Described as “a moral inquest into the colonial past,” Colonialism was dropped like a hot potato by its original publisher before being picked up by Collins. Scottish-born Oxford theologian Nigel Biggar waded into controversy several years ago with well-placed newspaper op-eds that appeared in the midst of the statue-toppling brouhaha. Central to the book is the topic of the British Empire. Even though Imperial Britain was guilty of a host of injustices, by the 1800s it was committed to the Christian principle that slavery was an evil that warranted abolition, even at great cost (‘econocide’ according to one historian). Abolition constituted a moral revolution, unique in the annals of history.

Biggar’s discussion ranges beyond slavery and includes judicious comments on Canada’s residential schools. (Bigger is not unfamiliar with Canada, being one of Regent College’s most illustrious grads.) His is a defence of the British Empire that I generally find persuasive but it remains an interpretation of a broad canvas portraying tragic, innumerable events and massive movements of peoples over time that cannot be neatly summarized, even in a text with more than 100 pages of footnotes.   

The counterpoint to Biggar is Legacy of Violence: A History of Violence by Caroline Elkins (Knopf, 2022). Focussing on the 20th century, Elkins, an historian, argues that Britain’s underlying doctrine was a racism that relied on an “unrelenting violence” to preserve its imperial interests. In order to do this Elkins largely avoids a discussion of abolition in the previous century and the larger and ongoing humanitarian impulses that continued in Britain into the 20th century.