From: julianlzb87@gmail.com   
      
   Earlier this month, an SOS dropped into my inbox. It came from a student   
   at the University of Sussex. Lest her repressive professors punish her   
   for what I am about to report, let’s call her ‘Emma’. ‘I am in a mild   
   state of despair,’ she wrote.   
      
   "This week alone I have been told that the history of kinship theory has   
   been, up until now, ‘Eurocentric and cisgendered’, and another   
   anthropology module must be viewed through a ‘queer and trans lens’. The   
   word ‘decolonisation’ comes up in almost every lecture. If university   
   campuses represent a microcosm of the greater society, then I fear we   
   are doomed."   
      
   I’m not surprised. After all, Sussex was the university that so failed   
   to protect the coolly reasonable, gender-critical philosopher Kathleen   
   Stock from a sustained campaign of vilification by students, aided and   
   abetted by some colleagues, that it destroyed her faith in academia and   
   drove her to resign. While the university was fulsome in its posthumous   
   regret at her leaving, it has yet to give any explanation – no matter,   
   make a confession – of its own astonishing failure to defend her.   
   Indeed, it’s currently litigating against a fine imposed by the Office   
   for Students for failures to uphold free speech.   
      
   Sussex had moved onto my radar before Emma’s email for two other   
   reasons. One is Alan Lester, the professor of historical geography who   
   has made it his mission in life to discredit me, lest anyone should be   
   seduced by my utterly moderate views of Britain’s colonial record. He it   
   was who wrote a 15,000-word takedown of my book, Colonialism: A Moral   
   Reckoning, in which he could find nothing positive to say either about   
   me or the British Empire. Zilch. Nada. He then organised the   
   counter-publication of a collection of essays; every one of them   
   targeted at me. Emma reports that, judging by the amount of classroom   
   time he devotes to debunking me, I now live ‘rent-free in his head’.   
      
   The other instance of Sussex I’d encountered is Gurminder Bhambra, a   
   professor of social theory. Two weeks ago, she was on the other side of   
   the table in a recorded discussion about empire staged by the Doha   
   Debates in Qatar.   
      
   Like Lester, Gurminder simply cannot credit the British Empire with any   
   positive achievement. When the moderator put the topic of the Empire’s   
   benefits on the table, she immediately issued the rhetorical challenge:   
   ‘What benefits?’   
      
   Flying in the face of obvious historical data, this is a main symptom of   
   the ideological character of her view. Her thinking is determined by a   
   theoretical axiom – that empire and colonial rule are totally unjust –   
   that will not countenance any contrary evidence. Not the fact that the   
   British Empire was among the first states in the world’s history to   
   abolish slavery and then led the world in suppressing it from Brazil to   
   New Zealand. Nor that it introduced liberal institutions of a free   
   press, independent judiciary, and representative government to parts of   
   the world that had never experienced them.   
      
   Similarly, nor that it made India the largest producer of steel outside   
   of North America, Europe, and Japan by 1935, and gave her 47,000 miles   
   of railway against China’s 17,000 by 1947. Nor that, between May 1940   
   and June 1941, it offered the massively murderous racist regime in Nazi   
   Berlin the only military opposition – with the sole exception of Greece.   
   In Gurminder’s eyes – implausibly – none of this counts for anything.   
      
   Behind this stubborn defiance of historical fact lies a more basic   
   axiom, namely, that colonialism was fundamentally about economic   
   ‘extraction’. In support, Gurminder invoked the argument that, since   
   India produced 25 per cent of world output in 1800 but only 2 to 4 per   
   cent in 1900, it follows that the British had plundered the country. Not   
   at all.   
      
   It only shows that industrial productivity in the West increased four to   
   six times during that period, reducing India’s share of global GDP. The   
   same fate befell uncolonised China. The neo-Marxist view that   
   colonialism was essentially about the predatory extraction of colonial   
   surplus owes much more to dogma than empirical data.   
      
   Over 25 years ago, the leading historian of imperial economics, David   
   Fieldhouse, endorsed Rudolf von Albertini’s conclusion, based on an   
   exhaustive examination of the literature on most parts of the colonial   
   world to 1940, that colonial economics ‘cannot be understood through   
   concepts such as plunder … and exploitation’. Recently, Tirthankar Roy,   
   the Bengali-born professor of colonial economic history at the London   
   School of Economics, has confirmed this, writing that ‘[t]he proposition   
   that the Empire was at bottom a mechanism of surplus appropriation and   
   transfer has not fared well in global history’.   
      
   But that’s the proposition that Gurminder sticks to dogmatically, with   
   the result not only that she denies the obvious – that the British   
   Empire did some good – but also that she spins seriously misleading   
   tales based on a highly partial selection of data. So, she characterises   
   the Empire as consistently callous towards the Indian victims of famine,   
   citing two facts. First, when famine hit Bengal in 1769-70, the East   
   India Company (EIC) callously increased the tax burden on the starving.   
   Second, when famine struck again toward the end of the 19th century, the   
   relief fund mandated by the Famine Code of 1880 was found to have been   
   spent on yet another Afghan war.   
      
   What Gurminder fails to mention is that, in 1769-70, the EIC governor of   
   Calcutta, John Cartier, strove assiduously to save Bengalis. That in the   
   following decades Warren Hastings and Lord Cornwallis instituted reforms   
   that enabled Bengal’s economic recovery and made the company fitter to   
   govern. And that by 1900, the British had built in India the largest   
   irrigation system in the world – five times what the Mughals had   
   achieved – and figured out how to stop seasonal food shortages   
   escalating into famines.   
      
   At Sussex and elsewhere, ideologically distorted history is being   
   force-fed to students like Emma, who don’t dare voice their reasonable   
   dissent, rightly fearing that the professorial ideologues who determine   
   their fates may not reward them for it. That vulnerable students are put   
   in such a fearful position drives a stake into the heart of the liberal   
   culture of freely giving and taking reasons that should prevail on our   
   campuses. University authorities have a duty to defend them better than   
   Sussex defended Kathleen Stock.   
      
      
   Nigel Biggar   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)