“The attempt to judge an empire would be rather like approaching an elephant with a tape measure,” the historian Margery Perham opined in 1961. Her attempts to make the case for decolonisation stand as a warning; her 1941 tract, Africans and British Rule, was banned as “anti-settler” by the governor of Kenya — yet the Caribbean economist Arthur Lewis, winner of the Nobel prize in 1979, denounced Perham as “not just smug and self-satisfied” but reeking of “that self-conceit which typifies the colonial Englishman and which is doing more than anything else to poison the relations between the races”.
In Colonialism Nigel Biggar disregards the “keep out” signs and marches into the minefield. Again. In 2016 he provoked protest with a “qualified defence” of
