6 December 2023.
Every year, Prospect puts together a list of Top Thinkers—a curated list of people who, through their ideas, are making an impact in the world right now—and asks you, the readers of this esteemed magazine, to vote for a winner.
This year the Prospect editorial team, together with some of our regular writers and contributors, have chosen 25 people whose work informs us about issues of critical global importance: climate, economics, freedom, geopolitics and technology.
Nigel has been named one of the top thinkers in freedom. Vote now to choose him as Prospect’s top thinker of 2024.
Nigel Biggar
Anglican priest, theologian and ethicist
In November 2017, Nigel Biggar set out a defence of the British empire in the Times, under the headline: “Don’t feel guilty about our colonial history”. He argued that the history of the British empire was “morally mixed” and urged his countrymen to “moderate our post-imperial guilt.” The priest, theologian and ethicist—who was at the time a professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford University—had already courted controversy by publicly resisting the campaign to remove the imperialist Cecil Rhodes’s statue from the wall of Oriel College, Oxford, and by hosting a series of conferences on Ethics and Empire. More than 50 Oxford academics signed a public letter declaring their opposition to Biggar’s views, which they described as “rest[ing] on very bad history” and “breathtakingly politically naive.”
After the rows, Bloomsbury commissioned Biggar to write a book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, but upon receiving the manuscript, indefinitely delayed publication, telling Biggar that “public feeling” was “not currently favourable”. Instead, William Collins picked up the book, and published it earlier this year.
While Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning critiques the empire for slavery, displacement of people, abuse and “some appalling racial prejudice”, it also praises it for helping to bring about the renunciation of slavery, innovations in medicine and technology, as well as the introduction of the free-market system. As you would predict, it received mixed reviews in some progressive outlets—but was praised by many academics and newspapers for its originality, clarity and panache. Biggar’s willingness to question prevailing ideologies and contextualise moral concerns within a historical framework make him a valuable thinker in our polarised times.