Very few people in this country know much about our imperial history, and so when zealous, noisy, aggressive folk tell them that it was a lit and the abrasism and oppression,

they don't know enough to contradict them, and also what they do know is it doesn't look good if you contradicts what appears to be the progressive view,

because then you too will get labeled as being racist or colonial apologists or whatever.

So there was nothing exceptional about the British involvement in slavery.

What was exceptional and extraordinary was that toward the end of the ancient century, the idea that owning other human beings as property began to be questioned on principle,

Britain was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish the slave trade and then to abolish slavery, and it then led the world in suppressing both of those,

as I said from Brazil across Africa to Malaysia, that was extraordinary. No other state had done that before.

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kism. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

Our terrific returning guest today is an ethicist at the University of Oxford and of course the author of his latest book, Colonialism and Moral Reckoning Nigel Bigger. Welcome back to Trigonometry.

I am pleased to be back.

Thank you so much. And this time you are on our set on our turf last week. We came to you. I'm really impressed.

No, thank you very much for coming back. It's a real pleasure to have you on your book is out. It's caused quite a stir.

It's done very well Sunday times best tell us several weeks in a row, etc, etc. Without any further ado, what is your book about and what was the case that you wanted to make?

So the book is a response to a fashionable view, namely that European colonialism and in particular, British colonialism was a listening of racism and economic exploitation.

And unwarranted violence. So it was simply evil. And at the extreme, you'll find people trying to approximate British imperial endeavor with Nazism.

So accusing British colonialists of genocide and such like so the book is a response to that.

And it argues that yes, like any longstanding state, be it national or imperial, the British Empire contained evils and goods.

It contained, for example, 150 years worth of engagement in slave trading and in slavery, but also subsequent to that it was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish the trade and the institution.

And then Britain led the world in suppressing it from Brazil across Africa to Malaysia.

So good and good and evils like like most states. And there's no way of kind of balancing up the good and evils and saying, well, so many years anti-slavery compensates for so many years of slavery that doesn't make sense at all.

But what I go on to say is well, no, you can't identify the British Empire with Nazism in any respect. It wasn't essentially racist or exploitative.

And then you add to that the fact that there were persistent humanitarian and liberal threads to imperial policy, anti-slavery.

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