavery were not the same thing? And why do you think there is this insistence on the radical left side to deny the very process that actually did free slaves insofar as they've become free in recent times?

So, Jordan, I think the identification of colonialism with slavery is similar to the 1619 Project in the United States, which identifies the foundations of the U.S. with fundamentally racist and therefore fundamentally illegitimate. I think what's happened is that probably through Black Lives Matter, the killing of George Floyd in 2020 in Minneapolis, the Black Lives Matter movement came across the Atlantic with no change of clothes, landed in Britain and our equivalent is to say contemporary Britain is systemically racist. And the reason it is systemically racist is that we continue to revere our colonial past, let's say, by having a statue of Cecil Rhodes.

As we all know, colonialism was essentially about slavery, which was based on a racist view of Africans as sub-humans. So colonialism equals slavery equals racism, and that's the foundations of Britain, and that's why we have to repudiate our colonial past—pull down the statue of Rhodes, pull down John A. Macdonald in Canada, and somehow therefore we liberate ourselves from systemic racism. That’s the logic behind the colonialism and slavery mantra.

So, in this country, those two things are commonly talked about as if they were the same thing. My very simple point in that second chapter is to say, "Wait a moment." As you've just said, Jordan, yes, for 150 years, some British people—by no means all—were involved in slave trading and profiting from slavery in the West Indies. But from 1807 onwards, first the slave trade, then slavery itself were abolished by the British. For the rest of the Empire's existence, for another 150 years, roughly, the British were involved in anti-slavery.

So you cannot identify British colonialism with slavery because for the second half of its life, it was anti-slavery. Yes, slavery in one form or another and some forms more were more humane than others has been around since virtually the dawn of time, practiced on every continent by black, brown, red-skinned, and yellow-skinned people as well as white-skinned people. The Comanche nation in the southwest of the U.S. ran what one historian has called a vast slave economy in the 1700s.

The Arabs were involved in slavery; Africans were selling African slaves to their Roman and Arab masters before they ever sold them to Europeans. So, we may be dismayed at the fact that so many Europeans and British people, up until the late 1700s, accepted this institution and the fact of slave trading, but we have to put it in context. Everyone did it, including slaves who escaped from the plantations in Jamaica into the forests of the interior; some of them kept slaves of their own. That's how common was the practice.

What happened in the late 1700s was that for the first time in history, some nations—not just Britain, also Denmark and France—came to the view that owning other people as your property, without them having any rights, was morally wrong. For the first time in history, these nations, eventually led by Britain, abolished the slave trade and slavery. Then Britain used its imperial power, its power for humanitarian purposes, to abolish slavery from Brazil, across the Atlantic to Africa, India, to Malaysia. So, power can be a good thing, and in that case, it was used for humanitarian purposes.

The irony here is, Jordan, as you suggested just before I started speaking, the only people here was—in that case—the empire and those humanitarians who were lobbying for the imperial power to be used as opposed to slavery; they were the progressive people of their day.

It also seems to me—and you're in a great position to comment on this—so first of all we have to accept, to some degree, that the willingness to use power and compulsion and to keep slaves is relatively ubiquitous across the entire human family, let's say, and that opposition to that emerges with difficulty and rarely. Then you have to ask yourself, what are the preconditions for that kind of opposition?

Certainly, the case with Wilberforce, as far as I can tell, was that he was driven by the conviction that all men and women are made in the image of God and that it was a violation of a transcendent ideal—that slavery, in and of itself, is a violation of a transcendent ideal. That is something that's deeply rooted in the Christian tradition.

Deeper than that, I mean there's certainly the dawning of objection to the notion of slavery and tyranny in the Book of Exodus that's much older than Christianity. But it's still an idea that emerged with difficulty, and I have tried to think my way around this, right? Because I don't like to multiply unnecessary metaphysical presumptions, but I can't see at all that opposition to slavery would have emerged the way it did in Britain if it wouldn't have been able to draw on a well of metaphysical and religious presupposition that was predicated on the idea that each person has a soul and that that soul, in some manner, has a divine value.

Yeah, so you're quite right. The main impulse for the abolition movement was Christian Evangelical Christian, and so John Wesley, in 1774, published a treatise called "Thoughts on Slavery." On the front page of the treatise is a quotation from the Book of Genesis where, is it Cain who says something like, "Am I my brother's keeper?" The implication being that all human beings, regardless of race and cultural development, are equally children of the one God. That was clearly the main conviction that drove Evangelical Christians, nonconformist Christians initially, to found the abolition movement.

Yes, I didn't know about that comment by Wesley, so that ties the story of Cain and Abel in with the opening chapters of the earlier parts of Genesis. You have the proposition that human beings are made in the image of God and you have the later proposition in the Cain and Abel story that that means you have a divine obligation to act in relationship to others with that divine value in mind.

That's right.

And so I know we get—we're getting on to Chapter Three on Race here, Jordan. This Christian conviction of the fundamental basic equality of all human beings, regardless of race, that persists throughout the British Empire. There was, in the second half of the 1800s, the development of a contrary view, which you might call scientific or biological racism, which holds that you have a hierarchy of races and the white races are naturally biologically superior to non-white races.

So you have a kind of permanent fixed racial hierarchy. But this notion of some people's being naturally inferior vied with the Christian notion but never displaced it. For example, I was reading and I caught this in my book, an account of debates in the Parliament of Canada in the 1880s, and it's reported by the historian that every time someone would stand up and say that the Native Americans are naturally inferior, others would stand up, and other MPs would stand up and say, "No, that's not British; that is not Christian."

Yeah, well, that's an interesting—there's a lot of issues there of great interest. I mean, one is that the white supremacist movement in the late 1800s was grounded in the quasi-scientific tradition and not in the Christian tradition, so that's pretty interesting for those who think that science by necessity will offer a morally superior view to, say, a mythologically predicated metaphysics.

And the eugenicist movement was a scientific movement as well, and it was predicated on a misapprehension of Darwinian presumptions and a misuse of the notion of survival of the fittest—fittest being equated with, let's say, most successful and dominant right now.

And those concepts are by no means equal. So a scientist would object, "Well, they were bad scientists!" There's some truth in that, but it's still interesting that the dominant form of explicit racism emerged out of the confines of the scientific community and not within the confines of the religious community.

And so, the question that you pose in Chapter Three was, was the British Empire essentially racist?

One of the things that struck me about Wilberforce and Wesley—this is particularly true in relationship to India—is that even though by the time they were operating and agitating against slavery, there were extremely potent economic reasons to keep India under the thumb of Britain, so to speak, there was still a tremendous amount of impetus on the moral side to translate the British Empire into something like self-government for the inhabitants of India as rapidly as possible. And that's, of course, a radical improvement over the situation that obtained before the British occupied India because it wasn't like it was an equality paradise of equality of opportunity prior to the emergence of British power.

That's right. I mean, as I’m frank in the book, yes, the British Empire did contain all sorts of racial prejudice, but my point is it didn't only contain that. It also contained, as we've just discussed, a major movement for the abolition of slavery, and later on in the 1800s, a movement of concern for the plight of native peoples who were suffering under the sudden impact of modernity based on a racially egalitarian view.

Also, yes, you sometimes get Britons who are dismissive and contemptuous of native cultures, but on the other hand, in India, for example, you have Britons who are fascinated by ancient Sanskrit, Hindu culture, who, unlike Indians, would alone let the ancient monuments disintegrate, preserve the monuments.

Then you get this very—in case you think that the British imperialists were constantly imposing their unwanted culture on native peoples, you have this incident in 1829, I think, when the East India Company wants to invest in building a Hindu college devoted to ancient indigenous Sanskrit learning, and you have a progressive Indian social reformer, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, write to the Governor-General and say, "Look, Sanskrit learning is benighted; what Indians need is exposure to European science, in which Europe has become preeminent."

Just think of that for a moment. In this case, the Brits want to support indigenous learning, and the Indian says, "No, we need the new stuff, the European stuff."

So, yes, there was racism, but there was also respect for, fascination with, and admiration for native cultures.

Also, I think the question that you posed was whether it was essentially racist. Now if it's racist by error and by corruption, that's very different than saying, as you pointed out, the 1619 project, which is making the case that the essential motivation was both racist and slave-owning, let’s say predicated on this need to dominate and oppress. There's a big difference between saying that things might degenerate in that direction even frequently and saying, "No, that was all it was."

That's that essential mania again that we were talking about.

Yes, and so another, I would say, historical fact that mitigates against the essentially racist accusation is the persistence of the Commonwealth after the Empire abandons its direct political control. I mean, you have to ask yourself, it's not as if the Commonwealth is as tight or effective as it might be, but as far as a loose collection of nations on the international front goes, the Commonwealth is pretty damn voluntary in its structure and also an aggregation of the countries that function better on average than almost all countries in the world. And that includes India, interestingly enough, which is a very complicated country and hard to get all moving in a productive direction simultaneously.

Yep. Just going back to your earlier point about the kind of—the liberal vision of an Empire that would, as it were, relax into independent states. The British learned their lesson from the American War of Independence in the 1770s and ‘80s. In my book, I quote free Scotsmen, all of whom ended up governing cities in India—Madras, Aligarh, Bombay in the 1820s. Every one of them can be found writing just to each other or saying to their subordinates, "Look, we aren’t going to be here forever. We British can’t rule here forever. All we can hope to do is to help build decent government, leave with grace, and carry the goodwill of the Indians."

Then, from 1860 onwards, as you, as a Canadian will know, when Canada became a dominion, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa all became increasingly independent. By 1930, they were virtually independent states, and India was put on the same track after the First World War.

So, yes, some Britons wanted to cling on to imperial power too long, but there was also a kind of liberal vision whereby the Empire would relax into what was being talked about as a Commonwealth of nations as early as 1916.

Hmm, yeah. Well, it's very interesting to speculate on the motives for that emergence too. I mean, you know, you don't want to be naive when you look at the historical record, but it seems to me to be undeniable that a special, again in the impulse that gave rise to people like Wesley and Wilberforce, there was this notion of the universal dignity of mankind and the idea that if we could all cooperate voluntarily towards the highest possible ends, that that would be much preferable to any state of preferable—of maintenance and productivity and ethical desirability to any state that might be imposed by force.

So, I think there was a positive conviction, a liberal conviction, plus a kind of wise political recognition that Britain didn't have the power to impose itself. It lost the war against the Americans in the early 1770s and it recognized it didn't have the power to make colonies do exactly what it wanted, so it had to negotiate.

Well, so the cynical view would be, well, because Britain couldn't exercise power, it settled for the second-best choice, but that's pretty damn cynical because there are other ways of being foul and corrupt that don't involve necessarily the use of direct power. And it's quite interesting that India, for example, still maintains very positive relationships with the UK.

Yes, it does. And I, myself, think that since power is a fact of life, the question is whether you use it badly or well—I think those who recognize the limits of their power are wise, and many people don't.

Chapter 4: Land Settlers and Conquest. How far was the Empire endeavor based on the conquest of land?

In North America and in Australia, to some extent in Africa, yes, there was conquest. As an ethicist, as a theorist about just war, that doesn't settle the matter ethically because I have to know, you know, what were the reasons for the conquest? But my reading of what happened in North America was that the English colonists in the 1600s were pretty brutal and pretty unscrupulous in taking lands from native peoples.

But there was a moral revolution, as we talked about, at the end of the 1700s. In Australia, I think certainly colonial governors and officials tried very hard to prevent settlers from seizing lands unjustly from natives. In the 1800s, the principle was that you don’t seize territory; you negotiate and you make treaties. In 1800s, that’s what happened in Canada.

So there was a—when people talk about the British Empire, they talk about it as if it was one thing. When people say it was essentially racist or essentially exploitative or essentially about conquest, I have to say, well, no. It was all sorts of things. You do have the unjust seizure of territory, but in the case of India, for example, the British never settled there in large numbers. In 1900, when there were about 300 million Indians, there were only about 164,000 Britons.

So, there were conquests in India, but again one has to ask, well, was the use of force in this case justified? Sometimes conquests are justified. I mean, the Allies conquered Nazi Germany in 1945. Most of us would say that was justified.

Conquest is not necessarily wrong, but there's no doubt that some land was taken unjustly from natives. But let's put this in context again. The mass movement of people and the trespass on other people's territory had been a fact of life throughout history.

Within the North American continent, Indian peoples were in the business of displacing other Indian peoples. The Iroquois, I think in the 1600s, expanded. They had their own, if you like, their own empire that was expanding. The Zulu in the 1820s in Africa pushed other African peoples off territory. Not justifying that. I'm not saying it was good. But when the Europeans did it with the British sword, I'm not saying it was good, but it happened a lot. Because, unlike the world we have today, we didn't have stable states with fixed boundaries. Things were much more fluid and uncertain.

But it’s not the case that the British Empire was built entirely on conquest or entirely on the unjust seizure of land. It depends on the case. In some cases—in Canada, for example—the session of land by native Canadians was agreed by treaty, and partly because inadvertently, Europeans brought disease to North America, and native peoples had died out in droves. The land that had been occupied was then vacant, and it suited native Canadians to cede this land that they had no use for.

It depends on the case.

Number five: Cultural Assimilation and Genocide. How did the British Empire involve genocide?

This is a hot issue in Canada because our own Prime Minister has basically defined our country and our culture as intrinsically genocidal, and that's an accusation that's causing no end of trouble, but nowhere near as much trouble as it's going to cause. It's a crucial issue. So, what did you conclude on that front?

Everything depends on how we define genocide, Jordan. I think, first of all, following what international law says about genocide, genocide has to be intentional, right? So, if we're talking about the mass annihilation of real people, my understanding is that no genocide occurred with the British Empire—not even in Tasmania.

I'm not alone in thinking that there are Australian historians who also think the use of the word "genocide" to describe the annihilation—virtually annihilation—of Tasmanian Aborigines was genocide—that's not appropriate. As for Canada—

Why not in Tasmania if that's the most crucial case? That could obviously be a reasonable place to focus. So, why is that inappropriate in the case of Tasmania?

Because it's quite clear that the colonial government sought to protect Aborigines; there was no intention on the part of the colonial government to exterminate Aborigines, and the evidence I've read says that even among settlers, yes, there were some who were so hostile to natives they wanted to exterminate them, but that was not a majority opinion.

To describe the reason the Aborigines—why Aborigines were virtually annihilated—not completely—as because of an intentional campaign to exterminate them is just not true. Many of them, of course, died because of disease and because of displacement, but it was not an intentional campaign of extermination.

In Canada, predicated on explicit state policy—no, no, not at all. The state did its best to prevent the abuse of natives by settlers. The problem was, as was often the case with colonial government, it was too weak, not too strong. It didn't have the manpower or the resources to stop what was going on on the frontier, which was wild and lawless.

We should point out, as in the case of slavery, that explaining ethnocentrism isn't actually a problem. The problem is explaining any resistance to ethnocentrism. That’s the miracle. I mean, human beings have very distinct in-group propensities, and that seems to characterize us at every level of social organization.

The probability that when one group meets another, there's going to be a certain degree of dehumanization of the other, to use the leftist tropes, that's almost certain. But there is that countervailing position that we've been elaborating, which extends a hand of welcome and an invitation to trade to people who aren't part of our particular ethnic group, and that's a non-trivial modifying force to the expression of that desire to dominate and destroy.

Absolutely. Just to expand a bit on that—yes, the human propensity to identify with one group against another and to feel superior to the other—whether it's football clubs or nations or races or churches or whatever—have you, that's a universal human propensity. We all like to do it because it makes us feel bigger and better.

But when you're thinking about what happened when Europeans encountered natives and Aborigines in Australia or Native Americans or Canadians in North America, you need to bear two things in mind. First of all, the cultural gap was vast. I mean, Europe at that time was at the pinpoint of modernity in terms of technology and science and weaponry and whatever, and they met people who, in terms of cultural development, were much less developed. So the cultural gap was just vast, and these people don’t understand each other.

You have weak government authority, so there's not much to control your encounter. The sense of threat was high, and where people feel insecure and don’t understand each other, they don’t have the same customs, conflict is almost inevitable, and it's uncontrolled, and that was tragic.

When you're thinking about this encounter between different ethnic groups, the inclination to be dismissive and hostile to another group is intensified because of those conditions.

Right, yes. Well, and I would also say, too, we don't want to underestimate the degree to which many of the earliest adventurers on the colonial frontier were narcoleptics and psychopaths who left their own country because no one could tolerate them, and so there is a certain heightened percentage of the worst who left first because no one could stand them where they came from, and they had the opportunity to let their sadistic motivations run free on the frontier.

So, yeah, when we talk about colonialism, I try to avoid the 'ism' because it implies again something that was unitary. We're talking about colonial imperial government in London, colonial government in Ottawa, and missions, traders, and adventurers. We're talking about all sorts of different people with different attitudes, and you're right—the story in North America and Africa was sometimes of independent private adventurers.

Part of the reason for imposing colonial government is to try and control the encounter between Europeans and natives in the hope that you might be able to protect natives.

Right, right. Well, number six was Free Trade, Investment, Exploitation. Was the empire driven fundamentally by the mode of economic exploitation?

I think we've covered that, so let's move to number seven: Government Legitimacy and Nationalism. Chapter seven: since colonial government was not democratic, did that make it illegitimate?

What I say about that, Jordan, is I think any good government has to be government for the people. Any government that wants to serve the people's interests needs to understand what it is that people need, and it needs to be able to hear from the people so that it forms policies that serve the people's interests.

So there needs to be communication between the bottom and the top, and democracy is one way of doing that. It’s one way of holding executive government to account, but it’s not the only way, and I just think it’s quite implausible to suppose that sufficient political justice only visited the earth with the birth of the American Republic in the late 1700s, early 1800s.

So the fact that a government isn't democratic, to my mind, doesn't make it illegitimate. Mass democracy was only developing in the Western world in the 1800s, and in Europe, the late 1800s. I mean, Britain didn't give the vote equally to men and women until 1928.

So if the Empire wasn't democratic, it was partly because Britain was only becoming democratic. The last thing I'd say about that is that native peoples sometimes recognize that even the government that isn't democratic is good enough.

So, in the 1950s and ’60s, no one knows how many, but there were several million Chinese who fled the Chinese mainland because it was then in a state of civil war or anarchy. Where did they flee? They fled into the British colony of Hong Kong. They did it voluntarily—not because Hong Kong was democratic but because at least there was the rule of law and the sufficient stability to build a decent life.

Your case essentially is I think is that even if there is a hierarchy of legitimate government—with highly functional democratic states being at the pinnacle—that doesn't mean there's no differentiation whatsoever between states that haven't reached that level of development for one reason or another, and that would exactly exemplify the case of Hong Kong.

Absolutely. I do have to go back to your biblical illusions earlier, Jordan, of course, in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament—a common metaphor for the king is shepherd. So even back there, there's a notion that a king, a good king, is a shepherd of his people.

And sometimes, sometimes it happens that he's also subordinate to a higher authority. I mean, you even saw that among the Mesopotamians. The Mesopotamians regarded their emperor, if he was exercising his sovereignty properly, as an avatar of Marduk; and Marduk had eyes around his head so he could see in all directions, and he could speak truthfully and magically.

So the Mesopotamians had already figured out that there was a principle of legitimate sovereignty, and it had something to do with the ability to pay attention to everything and to speak honestly.

Yes, so this goes back to our earlier discussion, Jordan, because yes, a good ruler is one who recognizes that he is subject to the requirements of goodness, truth, and beauty. The human conscience is not always sensitive, but sometimes a ruler's conscience is sensitive, and that's why one of the reasons why I remain a supporter of the monarchy in Britain is because, as we saw at the coronation ceremony a few days ago, the symbol of the head of state gets on his knees to receive authority from above, which is given to him, and I think that's a fantastic—a really important political symbol.

Right. Well, and it's comprehensible too when you put it in terms of something like an aggregation of virtues, say. Well, even if you're not explicitly religious in the classic monotheistic sense, you could say well a good ruler should be subordinate to the principles of truth and beauty and justice and courage and the panoply of more or less universally recognized virtues and that those are, in some sense, rulers above him or her.

Yes, yes.

Chapter 8: Justified Force and Pervasive Violence. Was the Empire essentially violent and was its violence pervasively racist and terroristic?

Okay, first thing to say is all states depend upon the threat of the use of violence because states are in the business of suppressing unjust behavior, whether within or threats from without. Unfortunately, in the world we have, some people do abuse others, and sometimes they have to be forced to stop, and therefore force and sometimes violent force has to be used. So let's recognize that as true of all states.

Next thing to do is to recognize that, as I said, in the past—whether in Britain or in Britain's colonies in the 17th and 1800s—governments were, compared to the states we have now, very weak, limited resources. When you've got a weak state, the threat of violence erupting and the whole system disintegrating is high, and therefore, in greater insecurity, the greater use of violent force is morally permissible. The only reason that we, in Canada or the states or in the West in Europe can afford to be very restrictive in the use of force within our own territories is because we're very strong states, and we don't have a lot of violence on the streets, but in the past, that wasn't so.

So, there's that. The third thing to say is whether violence is justified or not depends on the circumstances of the case. So I give some instances in that chapter of imperial violence that I think was quite unjustified. But then I say the British Empire was at its most violent between 1939 and ’45 during the Second World War when, as Canadians and Australians and Indians and Africans well know, the British resistance to