In the Oxford research project, entitled Ethics and Empire (2017-22), Nigel Biggar, the university’s regius professor of moral and pastoral theology and director of the MacDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life, sought to do two important interventions: to measure apologias and critiques of the empire against historical data from antiquity to modernity across the world and to challenge the idea that empire is imperialist, imperialism is wicked, and empire is therefore unethical. Historically, theoretically and empirically, it should be clear that the empire was a “death project” rather than an ethical force outside Europe that war, violence and extractivism rather than any ethics defined the legacy of the empire in Africa.īut it is the continuation of revisionist thinking that beckons a revisiting of the question of colonialism and its impact on the continent from a decolonial perspective, challenging the colonial and liberal desire to rearticulate the empire as an ethical phenomenon. This month marks 136 years since the end of the Berlin Conference in 1885, where western powers met to set the rules for how they would divide up Africa. One leading member of the project resigned from it, citing personal reasons. The key thesis: that the empire as a historical phenomenon – distinct from an ideological construct – has made ethical contributions and that its legacy cannot be reduced to that of genocides, exploitations, domination and repression.Įxpectedly, such a project raised a lot of controversies to the extent that other scholars at Oxford penned an open letter dissociating themselves from such intended revisionism and whitewashing of the crimes of the empire.
In 2017, a professor at Oxford University in the United Kingdom proposed a research project.
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