by Andrew Gimson, Conservative Home
Nigel Biggar ended his last book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, reviewed here on ConHome, by quoting part of a resonant observation by Elie Kedourie:
“No doubt, great Powers do commit great crimes, but a great Power is not always and necessarily in the wrong; and the canker of imaginary guilt even the greatest Power can ill withstand.”In this new and shorter work, Kedourie’s insight is quoted in full in the preface, but in the book’s title the word “canker” is replaced with “tyranny”.
This substitution was perhaps proposed by the publishers, and tolerated by the author, in the feeble belief that too few readers would understand the word “canker”.
But the original term suggests far more powerfully how an imaginary guilt can eat away, contaminate and at length cripple the self-belief on which a great Power depends.
Biggar has written a textbook, or primer, in which he summarises recent studies of the Atlantic slave trade, and the moral conclusions which can reasonably be drawn from them.
He is particularly exercised by the “gross imprudence” of the Church Commissioners, who authorised the spending of £100 million by the Church of England in reparation for the supposedly huge profits it made three centuries ago from slavery, by investments around the time of the South Sea Bubble, 1720, in the South Sea Company.