Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning

550 pages

Tearless

If you are a “Do not confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up” Woke, brilliant but blinkered, with a trio of A* ‘A’ levels and have secured a place at Oriel College Oxford where you delight, with your untutored tutors, in baying “Down with Rhodes” and spend your vacations in Bristol tearing down statues and casting them into the Avon, this book is not for you. Unless? Unless you could bring yourself to concede that you might possibly be mistaken.

Why? Because this book takes a balanced and structured look at colonialism, looks at slavery and the slave trade, which is as old as history and, tragically, is still current today. Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Greek, Roman, Persian, Arab, African, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Belgian, British – Yes, we’ve all had our go at it and some still do.  While examining multi-national colonialism, the book concentrates on the British because it seems that the British Empire being the biggest and most recent has, despite the success of the British Commonwealth which attracts countries not formerly part of the Empire, become, in recent years, the fashionable whipping-boy for all colonialism – and slavery.

The author considers, inter alia and warts and all, not selectively, why and what really happened at the Opium War, the Indian Mutiny, Benin City, Amritsar, Tasmania, the second Boer War, and with the Mau Mau. In simplistic terms, yes, Nigeria, you can have your compensation when we get ours from the Romans! But remember it was you who captured slaves and sold them to the slave-traders. The British Empire grew by trade and happenstance; it was far more benign, paternal and humanitarian than oppressive, racist and exploitive.

The book is a hefty, close-typed paper-back tome: 550 pages of which 288 are the ‘plot’, followed by 10 of ‘Epilogue’, 70 of ‘Postscript’ in which the author rebuts his critics, and 135 of ‘Notes’. Remembering my time in the RN how tempting it was when reading the Report of any Board of Inquiry to go straight to ‘Conclusions and Recommendations’; you may, if browsing in a bookshop, like to go to pp 275 – 288 for a taster. And, my usual yardstick for any book, page 59 which, coincidentally, reports actions by the RN to stop slavery and slave-trading decades before others did so.

So, for whom is this book best recommended? Anyone studying at the OU for a history degree or with an interest in our heritage; submariners on SSBN patrols or in the surface navy in boring appointments to inspire you in your bed-sit or on the train.

In short: hard work but well rewarded and with the truth rather than falsehoods.