University of Exeter Debating Society 22nd Nov 2025 Argument for the Proposition Alan Lester The modern European empires were many things, but above all they were vehicles for the transfer of assets and wealth from peoples of colour around the world to white European people. When those empires ended, formal sovereignty was conceded but as Olúfémi Táíwò puts it, they ‘had already built the pipes through which advantages and disadvantages flow’. Put simply my argument is this: colonialism was more extractive than developmental and post-colonialism has failed to reverse the flow. Empire lives on, not in terms of sovereignty but […]
Link to head-to-head review here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305748825001288
Alan Lester In 1962 Britain was losing an empire and figuring out what place it might occupy on the new world stage. Decolonisation was clearly irreversible, but not all of Britain’s colonies were independent yet. There was optimism that Britain would retain global influence as former colonies joined the Commonwealth. On 2nd April of that year, a parliamentary debate that was supposed to be about a simple change to World Bank borrowing rules spiralled into a discussion of Britain’s responsibilities to help its remaining and former colonies develop.[1] It was a debate that echoes down to a present, as Caribbean […]
Alan Lester Promoting the Anti-Reparations Bible Britain’s right-wing press has mobilised to promote Nigel Biggar’s latest book, Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt as the definitive riposte to reparations claims. Dismissing critics of Biggar’s previous work, as unfit, “intellectually or morally, to kiss Biggar’s boots”, “Let this be the end of the ‘reparations’ bilge” Simon Heffer wrote in The Telegraph. Biggar himself has been gifted articles in the The Telegraph and the Daily Mail, The Telegraph has interviewed him and The Spectator has published another affirmative review and a podcast interview. There’s no lack of support for Biggar’s […]
By Stephen Mullen In a recent article in The Times, (‘Scottish Taxpayers should not have to pay the price for Slavery, 7 June 2025), Professor Nigel Biggar misrepresented an exhibition in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum to claim, falsely, that it was exaggerating the significance of the Atlantic slave trade in the city’s history. Biggar critiqued the exhibition, Glasgow – City of Empire, which he claimed to have visited around May 2024. However, text which he identified as problematic was not actually there. Biggar’s main disagreement, as outlined in a May 2024 letter to Museum Manager, Phillippa Macinnes, relates to exhibition wording that […]
Alan Lester The Truth About Empire, a collection of essays for a public readership by fourteen leading historians of British colonialism that I edited and introduced, was the subject of Alexander Morrison’s review essay in the last issue of the Russian studies journal Ab Imperio. In that essay, Morrison drew a false equivalence between the curiosity-led approach to Britain’s imperial past adopted by the specialists in The Truth About Empire and Nigel Biggar’s attempt to develop a moral legitimation of the British Empire in Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. The Truth About Empire was not simply a political counterblast to Biggar’s […]
Margaret Butler, Ngaire Digby, Mira Knox, Alan Lester, Sheila Marshall, Andrea Mason and Katherine Prior St John the Evangelist Church at Newtimber, West Sussex, is a lovely little building nestled in the South Downs. You couldn’t really imagine a more idyllic spot, or such incongruity with the subject matter of this article: the deep relationships between this church and colonialism.[1] St John the Evangelist Church, Newtimber, West Sussex The church is a microcosm of the English countryside’s links with colonial exploitation overseas, but it is also connected with humanitarians’ attempts to mitigate colonialism’s worst excesses. The building embodies trans-Atlantic slave […]
Alan Lester There are two issues at stake. First and most immediate, Project Spire, the £100m (over nine years) reparative investment fund, set up in recognition of the links that the Church of England maintained with slavery. Secondly the broader question of slavery’s role in Britain’s Industrial Revolution. The conservative campaigning group History Reclaimed objects to Project Spire and to suggestions that slavery was economically important for Britain. It is seeking historical evidence to validate these positions. Let’s take Project Spire first. It was launched because the Church found that its clergy support fund, Queen Anne’s Bounty, was a shareholder […]
Paper given at Power, Slavery, and Culture in the Trans-Atlantic World: A Conference in Memory of Trevor Burnard, Institute of Historical Research, London, 30 June 2025 Alan Lester, University of Sussex Despite being a friend of Trevor’s since his days at Sussex, we only ever collaborated on one project, brought together by a conference organised by Joy Damousi in Australia, where of course Trevor was HoD at Melbourne and I had a visiting post at La Trobe. The project resulted in an edited collection in the MUP Studies in Imperialism series, Humanitarianism, Empire and Transnationalism, 1760-1995: Selective Humanity in the […]
