In 2022, the government of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu unveiled a monument of Col. John Pennycuick in his English hometown of Camberley. The inscription described him in characteristically Indian English flourish as “a noble man of sacrifice,” which sounds extravagant until one considers that, even today, families in the region hang his portrait in their homes and worship him as a god.

Pennycuick, a British Indian Army engineer, achieved deification for building the Mullaperiyar Dam, which since its completion in 1895 has provided much-needed water to several parched districts in Tamil Nadu and, according to locals, ended the famines there. Local tradition holds that Pennycuick sold his family property to help finance the project, though there’s no evidence for it.

The unveiling of this monument to a mustachioed military colonialist received almost no coverage in Britain, partly because Queen Elizabeth II had died two days earlier. But the story fitted awkwardly with the new dominant historical narrative in Britain, according to which the British Empire was an unequivocally evil institution whose lingering miasma still corrupts not only its former territories but also modern-day Britain.

When Kipling lamented, “What do they know of England, who only England know?” he was not being elegiac as much as describing a statistical fact. Contrary to modern caricatures, apart from episodic busts of enthusiasm, Britons were never very interested in their empire. At its Victorian peak, the great public controversies were more likely to be liturgical than imperial. In 1948, 51% of the British public could not name a single British colony; three years later, the figure had risen to 59%. Admittedly, this was after Indian independence, but it should not have been that hard. Proponents of the “imperial miasma” theory are right in saying that British people are woefully ignorant about their imperial past; but that was the case even when much of the world was colored red. 

The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism is a collection of essays edited by Alan Lester, an academic at the University of Sussex who has been at the forefront of the cultural conflict over British imperialism on the “miasma” side — though, like all combatants, he denies being a participant. Indeed, one of the book’s declared aims is to show that its contributors are not engaged in cultural warring.

Their nemesis, whose name appears 376 times in this book (more often than the word “Britain”) is Nigel Biggar, a retired theologian and priest at the University of Oxford. In 2017, Biggar began a project to study the ethics of empire alongside John Darwin, a distinguished imperial historian. The now-familiar academic denunciations then came along, and Darwin, on the cusp of a quiet retirement, withdrew from the project.

Lester was not part of the initial assault on Biggar but has since then emerged as his most voluble critic. He disclaims any political aims, protesting that he and his colleagues are engaged in a purely scholarly enterprise, based on facts and the study of the evidence.

Yet some of Lester’s public interventions — he recently described a poll showing that British people are less proud of their history than before as an “encouraging sign” — are hard to square with this denial. Biggar, by contrast, is refreshingly honest that his aims are both intellectual and political. I must add that both men are serious scholars, which is perhaps why neither has been able to decisively bloody the other in their jousts.

To grossly simplify the debate, Biggar thinks that empires are neither inherently good nor bad, but simply a very old form of government. He thinks that the British Empire has done some bad things but some good things as well. Lester and his collaborators think the British Empire was a horrible institution, and Biggar is a horrible scholar for defending it. Their key advantage is that they know more history than Biggar; their key disadvantage is that Biggar seems to have a far better moral compass than some of them.

This asymmetry is illustrated by one of the book’s most remarkable chapters, in which Liam Liburd, a professor of black British history, defends comparing the British Empire with Nazi Germany through a series of offensive parallels, thus begging the question of what the Tamil Nadu government was thinking when it paid for a monument of the moral equivalent of an SS officer (or indeed why the Indian government employed former British colonial officials well until the 1970s).

At one point, Liburd compares the 1943 Bengal famine to the Nazi gas chambers, conveniently overlooking the possibility that the Imperial Japanese Army’s invasion of Burma’s rice paddies might have had something to do with the lack of rice in Bengal and absolving Imperial Japan from any blame. This is anti-imperial derangement at its peak.

Not all of the book’s chapters are so self-discrediting and morally bankrupt. In his useful contribution, Saul Dubow, a South African historian now at Cambridge, reminds us that Cecil Rhodes was not a very good man — empire-builders seldom are — and was controversial even during his lifetime, shunned by many of his countrymen.

In his attempt to prevent Rhodes’s monument at Oxford from being toppled in 2020, Biggar fell into the common trap of portraying Rhodes and his peers as progressives avant la lettre when the argument should have been that it is unbecoming for Oxford to keep Rhodes’s donations whilst trampling on his name. Liberal imperialism existed; but so did illiberal imperialism. No argument against monument-toppling should hinge on proving that their subjects belonged to the former camp.

“What about slavery?” asks Dubow’s Cambridge colleague Bronwen Everill. Unfortunately, her four pages, which read like a last-minute student essay, do not enlighten us. The most she can manage is to point to an 18th-century African monarch abolishing the slave trade as evidence that the British do not deserve any plaudits for their abolitionist efforts across the world, whose cost has been estimated at 1.8% of its gross domestic product over a period of 60 years.

Meanwhile, Abd al Qadir Kane, Everill’s abolitionist monarch, only objected to the enslavement of Muslims but not to slavery generally, his progressive reputation resting mainly on the misunderstandings of Thomas Clarkson, an overenthusiastic English abolitionist. (Either cleverly or lazily, Everill quotes Clarkson’s misleading account, thus avoiding the need to engage with the historiography on Islamic slavery in Africa.)

Everill’s central argument is that abolitionism allowed Britain to rove the world as a moral policeman and to overthrow rulers who refused to abolish slavery. It is never clear, however, why this was morally bad. If anything, Britain did not go far enough: Well into the 1960s, British representatives still manumitted slaves on an ad hoc basis in its Gulf protectorates, when the moral thing would have been to force their rulers to abolish slavery, at gunpoint if necessary.

The same stubborn refusal to admit that imperialists could very occasionally do good things pervades Andrea Major’s chapter on sati, the Hindu custom of burning widows alive. “It may be worth stating clearly at the outset that I am categorically against burning women alive under any circumstances,” says Major before adding that she ascribes to the extensive academic literature on “how sati functioned as a tool of patriarchal oppression of women.” One hopes that she would have been able to come to the same conclusion even in the absence of such an impressive body of feminist scholarship.

Major’s chapter is framed through a debunking of the apocryphal story of Gen. Charles Napier telling a deputation of Indian grandees that if they burned widows according to their customs the British would hang them according to theirs. She begins her chapter by complaining that the anecdote was bad because it threatened extrajudicial lynchings for the widow-burners; she ends it by complaining that the British never hanged anyone for burning widows.

Anyhow, says Major, sati only affected a few women — 0.2% of widows in Bengal in 1824, which I suppose would have provided some comfort to the 600 or so women who were burned that year, had they known of this fact. Major’s underlying point — the British used the anti-sati crusade to justify their Indian Empire, is a perfectly good one. It is a shame that she thought it necessary to preface it with so much moral throat-clearing.

Many of the remaining chapters boringly state the obvious. Robert Bickers informs us that war memorials sometimes celebrate heroism, while Erik Linstrum tells us that colonial authorities tried to protect their government’s reputation. Big, if true.

In the final chapter, Margot Finn is reduced to complaining that Biggar cites more books published by Oxford University Press than by Cambridge University Press (if I had to guess, it is because one publishes four times more books than the other) and that his citations are “overwhelmingly Anglophone.” (I found two non-English sources cited in The Truth About Empire.)

As I slogged my way toward the last page, I could not help but think of the Indian officials who came to England to celebrate their former colonial overlord. I am sure they do not want the British Raj to be revived. People generally prefer self-government, even when the new governors are more venal than the departing ones.

But they are capable of celebrating both independent India and Col. Pennycuick because, like most normal human beings, they are capable of holding more than one moral idea in their heads at the same time. The Truth About Empire promises to be “a shield against the assault on historical truth.” Its authors might do well to visit Col. Pennycuick’s memorial at Camberley before it, too, is toppled.

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Yuan Yi Zhu is a professor at Leiden University and a research associate at the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Constitutional Law and Legal Studies.