By Scott Graber
It is Monday, and I’m in Port Royal. It is decidedly cooler this morning as sit on our darkened deck awaiting our newspapers — The Beaufort Gazette and the Wall Street Journal. In the meantime I’ve got a recent review of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning by Nigel Biggars, published by William Collins, and weighing in at a hefty 480 pages.
Colonialism is a response to the current notion that the British Empire was about conquest, slavery and the building of palatial, sugar profit-financed houses in the Cotswolds. The academic world — led by restive students at Oxford—has responded to Nigel’s academic reckoning with contempt and the accusation that the British Empire “was always and everywhere wicked.”
Nigel writes that the British Empire was “complicated and ambiguous”. He says that there were some good things — free trade, stability — and one must do some weighing before joining the outraged student chorus.
Colonialism should be read with another recently published heavyweight titled Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War by the prolific professor, Howard French, who teaches at Columbia.
Mr. French begins Born in Blackness in 1332 with the arrival of Mansa Musa in Cairo accompanied by an army of 60,000, hundreds of pounds of gold dust and 12,000 slaves. The arrival of this heretofore unknown, Mali-based king stunned the world, especially Portugal.
According to Mr. French the Portuguese were just getting the hang of long-range sailing. And so they dispatched their ships to that coast, which came to be called the Gold Coast, acquiring a monopoly on the gold trade that would enrich Prince Henry and lead to a major economic expansion in Europe. And for almost 200 years the Portuguese were not interested in anything but getting gold out of Africa.
But then came the discovery of the island of Sao Tome’ and the establishment of sugar cane plantations a little further down the West African coast. Sugar — grown and harvested by Kongo slaves — essentially replaced gold, becoming the great economic tonic that improved the health and happiness of most Europeans. And, yes, I know that these days sugar crystals are akin to methamphetamine.
The success of slave labor on Sao Tome’ led to slave labor in cotton, tobacco and coffee which also transformed European life. But, of course, much of that slave-grown cotton went straight into British textile mills — mills that produced profits allowing the Brits to colonize the rest of the world.
One might conclude, at least at this point, that the students at Oxford have got it right—that the British Empire was “always and everywhere wicked”.
But Nigel goes on to say there was a good side to this worldwide expansion. He writes that the Brits created a “worldwide free market that gave native producers and entrepreneurs opportunities previously absent; the establishment of peace imposing curbs on warring peoples; the setting up of a civil service and judges who were extraordinarily incorrupt (especially when compared with their postcolonial successors); the laying down more track in India than all other European colonialists did in their empires; and the dissemination of modern science and medicine …”
Well, you get the picture here.
As heretofore mentioned Nigel’s willingness to acknowledge that something good came out of the Empire has enraged those students majoring in “Post Colonial Studies” at Cambridge, Oxford and the London School of Economics. This clamor caused his Bloomsbury publisher to cancel its planned publication; but then a rival, Collins, stepped in and put the controversial book on the street.
Although the argument that the Brits “did good as well as evil” did not sit well with students at Oxford, Biggars actually went further down this road asking if the British Empire “did more good than evil”?
“This is the kind of query that elicits gasps in classrooms today. The very raising of such a question, one accepts the possibility that Empire wasn’t irretrievably bad, is offensive to a majority of Mr. Biggars’ colleagues.”
I have spent my adult life engaged in a profession that demands a that a jury make a final determination of whether a person was good or evil in a particular circumstance. Right at the moment the current verdict — on the Empire — is probably guilty.
But that verdict won’t end the debate as long as history professors continue to publish their manuscripts about Mansa Musa, Prince Henry and the legions of civil servants who were, one would guess, infused with virtue as well as vice.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
