The Empire Strikes Back

Public controversy over the colonial past is really about the political present. Colonial history is being used in aid of present political causes. That is why it is controversial. In my recent, British experience, left-wing, “progressive” historians are wont to pretend that the controversy is something of a confection, whipped up by conservatives for grubby political reasons. They present themselves as the dispassionate, professional guardians of historical truth in contrast to reactionary polemicists. And they display an astonishing lack of political and ethical self-awareness.

Twenty years ago, the eminent Australian historian Stuart Macintyre did exactly that. In his book The History Wars (2003), he tended to describe the public controversy over Australia’s colonial past as something stoked up by politically conservative “history warriors”. Note: the warring is all done by the conservatives; the warred-against are merely professional historians innocently going about their business. However, at one point the thought that professional historiography might be biased—indeed, distorted—by left-leaning political convictions escapes this narrative and flickers across the page. When discussing Keith Windschuttle’s exposure of historians’ exaggerations of the violence suffered by Aboriginal people at the hands of settlers, Macintyre offers excuses for some of them. But then he comments, “It is harder to explain why all the errors are in one direction”—that is to say, why all the errors exaggerate settler violence, rather than diminish it.[1] The obvious explanation is that the errant historians had a political interest in over-egging the sins of the settlers. Yet Macintyre declines to pursue the matter further and leaves the question hanging.

I do not complain about the political uses of history. Indeed, the reason why I have sought to correct the historical record about the British Empire in my 2023 book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, is political: to counter a relentlessly negative narrative that corrodes faith in liberal democratic, Western states at a time when illiberal, authoritarian powers are flexing their intimidatory muscles across the Taiwan Strait and exercising violent ones in Ukraine. So, I make no complaint about political use. I make it only about political abuse—such as Stuart Macintyre saw, without recognising.

 

II

One form of abuse is the covert operation of unfair ethical bias. A glaring instance of this can be found in recent historiography about pre- and early colonial history in North America, where some historians are wont to present Europeans as responsible for introducing sin to an indigenous Eden. As Alan Taylor, an historian at the University of Virginia, has written, “[t]o highlight the social inequities and environmental degradation of our own society, some romantics depict pre-1492 Americans as ecological and social saints living in perfect harmony with one another and with their nature”.[2]

One such romantic is Pekka Hämäläinen, the Finnish-born Professor of American History at Oxford University, who exhibits symptoms of what I call ethical schizophrenia: the balm of indulgence is given the natives, while the acid of cynicism is poured over the Europeans in general and the English in particular. In his 2022 book Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, Hämäläinen gives over the first two chapters to the history of North America before the advent of the Europeans, titling the second chapter, “Egalitarian continent”. Here we learn that ancient indigenous peoples focused on “reciprocal relationships” between humans and the non-human world, “shunned political centralization”, and created vast regional webs of “reciprocity and sharing”.[3] They engaged merely in “rivalry”. In time, however, the “extension of reach and ambition” produced more hierarchical orders able to mobilise labour on a large scale. Accordingly, in Mesoamerica political centralisation gave rise to empires that “drew people into their orbit through military might”.[4] In the eleventh century AD slaves were used to construct the city of Cahokia at the junction of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, where “[a]n aristocracy began to command lesser people and their labour, possibly through violence”.[5] At this time, we are told with clinical dispassion, “approximately 270 people were ritually sacrificed and buried in a series of mass graves to accompany elite persons in death. In another instance, 118 female captives were brought to Cahokia and killed”.[6] Nevertheless, by the time Europeans appeared on the scene in the sixteenth century, the indigenes of North America had learned the error of their social and political ways:

North American Indians had experimented with ranked societies and all-powerful spiritual leaders and had found them wanting and dangerous. They had opted for more horizontal, participatory, and egalitarian ways of being in the world—a communal ethos available to everyone who was capable of proper thoughts and deeds and willing to share their possessions. Their ideal society was a boundless commonwealth that could be—at least in theory—extended to outsiders, infinitely.[7]

There are many reasons to be sceptical of Hämäläinen’s romantic story here. First of all, the social and political organisation of Indians at the time of their first encounter with Europeans was the result less of a political experiment and enlightenment than of a strategy for survival necessitated by overpopulation, environmental degradation, and a subsistence crisis in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.[8] Next, observe how Hämäläinen coyly presents the indigenous peoples as engaged in “rivalry”, but never war; and how their empires, merely “extending their reach and ambition”, “drew people into their orbit” through military might, rather than invading, killing, and enslaving them. Observe, too, the matter-of-fact reportage of mass human sacrifice, quite uncoloured by emotive, evaluative adjectives. And as for the boundless commonwealth open to anyone “capable of proper thoughts and deeds”, that sounds entirely innocent—until one realises that exactly the same could have been said of the later European empires with their missions civilisatrices, and until one wonders what became of the victims of indigenous empires who did not care to be civilised and incorporated.

Then, when it comes to describing Europe and the expansion of European empires into the Americas, Hämäläinen’s language and tone change dramatically. Bearing the title, “Blind conquests”, Chapter 3 speaks of “ruthless warlords” reducing peasants to serfs in the tenth century, of “[w]ar … glorified as a holy affair suffused with notions of duty, honor, and loyalty”, and of the Spanish conquering the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century with “cruelty and brutality”. And talking about “military imperialism [being] coupled with biological imperialism”, it also unjustly conflates deliberate aggression with the inadvertent spread of disease.[9]

In contrast to this implausible, partisan account, the even-handed Alan Taylor writes:

…it would be difficult (and pointless) to make the case that either the Indians or the Europeans of the early modern era were by nature or culture more violent and “cruel” than the other. Warfare and the ritual torture and execution of enemies were commonplace in both native America and early modern Europe.[10]

If colonists sometimes used cruel violence to terrorise Indians, they also used it to discipline their own: when Virginian colonists who had deserted to the Algonquians were recaptured in 1612, some were burned at the stake or had their bones methodically broken on the wheel. Moreover, the Indians had their own cruelties, too. When the Iroquois sought to replenish their numbers after devastation by disease in the 1630s and 1640s, they would raid neighbouring Indian peoples for captives in so-called “mourning wars”. These may have been motivated by grief and aimed at “restoring spiritual balance to their world by transforming others into Iroquois”, as Hämäläinen puts it,[11] but the “transformation” in question was brutally coercive and sadistically cruel. Female and juvenile captives, having been torn from their homes, were literally adopted as Iroquois. But adult males were less fortunate, being ritually “adopted” by torture and cannibalism: “tied to a stake … their new relatives took turns to ‘caress’ them with firebrands. Women cut up the corpses and boiled the pieces in kettles so that the Iroquois could absorb the prisoners’ spiritual power.”[12]

Hämäläinen’s abuse here consists of unfair ethical discrimination, downplaying the aggression, imperial expansion, violence, and cruelty of native Americans, while highlighting those of the European colonists.

 

III

Some reckon we should keep history and ethics well apart. I am inclined to think that unrealistic. We humans are moral beings; we cannot help but react critically to historic instances of grave injustice, excessive violence, and wanton cruelty. And if we pretend not to judge, we will judge anyway, but covertly.

We probably cannot prevent ourselves from expressing moral judgments as we narrate the past. So rather than keep ethics out of history, we should aspire to judge well rather than badly. By good judgment, I mean two things. One is the recognition that human beings are always in the process of learning morally, and that some moral truths obvious to us were just not obvious to our ancestors. To us, for example, it is obvious that slavery is wrong, insofar as it makes one person the absolutely disposable property of another. However, to most of our ancestors up until the second half of the eighteenth century, slavery was a fact of life—an institution that had existed all over the world since time immemorial. There could be good or bad forms of it—some granting slaves certain rights, others not; some being merciful, others being cruel—but the institution itself was taken for granted. It took time for the idea that slavery is essentially wrong and could be abolished to gain social and political traction. Our moral clarity is the gift of a long process of moral evolution, which should make us humble and grateful. Recognising that is one element of good moral judgment.

A second, related element is the recognition that the circumstances of the past were often very different from our own. When reading of our forebears in the sixteenth and seventeen centuries—indeed, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—we may well be appalled by the frequency and level of violence in which they indulged. But before we rush to judgment, we need to pause and consider the difference in circumstances. We need to exercise our historical imagination, transcending the environment we happen to live in and take for granted. The truth is that today in Australia, as in the UK, most people enjoy degrees of health, wealth, and security that are unprecedented in our own history and unequalled in many parts of the world. Compared to our grandparents, even our parents, most of us are extraordinarily fortunate. Our good fortune owes a lot to the fact that we live in states that are strong enough to deter attacks by external enemies and suppress attacks by internal ones. It was not always so, and it behooves us to remember that. The world we now inhabit is not eternal, but contingent and creaturely. It was built and bequeathed to us. Which should make us at once humble and grateful. And it should also make us more empathetic and less self-righteous towards those in the past who did not conform to our norms.

We cannot help but judge the past by our present ethics. We can make sure, however, that our present ethics are informed by a humble sensitivity to human limits and frailty and by a historical imagination that enable us to enter sympathetically into the moral constraints and demands of circumstances very different from our own. That is, we can ensure that our morality is not self-righteous.

 

IV

So, when we come to think about British colonial expansion in general, and expansion into Australia in particular, we ought to set it in its historical context. An important part of that context is the universality of empire, which is a single political entity where a metropolitan people and state dominate a plurality of subordinate states and peoples. Until the end of the First World War, empire was arguably the most common form of political organisation. It had been around since shortly after the dawn of time, had appeared on every continent, and was practised by people of every skin colour.

The Assyrians were doing empire in the Middle East over four thousand years ago. They were followed by the Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Persians. In the sixth century BC the Carthaginians established a series of colonies around the Mediterranean. Then came the Athenians, followed by the Romans, and after them the Byzantine rump.

Empire first appeared in China in the third century BC and, despite periodic collapses, still survives today. From the seventh century AD Muslim Arabs invaded east as far as Afghanistan and west as far as central France. In the fifteenth century empire proved very popular: the Ottomans were doing it in Asia Minor, the Mughals in the Indian subcontinent, the Incas in South America and the Aztecs in Mesoamerica.

In North America, the Iroquois reconquered the St Lawrence valley in the late 1600s before expanding westward as far as present-day Illinois. Shortly afterwards the Comanche began extending their imperial sway over much of what is now Texas, eventually running what one historian has called “a vast slave economy”.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic to the south the Asante were expanding their control in West Africa and in the 1820s King Shaka led the Zulus in scattering other southern African peoples to several of the four winds.

Further east, Austronesians had begun to expand from the mainland of south-east Asia about six thousand years ago. Their Polynesian successors proceeded to colonise the Pacific, eventually landing in what is now New Zealand in the thirteenth century AD and opening what Michael King calls “the Maori colonial era”.[13] Six centuries later, in 1835, the Maori colonised the Chatham Islands by slaughtering about ten per cent of the Moriori population and enslaving the rest.[14] I assume that aboriginal peoples in Australia, too, had their own moments of imperial expansion and subjugation long before Europeans arrived.

Set in this global historical context, the creation of European empires outside of Europe from the fifteenth century onwards is entirely unremarkable. The Portuguese were first off the mark, followed by the Spanish, and then, in the sixteenth century, by the Dutch, the French and the English—or, after the Act of Union in 1707, the British.

What is remarkable, therefore, is that the present controversy about empire and colonisation shows no interest at all in non-European empires, past or present. European overseas empires are its sole concern, above all, the largest, British one, which contributed most to the US-led liberal world order that has prevailed since 1945. The British Empire is a proxy for the West.

Certainly, an effect—and probably the intention—of this myopic focus is to make the British Empire seem unique. And when that focus proceeds to concentrate exclusively on imperial sins, the British Empire is made to look uniquely, essentially evil. Thus, the phrase “colonialism and slavery” has been propagated, as if the Empire and slavery were identical. Whereas, in fact, the British were among the first peoples in the history of the world to abolish slave-trading and slavery in the early 1800s, and they then spent the second half of the Empire’s life using imperial power to suppress them both from Brazil, across Africa, to Malaya and New Zealand.

Why would anyone want to make the British Empire—the West—look essentially evil? Because it is useful in acquiring political leverage, whether with a view to persuading the British government to pay billions or trillions of pounds to Caribbean states in reparations for slavery; or persuading the Canadian and Australian governments to grant more resources and autonomy to indigenous communities; or destroying Western cultural and political hegemony in the idealistic cause of global egalitarianism.

 

V

But the British Empire, and its colonial components, were not essentially evil—and political cases that pretend they were only expose their own weakness. Like any long-standing state colonial expansion and government it contained elements of evil and injustice. In North America and Australia, the greatest evil was the importation of lethal disease, which devastated indigenous populations. After fifty years of contact with Europeans, according to Alan Taylor, a native American group would lose about 90 per cent of its population to successive epidemics.[15] However, with one or two possible, wartime exceptions in North America, the spread of disease by Europeans was inadvertent. (Christopher Warren’s conspiracy theory that smallpox was deliberately spread among Aborigines at Sydney Cove by British marines in 1788-89 rests entirely on circumstantial evidence and “modern” Aboriginal testimony and is not, in my judgment, cogent.[16]) The inadvertent spread of lethal disease, however tragic, is not immoral. So, Europeans who imported it to North America can no more be blamed than the medieval traders who brought bubonic plague to Europe in the fourteenth century, killing up to 200 million people and wiping out perhaps half the entire population; or than the Macassan fishermen who brought smallpox to northern Australia around 1800; or than those travellers who spread COVID-19 around the world in 2020 and helped cause over 7 million deaths.

But what about genocide? Is it not true that in Tasmania in the early 1800s, the British perpetrated what Robert Hughes called “only true genocide in English colonial history”?^[17] The answer to that question depends crucially on what is meant by the word genocide. If “genocide” is to a whole people what “homicide” is to an individual, then it must be deliberate and intentional. Indeed, that is how the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide understands it—as comprising a set of “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” (Article II).^[18] In that case, we can say—not only with Keith Windschuttle, but also with Henry Reynolds^[19]—that what happened in Tasmania in general was clearly not a case of genocide, even if individual settlers and convicts did sometimes kill with racist motive and exterminationist intent. The virtual, if not quite actual, annihilation of the Tasmanian Aborigines was far more tragedy than atrocity.^[20]

What, then, about the policy of the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families into government- or church-run institutions between 1905 and the early 1970s? Was that not “cultural genocide”? No. The rationale for the policy was the assumption that the pure-blooded Aboriginal population was in rapid and terminal decline, but that mixed-race children could be saved by being assimilated to mainstream, European society. Some have argued that such a policy amounted to the destruction of the Aboriginal people as a people and therefore amounts to a cultural form of “genocide”.[21] Reynolds, however, rightly resists this line of thinking, holding that the issue of intention is “critical”.[22] He observes that Raphaël Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” and pioneered the drafting of the Genocide Convention in the 1940s, distinguished between, on the one hand, “cultural genocide” aiming at the annihilation of the cultural life of a group and using drastic methods to achieve it, and, on the other, a policy aiming at assimilation and using only moderate coercion. Reynolds also observes that the proposal to include “cultural genocide” in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was eventually rejected.[23]

Nevertheless, the absence of genocidal intention alone does not get the British entirely off the moral hook, for an action can also be made morally wrong through the negligent or complacent acceptance of evils that could have been feasibly avoided, even when they were not intended. In the case of Tasmania, colonial governors were generally not negligent or complacent in that they strove consistently to save Aboriginal people from the evil effects of white colonisation. However, what neither they nor their masters back in London tried to do was to stop the colonisation altogether, as some now suggest they should have done.^[24]

The most obvious reason why they did not do so was their confident belief in the possibility of human progress. The 1830s and 1840s lay in the middle of what has been called the “Age of Improvement”.[25] Medical science had invented the first vaccine against smallpox, engineering had produced ocean-going steamships, and Christian humanitarianism had not only abolished slavery in the British Empire but was engaged in securing legislation to protect the welfare of industrial workers at home. Colonial Office officials in London and colonial governors in Australia genuinely believed that inducting native peoples into progressive British civilisation would improve their lives.[26] That was one reason why they did not pause the process of colonisation. Another was that, since there had been little or no violence between settlers and Aborigines for the first two decades of the colony’s life, by the time it became clear that the presence of the British posed a mortal threat to the natives, colonial settlement had already taken root. Further still, there seemed to be reason to hope that the dilemma could be resolved by creating protective reserves for the natives, where, in a secure environment, they could gradually adapt to the modern world growing up around them.

 

Still, could the British simply have stopped colonisation in Australia altogether, if they had wanted to? The example of North America was not encouraging: the imperial government’s attempt to stop settlers from intruding on native lands out west after 1763 had provoked a revolt that led to its complete loss of control over the American colonies twenty years later. To stop and reverse colonisation in Australia would probably have required an early-nineteenth-century government to fight a second (smaller) war against colonists, not just on the other side of the Atlantic but on the far side of the globe. Yet, even if the British had succeeded in vacating Australia, the vacuum would have been filled, sooner or later, by the French or even the Americans. Given modern maritime technology, Western modernity was going to hit Aboriginal Australia, one way or another.

And it stands to the comparative credit of imperial and colonial governments that they often strove to ameliorate the impact, and to integrate Aborigines into what would become one of the most prosperous and liberal countries on earth. It could have been otherwise. It could have been like the Maori colonisation of the Chatham Islands—all slaughter and enslavement.

VI

None of this is to deny that the British colonisation of Australia involved instances of injustice, most notably the unjust taking of land from Aboriginal peoples. It does not follow, however, that justice is done today by reversing injustice done two hundred years ago. The historic theft of land meant a gravity of loss to an Aborigine’s ancestor in 1800 that it cannot mean for the Aborigine in 2024, now that he has alternative ways of earning a living and is supported by a welfare state.[27] Similarly, even if you now sit on the land stolen from my ancestor, simply returning it to me would do you an injustice, insofar as you have built a life and an economy on it and are not culpable for the original wrong. As the legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron writes:

There have been huge changes since North America and Australasia were settled by white colonists. The population has increased manyfold, and most of the descendants of the colonists, unlike their ancestors, have nowhere else to go … the changes that have taken place over the past two hundred years mean that the costs of respecting primeval entitlements are much greater now than they were in 1800.[28]

Besides, trying to respect alleged primeval entitlements by rolling time backwards and restoring aboriginal land and self-government does not always benefit the natives. Some in Canada argue that such a policy continues to:

…keep natives isolated and dependent, thus perpetuating existing social pathologies … [and] has resulted in a large amount of corruption where powerful families siphon off most of the resources while the majority remain mired in poverty and social dysfunction. Privileged leaders live in luxury and are paid huge salaries, while most aboriginal people rely on social assistance.[29]

In the face of these intractable complications Waldron concludes that our focus should lie on addressing present injustices rather than trying to untangle historic injustices:

…it is the impulse to justice now that should lead the way … not the reparation of something whose wrongness is understood primarily in relation to conditions that no longer obtain. Entitlements … fade with time, counterfactuals … are impossible to verify, injustices … are overtaken by circumstances.[30]

Present unjust disadvantage is usually not best served by trying to unpick the distant past.

Nigel Biggar, CBE, is the Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford and the author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023, 2024).

 

NOTES

[1] Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars, 2^nd ed. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004), p. 169.

[2] Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The settling of North America (New York: Penguin, 2001), p. 4.

[3] Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America (New York: Liveright, 2022), pp. 7, 9, 10.

[4] Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, pp. 11, 12, 15.

[5] Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, pp. 14, 16, 18.

[6] Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, p. 18.

[7] Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, p. 24.

[8] Taylor, American Colonies, pp. 13, 16.

[9] Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, pp. 25, 26, 27, 31.

[10] Taylor, American Colonies, p. 4.

[11] Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, p. 101.

[12] Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, p. 105; Taylor, American Colonies, pp. 102-3. Hämäläinen’s partisanship is at its starkest when he strains to put the brightest possible gloss on indigenous kidnapping, torture, and cruelty, telling us that “[the Iroquois] needed captives to replenish disease-ravaged populations, mend fractured lineages, alleviate pain through vengeance, and restore the spiritual vitality of their communities” (p. 104); and that they “conducted these ceremonies not because they clamored for war but because they wanted peace. Ritual absorption of enemy bodies and souls … eased the Iroquois’s pain and helped them regain reason; it restored normalcy” (p. 105). Well, that’s all right, then.

[13] Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand (Rosedale, NZ: Penguin, 2003), p. 61.

[14] Ibid., pp. 124, 151.

[15] Taylor, American Colonies, p. 40.

[16] See Biggar, Colonialism, pp. 413-16n.106.

[17] Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding (New York: Vintage, 1986), p. 120.

[18] The emphasis is mine.

[19] Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History (Ringwood: Viking, 2001), p. 85.

[20] The longstanding belief that the Tasmanian aboriginals were entirely wiped out is now disputed by those who claim reparations, especially the restoration of allegedly stolen land.

[21] Tom Lawson is one such, describing policies undoubtedly intended to help aboriginal peoples adapt culturally, in order to survive, as genocidal: “The logic of the British presence in Tasmania, and indeed on continental Australia, looked forward to and indeed demanded a future free of the original owners of the soil. It is only the idea of genocide, incorporating both cultural and physical destruction, that can fully capture the totality of the project to undermine and destroy indigenous populations and culture” (The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania [London: Bloomsbury, 2021], p. 23).

[22] Reynolds, An Indelible Stain, p. 174.

[23] Ibid., pp. 175-6.

[24] For example, Norbert Finzsch, ““It Is Scarcely Possible to Conceive that Human Beings Could Be So Hideous and Loathsome”: Discourses of Genocide in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century America and Australia”, in A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone, Colonialism and Genocide (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 19: “the wilful blindness to or impotent disapproval of … unauthorized settler actions on the part of colonial authorities can be construed as an implicit intention to destroy the indigenes, despite the fact that they were often in thrall [sic] to humanitarian ideals of just treatment of the “natives”. For the fact is that … such enlightened humanitarians were prepared to accept, if in an agonized or resigned manner, the “inevitable extinction” of the aboriginal peoples. After all, how could they justify halting the march of progress in the form of colonization in order to save such abject creatures?” Wilful blindness is indeed among the things that can vitiate an act, as is malicious intention. But they are not the same thing.

[25] This is the title of Asa Briggs” famous book, The Age of Improvement, 1783–1867 (London: Longmans, 1960, 2000).

[26] Lawson acknowledges this: “The Colonial Office consistently believed that colonial development was the means of saving indigenous peoples … Indeed, it was in fact widely assumed that if the intentions of British colonialism had been maintained, indigenous peoples would have thrived under the “amity and kindness” of benign imperial rule … Humanitarian voices … argued consistently that colonialism needed to be conducted in the correct spirit in order that it might benefit indigenous populations too” (Last Man, pp. 204, 205).

[27] Jeremy Waldron, “Redressing Historic Injustice”, University of Toronto Law Journal, 52 (2002), p. 148.

[28] Waldron, “Superseding Historic Injustice”, Ethics, 103/1 (October 1992), p.26.

[29] Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), pp. 8–9.

[30] Waldron, “Superseding Historic Injustice”, p. 27.