From: fedora@fea.st   
      
   On Sat, 21 Feb 2026 16:22:54 +0000, Julian    
   wrote:   
      
   >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.   
      
   You must feel sorry for those poor conservatives, they feel despair.   
      
   >"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   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)