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17 April 2023. The Irish Times. Sir – In his review (March 31st), Marc Mulholland caricatures my book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, when he reports that I “tell those aggrieved by imperial land-grabbing, discrimination and repression to stiffen the lip, look on the bright side, stop feeling sorry for themselves, and realise that was all for the…
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14 April 2023. By Nigel Biggar for The Times. As brutal regimes flex their muscles, nationalists’ caricatures of the Empire burden Britain with an imaginary guilt What moves voters is often not the analysis of policies. When the think tank These Islands conducted a focus-group survey of the Scottish electorate in 2021, it discovered that…
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1 March 2023. Nigel wrote an article for issue 14 of Aspects of History, a multi-platform periodical founded and edited by Oliver Webb-Carter. Aspects of History believes that ‘history should be both championed and challenged, disseminated and debated’. You can find Nigel’s article through the link below. Do make sure to subscribe to Aspects of…
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The call for the restitution of museum artefacts on the grounds of ‘colonial guilt’ is based on a misreading of history Article by Nigel Biggar for The Telegraph. 28 January 2023. That those who do an injustice should rectify it, is moral common sense. No one disputes that Germany’s post-1945 government should have restored stolen…
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Nigel Biggar: In celebrating people, we admire them only for some things they’ve done ‘Ireland’s famous 18th century philosopher, George Berkeley, was guilty of racial prejudice and slave – owning. He once described the Irish poor as “a lazy destitute race” and he bought a slave plantation on Rhode Island. Since the Irish today deplore both racism and slavery, shouldn’t…
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My run-in with the Rhodes Must Fall movement shows how little appetite there is for nuanced discussion of colonialism. Instead, activists are driven by hatred of the Anglo-American liberal world order, writes Nigel Biggar ‘It was early December 2017 and my wife and I were at Heathrow airport, waiting to board a flight to Germany.…
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Oriel College’s statue of Cecil Rhodes has become a lightning-rod in the debate about Britain’s colonial past. But the complexities of the man and his activities in South Africa are often reduced to crude hyperbole and absurd analogy. The Telegraph has recently posted Steven Edginton’s interview of Nigel Biggar, in which they explore Rhodes’ life and work in…
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The Critic published (18 March) Nigel Biggar’s review of The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Cultural Violence and Cultural Restitution (Pluto Press), a book by archaeologist Dan Hicks (Professor of Contemporary Archaeology, University of Oxford). Biggar’s review, ‘Whites and wrongs’, offers a counter-examination of the claims and conclusions set out by Hicks and closes with a clarion call for scholarly rigour…
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Briefings for Britain published Nigel Biggar’s report on slavery, which was distributed to all Members of Parliament, among others. Details of this report can be found at the Briefings for Britain website, here. Biggar’s full report, “Britain, Slavery, and Anti-Slavery”, is available for download as a pdf. Alternatively, one can read the report online.
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Nigel Biggar has published two essays that bring to a reader’s attention a history of slavery and the British response that calls into question the narratives of racial discord and need for reparations that decolonisation movements (i.e., Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter) proffer. Biggar outlines a vast history of slavery while highlighting anti-slavery movements, which too…