The publisher’s own description makes its purpose clear. The
book is presented as a corrective to what it calls “fashionable” accounts of
Britain’s past, which focus on its crimes while overlooking its achievements.
One endorsement praises it for highlighting “the good things that Britain and
her Empire have done.” This is not scholarship with political implications; it
is political propaganda presented as scholarship.
Both authors come to the subject with long-established
agendas. In Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023), Biggar weighed the British Empire’s moral record, balancing railways, legal codes, and the suppression of the slave trade against Amritsar, the Bengal famine, and the
detention camps in Kenya. Tombs, author of The English and Their History,
founded History Reclaimed to oppose what it
calls “woke distortions” of Britain’s past. He was also a prominent academic advocate
for Brexit. Our Islands’ Story brings these projects together in a single,
readable volume for the general public.
The balance‑sheet method: petty‑bourgeois moralism as
ideology
The balance-sheet method is the book’s organising principle.
It presents empire as a series of discrete policies- some good, some bad- to be
judged by an impartial moralist. In doing so, it obscures what defines empire:
a system of exploitation driven by British capital’s need for markets, raw
materials and investment opportunities. The Irish Famine, the opium wars, the
Bengal famine of 1943, Amritsar and the partition of India were not lapses in
an otherwise benevolent project. They were logical outcomes of a profit-driven
system. Treating these events as isolated “mistakes” falsifies their
meaning. They were not deviations from the norm, but expressions of it: the
violence required to maintain a global hierarchy of labour, property and
political domination.
The balance‑sheet approach is not simply inadequate; it is
ideological. It rests on the fiction that empire can be morally audited, its
crimes offset by its “achievements.” This is the language of accountancy
applied to human suffering. It presupposes that the historian stands outside
history, weighing actions on a timeless moral scale. But no such figure exists.
The “impartial moralist” is not a neutral observer. It is a class position: the
petty‑bourgeois intellectual who claims to stand above classes while in reality
serving the ruling class by laundering its crimes into moral verdicts. The
balance sheet is the ideological form of this pretence: a way of transforming
structural exploitation into a series of moral transactions.
Trotsky demolished this posture in Their Morals and Ours,
exposing the appeal to eternal moral truths as a device that invariably
justifies the interests of the powerful. He insisted that morality is historically
conditioned. The ruling class invokes “universal” principles only to sanctify
its own domination. Biggar’s method is a textbook example. His earlier Colonialism:
A Moral Reckoning framed empire as a moral puzzle: how to weigh railways
against famines, legal codes against massacres. But this is not moral
reasoning; it is apologetics. It treats the products of exploitation as moral
credits and the consequences of exploitation as moral debits, thereby
preserving the system itself from scrutiny.
Biggar’s theological background is not incidental. The
balance sheet is a secularised theodicy: sins weighed against graces to
vindicate the whole. Theodicy seeks to reconcile evil's existence with God's goodness. Biggar’s project is to reconcile imperial violence with the
supposed beneficence of British civilisation. The structure is identical. The
moral ledger becomes a way to explain away atrocities rather than explain them.
The question is never why empire produced famine, massacre and dispossession,
but how these can be integrated into a narrative of ultimate righteousness.
This method also serves a crucial ideological function today.
By dissolving empire into moral fragments, it obscures the class relations that
produced it. Empire was not the collective achievement of “the nation.” It was
the instrument of a ruling class whose interests lay in global expansion. The
British working class had no more control over the decisions that produced the
Irish Famine or the Bengal famine than the colonised populations who suffered
them. To weigh empire’s “benefits” and “costs” as if they were shared
nationally erases this fundamental division.
The balance‑sheet method therefore serves two purposes. It
sanitises the past by transforming systemic violence into isolated moral
lapses. And it prepares the present by offering a usable past for a ruling
class once again turning to militarism and great‑power conflict. A population
taught to see empire as “on balance” a force for good is more easily mobilised
for new imperialist ventures. The moral accountant becomes the state's ideological quartermaster.
The ideological work of “our”
The title’s possessive, Our Islands’ Story, performs essential ideological labour. It
asserts a common national inheritance where none existed. The rhetorical move
is simple but decisive: by placing the empire within the category of “our”
history, Biggar and Tombs dissolve the class divisions that structured both the
making of empire and its consequences. The British working class were not
shareholders in empire; they were its domestic raw material, the source of the surplus
value that financed imperial expansion. Their labour underwrote the industrial
and financial power that enabled Britain’s global reach, yet they remained
politically disenfranchised, economically exploited and socially subordinated.
They had no more say in the decisions that produced famine in Bengal or
massacres in Kenya than the peasants and workers who suffered them.
The ideological function of the possessive is therefore to
universalise what was in reality a class project. Empire was not the
achievement of a unified national community. It was the instrument of a ruling
class whose interests lay in global expansion, the suppression of colonial
resistance and the extraction of profit from subject peoples. To speak of “our”
empire is to erase the fundamental division between those who benefited from
imperial plunder and those who paid for it in Britain through exploitation and
poverty, and across the colonies through dispossession, famine and repression.
This erasure is central to the book's political purpose. By
claiming empire as a shared inheritance, Biggar and Tombs seek to bind the
working class to the ruling class's ideological needs in the present. The
appeal to national unity always precedes reaction. In periods of
crisis, the ruling class turns to the myth of a common past to justify the
demands it will soon impose: sacrifices for “national security,” acceptance of
militarisation, and support for foreign policy adventures dressed up as moral
obligations. The possessive in the title is therefore not a stylistic flourish
but a strategic device. It lays the ideological groundwork for the argument
that Britain’s imperial past is a source of pride, continuity, and collective
identity.
But the “inheritance” Biggar and Tombs defend belongs only
to those who profited from empire. The working class’s real inheritance is the
history of struggle against exploitation at home and abroad: the Levellers, the
Chartists, the 1926 General Strike, the solidarity of Lancashire cotton workers
with the anti‑slavery cause. To reclaim that history is to reject the false
unity of “our” islands and to recognise that the only genuine community of
interest is the international working class, whose future lies not in
reconciling with empire but in abolishing the system that produced it.
Slavery, abolition and the falsification of history
Although the book must be quoted directly once you have the
text, its treatment of slavery and abolition is predictable. The standard
apologetic line that Britain’s suppression of the slave trade redeems its
earlier participation is a moral fable. It rests on the assumption that
abolition was a spontaneous flowering of British civilisation, a moment when
the nation’s conscience awoke and corrected its earlier sins. This is
mythology. Enlightened rulers did not bestow abolition on
enslaved people. It was the product of a specific historical conjuncture: the
rise of industrial capitalism, which made slave‑based plantation production
increasingly incompatible with British economic interests, combined with mass
pressure from below, the working-class abolitionist movement, Caribbean slave
revolts, and the political agitation of the oppressed themselves.
By the early nineteenth century, the economic foundations of
empire were shifting. Industrial capitalism required wage labour, expanding
markets, and new forms of investment. Plantation slavery, with its rigid labour
system and limited consumer base, increasingly obstructed these needs. The
ruling class did not abolish the slave trade out of moral revulsion but because
British capitalism's economic logic was changing. At the same time, enslaved
people were not passive recipients of emancipation. Revolts in Jamaica,
Barbados and Demerara shook the foundations of colonial rule. The Haitian
Revolution demonstrated that slavery could not be maintained without permanent
military occupation and escalating violence. In Britain, working-class
abolitionists, including Lancashire cotton workers who later supported the
Union during the American Civil War, pressured the ruling class in ways it could
not ignore.
Even after abolition, British capital continued to profit
from slave‑produced cotton and colonial labour. Lancashire mills were fed by
cotton harvested by enslaved workers in the American South. British banks
financed slave economies across the Atlantic. Colonial labour systems
indenture, forced cultivation, punitive taxation reproduced the essential
features of slavery under new names. The balance‑sheet method hides this
continuity. By treating abolition as a moral credit that cancels earlier
crimes, Biggar and Tombs obscure the fact that exploitation did not end in 1807
or 1833; it merely changed form.
The apologetic narrative of abolition serves the same
ideological purpose as the rest of the book: to present empire as a moral
project, flawed but ultimately benevolent, rather than as a system of global
exploitation whose violence was structural, continuous and indispensable.
India, Ireland and the logic of imperial violence
The same method distorts India’s history. The Bengal famine
of 1943 was not a natural disaster but the result of wartime requisitioning,
price manipulation, and the diversion of grain by a colonial administration
that prioritised imperial military needs. The famine directly expressed imperial policy under crisis: grain was exported from Bengal even as millions starved; Churchill’s War Cabinet rejected pleas for relief shipments because it needed shipping elsewhere; and colonial officials insisted the market must be allowed to “regulate” supply. The result was
the death of three million people. To treat this as a tragic lapse, an
unfortunate misjudgment in an otherwise benevolent imperial record, is to
falsify its meaning. It was the predictable consequence of a system whose
overriding priority was prosecuting Britain’s global war effort and protecting
imperial interests, not the lives of colonial subjects.
Amritsar, likewise, was not an aberration but the normal
operation of colonial rule under conditions of political resistance. The
massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians in 1919 was not the product of a
rogue officer or a momentary breakdown in discipline. It was the logical
extension of a regime built on coercion, surveillance and the suppression of
dissent. The colonial state responded to mass political mobilisation with
exemplary violence, designed to terrorise the population and reassert imperial
authority. To isolate Amritsar as a “mistake” is to deny the structural
character of colonial repression.
Ireland exposes the lie most starkly. The Great Famine was
not a tragic misfortune but a social catastrophe produced by the enforcement of
market discipline under colonial rule. British administrators refused to
suspend grain exports, insisted that relief must not interfere with the
“natural” operation of the market, and treated mass starvation as an
unfortunate but necessary consequence of economic orthodoxy. The ideology of
laissez‑faire was applied with lethal rigidity to a colonised population whose
land, labour and political rights had already been stripped away. Any attempt
to minimise or moralise the Famine as an unavoidable tragedy or a failure of
compassion is the book’s most damning evidence of its ideological purpose. It
reveals the balance‑sheet method for what it is: a device that dissolves structural violence into isolated moral episodes, preserving the
legitimacy of the imperial system itself.
The treatment of India and Ireland thus exposes the core
function of Biggar and Tombs’ project: to rehabilitate empire by severing its
crimes from their economic and political foundations, transforming systemic
exploitation into a series of unfortunate events that can be weighed, excused
and ultimately forgiven.
Militarism and the ideological mobilisation for war
The timing of Our Islands’ Story is not accidental.
The book arrives as governments across Europe pour money into rearmament and
ideologically prepare their populations for war. In Britain, this mobilisation
is inseparable from the ruling class’s role as NATO’s most aggressive European
participant in the war against Russia, its surge in defence spending, and the
media’s demand for an “end to the post‑Cold War peace dividend.” The political
establishment speaks openly of a “pre‑war world,” of the need to rebuild
munitions stockpiles, expand the arms industry, and prepare society for
prolonged conflict. In such a climate, rehabilitating empire is not an academic
exercise but an ideological necessity. A ruling class that seeks to wage new
imperialist wars must first sanitise the old ones.
Militarism requires a usable past. A population taught to
feel shame about colonial massacres is harder to mobilise than one taught that
Britain has been, “on balance,” a force for good. The authors’ complaint about
a “demoralising” view of history reveals more than it admits. Their concern is
not historical accuracy but national morale. They object not to falsehoods but
to truths that undermine the ideological cohesion required for war. The balance‑sheet
method, with its moral credits and debits, functions as a psychological
preparation: it reassures the public that Britain’s global interventions have
historically been justified, even noble, and therefore that future
interventions may be as well.
The book’s celebrity endorsements fit this pattern. John Grey,
the philosopher of liberal disillusionment, praises it as essential reading. Its defence of empire as a remedy for “partisan narratives” speaks volumes
about the state of official intellectual life. The liberal intelligentsia,
having abandoned any serious critique of capitalism, now embraces a nostalgic
nationalism that aligns seamlessly with the geopolitical aims of the ruling
class. The ideological convergence between conservative imperial apologetics
and liberal pessimism is not accidental. Both currents seek to stabilise a crisis-ridden
social order by appealing to a mythologised past.
None of this means that the left‑liberal accounts Biggar and
Tombs attack are the alternative. Much of what passes for “decolonising”
history in universities substitutes moral denunciation and racial categories
for class analysis. It leaves the profit system which produced both empire and
its present‑day successors off the hook. The liberal critique of empire often frames itself as a struggle over national identity: whether Britain should feel
pride or guilt. This is the mirror image of the right‑wing narrative, which
insists on pride and rejects guilt. Both approaches treat history as a moral
drama rather than as the unfolding of class relations and economic imperatives.
This symmetry is not new. As Nick Beams demonstrated in his
analysis of Australia’s “History Wars,” both the revisionist right and its
liberal critics treat history as a question of national identity rather than
class struggle. The same pattern repeats here: both sides moralise, and neither offers class analysis. The right defends empire as a civilising mission; the
liberal academy condemns it as a racial injustice. But both frameworks obscure
the underlying reality: empire was a product of capitalism, driven by the need
for markets, raw materials and strategic dominance. Its violence expressed
class interests, not national character, whether noble or wicked. To frame
empire as either national pride or national shame is to accept the nationalist
premise that “the nation” acted as a unified subject. In reality, the British
working class had no more control over imperial policy than the colonised
populations who suffered its consequences.
The real history of these islands is not the story Biggar
and Tombs tell. It includes the Levellers and the Chartists, the Irish national
struggle, the 1926 General Strike, and Lancashire cotton workers’ solidarity
with the anti‑slavery cause in the American Civil War. It includes the mass
movements against imperialist war, the struggles of miners, dockers and
engineers, and the internationalist traditions of the British working class.
These movements were not marginal footnotes to the national story; they were
the decisive expressions of the only social force capable of opposing
imperialism: the working class. Their history shows that workers' interests in
Britain never aligned with the ruling class's interests at home or abroad.
The working class fought for democratic rights, social equality and
international solidarity, while the ruling class pursued profit, domination and
war.
This history points not to reconciliation with Britain’s
imperial past but to the international struggle for socialism. The working
class’s inheritance is not the empire but the fight against it: the strikes,
mutinies, protests, and political movements that challenged capital's power and
its global system of exploitation. Reclaiming that history means rejecting the
ideological project embodied in Our Islands’ Story. It is to recognise
that the only genuine community of interest is the international working class,
whose future lies not in rehabilitating empire but in abolishing the capitalist
system that produced it.
Our Islands’ Story is an ideological artefact of a
ruling class preparing for war and seeking to rehabilitate its imperial past.
Its method is moralistic, its history selective, its politics reactionary.
Against this stands the working-class history, the only force capable of
opposing imperialism and preventing the catastrophe toward which capitalism is
driving humanity. The task today, as in every period of crisis, is to arm the
working class with historical truth, not the sanitised myths of bourgeois
historians. Only on that basis can a movement oppose war, defend
democratic rights, and fight for a socialist future.
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