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By Nigel Biggar for Compact. 2 February 2023. It was the second week of December 2017, and my wife and I were at Heathrow airport, waiting to board a flight to Germany. Just before setting off for the departure gate, I couldn’t resist checking my email just one last time. My attention concentrated when I…
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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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In an essay published in UnHerd (10 January 2022), Nigel Biggar offers Christian reflections on patriotism in general, as well as an apologia for the British species. Read ‘The importance of being British’ here.
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Nigel Biggar has published an article in a special issue of Studies in Christian Ethics 35, no. 1 (November 2021). The issue features essays gathered around the theme ‘Truth, lies, and Christian ethics’. Biggar’s article is titled ‘Whatever Happened to the Canaanites? Principles of a Christian Ethic of Mass Immigration’ (pp. 127-139). The open access article can…
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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.