Conversations guest, Anglican priest, theologian, and ethicist Nigel Biggar makes a case for why we ought to take a balanced and objective approach to judging the actions of the British Empire.

Nigel pushes back on the modern tendency to conflate colonialism with the West in general, and to compares it to societies that have produced far more odious outcomes, such as German National Socialism.

"The British Empire contained both good and evil. It was not essentially evil. It showed itself capable of learning from its mistakes and correcting itself. And from the end of the 18th century its humanitarian and liberal commitments grew ever stronger, reaching their climax between May 1940 and June 1941, when the Empire offered the only military resistance (alongside Greece) to the massively murderous racist regime in Nazi Germany."

Nigel Biggar