Failing to denigrate Britain’s entire colonial record has become a heinous crime

This book has already had an interesting life, and most readers will by now know something of its history. For any who don’t, Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism was originally submitted for publication to Bloomsbury and was warmly received by them; but two months later it was indefinitely delayed, because (as the ‘email from the very top’ went) ‘public feeling’ was ‘not currently favourable’. Biggar writes in his introduction:

I asked them to specify which ‘public feeling’ they were referring to, and what would have to change to make conditions favourable to publication, but they declined to give answers. Instead, they informed me that they were cancelling our contract. Happily, William Collins has rescued what Bloomsbury chose to jettison.  

If the book has got off to a rocky start, it is likely to get rockier still, because it will divide opinion along seemingly irreconcilable lines. Biggar has already had his very public run-ins with the anti-colonialists, and for all its air of disinterested enquiry, his ‘moral reckoning’ is not so much an olive branch as a broadside against an ‘illiberal cancel culture’ and time-serving academics for whom a ‘fashionable’ anti-colonialism is the open door to ‘posts, promotions and grants’.