On Friday, the school welcomed Professor Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford. Professor Biggar has published extensively during the course of a long and distinguished career. Most recently, he has written on the moral questions posed by the British Empire and it was on this subject that he addressed pupils. He began by looking at the career of an East India Company official, making the point that many people from Britain went to India in order to make a living. He illustrated how the establishment of British rule in India had the effect of gradually bringing to an end conflict between the various local rulers who had come to the fore following the demise of Mogul power.
This was undoubtedly a key feature of colonial rule, namely the ability of the colonial power to keep the peace between different factions in indigenous society. Professor Biggar then turned his attention to the vexed question of Britain’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. He was disarmingly honest about this. Britain had trafficked literally millions of slaves from West Africa to the Caribbean over the course of a century-and-a-half, but it had then abolished both the slave trade and slavery in its own possessions and had enforced the ban by means of the Royal Navy. He moved on to look at cultural interaction in Britain’s overseas territories.
In India, Christianity had a very limited impact, with the bulk of the population remaining either Muslim or Hindu, but the English language and Western systems of thought had caught on, because this had served local interests. In Africa, Christianity had become hugely influential, despite the fact that missionaries had been able to rely on nothing more than persuasion. Professor Biggar ended his talk by making the point that the British Empire had been at its most violent during the Second World War, when it had been engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan and here questions of right and wrong seemed remarkably straightforward.
A great many questions were asked by pupils. These were both thoughtful and searching, proof of the warning given to Professor Biggar before the talk that despite the young age of our pupils he would not have an easy time of it!
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