7th February 2018 1:00
By Blue Tutors
An Oxford professor was this week put firmly in his place by nearly sixty of his Oxford colleagues after publishing an article in The Times apparently defending a widely discredited and controversial essay by American academic Bruce Gilley. The original essay by Gilley, a political scientist at Portland State University, extolled the virtues of colonialism and questioned its ‘bad name’. After an uproar, two petitions and the resignation of nearly half the editorial board of the quarterly in which it was published (Third World Quarterly), the piece was taken down from the site. But not before its reverberations could make their way across the Atlantic to our own academic shores.
Regius Professor Nigel Bigger, moral and pastoral theology at Oxford University, claimed in his Times article that Britain can and should be proud of some aspects of colonialism. The final few paragraphs can be read below, and need little in way of explaining the inevitable response from other Oxford academics, who were quick to joint-author and publish an open letter in The Conversation.
‘[W]hile we might well be moved to think with care about how to intervene abroad successfully, we won’t simply abandon the world to its own devices.
The costs, errors and uncertain results of our recent adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have rightly chastened us. Part of what they should teach us, however, is that successful intervention requires more, earlier. Many Iraqis rejoiced at the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s atrocious regime but were disillusioned at the invaders’ subsequent failure to impose order.
Considering Britain’s unwarranted guilt over its alleged betrayal of the Arabs during and after the First World War, the historian Elie Kedourie wrote: “No doubt, great powers do commit great crimes, but a great power is not always and necessarily in the wrong; and the canker of imaginary guilt even the greatest power can ill withstand”.’
The letter is a ‘firm rejection’ of Bigger’s views, though he has said that no one has raised such concerns in person. This may, of course, be because his seminars on the topic of his latest research programme, called “Ethics and Empire” ‘consists of closed, invitation-only seminars’.
The academics go on to tear apart his exemplars and very clearly distant him and his work from themselves, their students and the university as a whole. Indeed, they go so far as to say that:
‘The “Ethics and Empire” project asks the wrong questions, using the wrong terms, and for the wrong purposes. However seriously intended, far from offering greater nuance and complexity, Biggar’s approach is too polemical and simplistic to be taken seriously. There is doubtless much to be said about the ethical regimes that have historically been used to justify or critique imperial rule (a story at least as old as Tacitus). But there is no sense in which neutral “historical data”, from any historical context, can simply be used to “measure” the ethical appropriateness of either critiques of or apologia for empire, let alone sustain an “ethic of empire” for today’s world.’
According to the BBC, Professor Biggar said in response that ‘in the current illiberal climate such discussion is only possible in private’ as ‘enemies of free speech and thought would disrupt it’. A student group that aims to examine Oxford's ‘colonial past’ called Common Ground has also criticised Biggar and the project. Again, according to the BBC: ‘a university spokesperson said “arguments and differing approaches" are to be expected, and defended Prof Biggar as an "entirely suitable" person to lead the "valid evidence-led academic" project’.