“The British empire was not from its inception a coherent project, methodologically developed out of some original plan.” The first chapter of Nigel Biggar’s near-500-page “moral reckoning” with empire begins with this eminently reasonable claim. The Oxford professor emeritus of moral theology presents himself as a clear-eyed outsider who has “stumble[d], blindly, into the Imperial History Wars”, to provide complexity and nuance to an otherwise overly politicised field. But all is not what it
