History Reclaimed?

You can't counter Woke history with their own tools

The sun has set on the British Empire, and Britain’s very own Historikerstreit is now in full swing. Left-wing views on the British Empire and its relevance to the political situation today need little introduction, but to briefly enumerate: the Labour opposition believe that Britain is systemically racist, and that its imperial and colonial past must be reckoned with; mobs are defacing and pulling down statues of dead white men; academics, journalists, civil servants, educators, and other public figures are all engaged in repeatedly blaming white British people for problems in minority communities, tracing these problems back to the Empire and to white racism. The controversy around Britain’s imperial legacy has flared up before, but made its way to the forefront of public discourse in late 2015, when the University of Oxford’s Oriel College launched a consultation on the future of their statue of Cecil Rhodes after pressure from students in the wake of statue-toppling events in America and South Africa. Since then, universities across Britain have committed to ‘decolonising’ their respective institutions by rewriting curricula perceived as ‘eurocentric’, introducing mandatory equality and white privilege training among students and staff, and implementing racial hiring quotas and pursuing positive discrimination in favour of non-whites.

In opposition to these trends, dissenting academics have begun to involve themselves more boldly in the debate over the empire and its legacy: a slew of articles have been published in The Telegraph and The Spectator by well-known historians such as Professor Nigel Biggar, Baron Andrew Roberts, and Professor Robert Tombs, taking aim at leftist academic consensus, government education policy, and left-wing culture warriors in general. Projects like Ethics and Empire have ‘tested the critiques against the historical facts', and more recently, these scholars have joined forces and created ‘History Reclaimed’, a website and extended project dedicated to countering left-wing narratives about imperialism.

These countermeasures were met with the expected institutional backlash: Professor Bruce Gilley’s article, ‘The Case for Colonialism’, was retracted after board resignations, petitions from academics, and death threats, and his subsequent biography met with the same fate. Professor Biggar’s ‘Ethics and Empire’ project was subjected to significant pressure, and his latest book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, was cancelled after Bloomsbury Publishing got cold feet. For both authors, however, the controversy would end up working in their favour, with their respective works being republished elsewhere to wide acclaim. Biggar in particular has gained huge traction in conservative circles and has cemented himself as one of the most prolific cultural commentators, writing over fifty articles on culture war topics since 2017, when he defended Gilley’s article.

The pushback has been mirrored to a degree among sections of the Conservative Party: in 2020, the then Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden (now Deputy Prime Minister), echoed History Reclaimed’s views in an address to the UK’s major museums, galleries, and cultural bodies, reminding them that the government did not support the removal of historical statues. Throughout 2021, the then Housing Secretary, Robert Jenrick, took measures to make the removal of statues and plaques more difficult, favouring a ‘retain and explain’ stance. Backbenchers have also stepped into the fray, with the Common Sense Group (CSG) publicly criticising the National Trust and the National Maritime Museum, as well as releasing a manifesto in which ‘woke’ perspectives on history are attacked.

There is also some evidence of discomfort among Conservative politicians with regard to the influence of far-left narratives in the Civil Service. Priyamvada ‘White Lives Don’t Matter’ Gopal, Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge, had a speaking invitation from the Home Office withdrawn (unsurprisingly, more to do with her claims about historical anti-black attitudes among Priti Patel’s ethnic group than her long career of anti-white rhetoric). Pro-migration writer Kenan Malik attracted the ire of both The Telegraph and of former Home Secretary Priti Patel after it emerged that he had been invited to address civil servants. In May, several Conservative MPs spoke at Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism Conference in London, a significant reversal given that the party had previously formally reprimanded Daniel Kawczynski MP for attending NatCon 2020 after pressure from Jewish groups (though other MPs remain unhappy about these developments). In the higher education sphere, History Reclaimed members have been involved in the drafting of the recently enacted Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 (Biggar, for example, submitted evidence to the Public Bills Committee for the initial draft legislation), which met with howls of anguish from the University and College Union (UCU) and several other left-wing academic groups.

How should the right view these defences of our history? When looking over some of the output of the History Reclaimed authors, we quickly encounter the expected boilerplate: Dr Marie Kawthar Daouda thinks that fussing over the Rhodes statue is actually a sign of Western privilege; Professor Tombs is willing to overlook Colston, but targeting statues of Gladstone, Peel, and Churchill is taking it too far; History Reclaimed contributor and editorial advisor Professor Doug Stokes identifies Britain’s ‘hugely progressive role in history’ in the Magna Carta, the abolition movement, and fighting the Nazis.

Rightists encounter these arguments all the time, and we correctly point out that these arguments tend to accept the framing of leftists: by legitimating the idea of ‘Western privilege’; accepting mobs of vandals tearing down British heritage in some cases; and lumping the Magna Carta together with fighting the Nazis under the same nebulous conceptual umbrella. But as milquetoast as their defences may be, it is tempting for the British right to put their complaints aside and be satisfied with some much-awaited pushback. It goes without saying that defending our colonial legacy against the leftist institutional bloc that hates Britain, its history, and its people is a noble enterprise, and modern ‘anti-woke’ apologists of empire are not really at fault in this regard.

The author certainly agrees that insofar as they are succeeding in making life hard for decolonisers, anti-British academics, and left-wing pundits, they should be supported. Not is all as it seems, however.

---

What is History Reclaimed reclaiming?

History Reclaimed’s mission is, prima facie, presented chiefly in reactive terms: countering distortions of history from activist academics for political purposes, providing balance in the historical debate, and calling out efforts to cement certain narratives (i.e., of enduring racist oppression) as orthodoxy, and this is also how panegyrics of the group in places like The Telegraph typically present them. But if racist colonialist oppression should not be the focal point of empire discourse, what should be? Do these academics have a substitute vision for how British people should think about their imperial legacy? Professor Biggar certainly does, elucidated most clearly in his 2022 Roger Scruton Memorial Lecture, entitled ‘On Deconstructing Decolonisation’. In his speech, Biggar sets out to refute the left’s ‘cultural revolutionary decolonising story’. All well and good, but the real reason we should care about confronting left-wing narratives, according to Biggar, is that winning ‘the colonial front in the culture war’ is ‘politically crucial’ in order to preserve 'the self-confidence of the British and their identity as a people committed to support and promote a liberal international order’. The introduction to Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning makes the same point, and states that ‘academic post-colonialism’ is an inadvertent ally of the authoritarian regimes in Russia and China (Biggar 2023, p. 5).

Other members of History Reclaimed have promoted this worldview almost verbatim in a variety of contexts. History Reclaimed contributor and editorial advisor, Professor Gwythian Prins, recently gave a speech at NatCon 2023 praising Biggar’s book and espousing the same commitment to upholding liberalism against Putin and Xi, focusing on criticising ‘woke cults’ on ‘urgent grounds of national security’ for making the ‘defence of freedom much harder’. In an interview with former Australian Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson, Professor Stokes elaborated on the ‘geopolitics of identity politics’ and how the rise of wokeism will inhibit the reinforcement of the liberal international order, as well as undermine the UK’s efforts to turn itself into a ‘broadly multi-ethnic and multi-racial’ country. His latest book, Against Decolonisation, echoes Biggar in calling for a renewed Western confidence in the face of China and Russia, both of which have ‘weaponised wokery’ via social media propaganda and troll farms (Stokes 2023, pp. 142-144). For Professor Tombs, liberal imperialism, the triumph over fascism, the United States’ assumption of the role of guardian of the liberal world order, and decolonisation (the twentieth century variety) are woven together in a great ‘enlightenment narrative of progress’, with post-war history supposedly refuting the Spenglerian narrative of Western decline. But the global liberal order, he says, is threatened by growing forces such as Chinese Nationalism, militant Hinduism, and fundamentalist Islam. When British intellectuals undermine this enlightenment narrative by substituting left-wing decolonisation narratives, they are acting as useful idiots for authoritarian regimes and consequently undermining the liberal world order. Professor Gilley’s aforementioned ‘The Case for Colonialism’ calls for us to take up the White Man’s Burden once more, and to further the liberal imperialist civilising mission in the modern context of ‘reaffirming the primacy of human lives, universal values, and shared responsibilities’ (Gilley 2017, p. 1).

The History Reclaimed counter-narrative can thus be summarised. For the nineteenth century, the British people’s chief source of pride in the Empire should be found in its record of extending liberalism, democracy, and human rights to distant populations. The great legacy of Britain in this era is that we ended slavery and suttee, gave the Indians railroads, brought the Māori our constitutional norms, and so on. The empire’s twentieth century legacy is that of laying the foundations for the liberal world order, triumphing over Nazi Germany, and then gracefully perishing, being reborn in the new international order in time to play its part in defeating Soviet Russia, and thus helping to usher in the End of History. The story for the twenty-first century is therefore already written, with Britain freeing itself from the clutches of the decolonisers and the declinists just in time to rediscover its true calling and take on today’s illiberal world powers.

The History Reclaimed group’s efforts to cement this counter-narrative among the country’s leaders go beyond articles and conference talks, and extend into the world of politics and policy. A June 2021 policy paper from the Council on Geostrategy — dedicated to ‘upholding a free and open international order’ — penned by Biggar and Stokes argues that the Scottish independence movement is partly driven by left-wing anti-imperialism, and that its success would undermine the UK’s ability to act on the international stage. In June 2022, the Centre for Brexit Policy (CBP) published a detailed report aiming to steer the British government’s foreign policy outlook in response to the 2021 Integrated Review, arguing for, among other things, a greater entanglement with the US on the basis on ‘commonalities of values’, as well as for a tougher stance on China and a greater commitment to implementing the ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’. The EU is described in the report as an aberration seeking to impose a globalist world order, much changed from the supposed good old days where globalisation was merely a ‘sensible economic notion based on free trade and the free movement of capital and labour’. The necessity of clearing out ‘woke’ civil servants from Whitehall is emphasised, but no concessions are made to those who suspect that sending tremendous amounts of money to Ukraine and having our energy security undermined might not entirely be in the interests of the average Brit. The paper’s authors include three History Reclaimed writers, as well as a foreword by History Reclaimed editorial adviser Niall Ferguson, whose career in supporting liberal internationalism is perhaps more storied than any other member. Ferguson’s pedigree is far too extensive for this article to cover in any great detail, but we will note that he recently appeared at a talk alongside Blackrock CEO Larry Fink to argue that supporting Ukraine is good value-for-money for the West.

And while it is no surprise that Ferguson’s prestige is such that he can find occasion to dine with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, we can also find other History Reclaimed members quietly cultivating links with influential Tory MPs. Seven MPs spoke at NatCon 2023, alongside Biggar and Prins, with keynote speeches from Suella Braverman, Michael Gove, and Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg. The launch of Biggar’s book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning was attended by ‘a host of genial, approving Tories’, including Michael Gove and Danny Kruger. Biggar also sits on the advisory board of the New Social Covenant Unit, a communitarian project by Danny Kruger (again) and Miriam Cates. Co-authors of the aforementioned CBP report included David Jones and Sir Iain Duncan Smith.

Finally, it is worth mentioning some of the ideological cross-pollination occurring in the centre-right world: Legatum Institute CEO and life peer, Baroness Philippa Stroud, has recently inaugurated a kind of anti-woke Davos alternative called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), with a star-studded lineup including Dan Crenshaw, Paul Marshall, and Jordan Peterson, among others. Her Telegraph article announcing the launch of ARC approvingly cites one of Tombs’ boilerplate pieces about the Wokes undermining the West, and we are informed that Ferguson also happens to be on the advisory board, as are Cates and Kruger.

Aside from the direct links already mentioned, there is ample evidence that the History Reclaimed worldview has been inculcated at the highest levels of government. In a 2021 speech at the Chatham House think tank, the then Foreign Secretary (and unconvincing-Remainer-turned-Leaver) Liz Truss explained that being ‘ashamed of our history’ has contributed to the rise of illiberal world powers, and that we should be proud of our history because it ‘makes us what we are today’ — that is, a champion of global values and free-market economics. In 2022, Oliver Dowden (another Remainer) addressed the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential right-wing think tanks in the US. His speech — ‘The Threat To Democracy: Defeating Cancel Culture by Defending the Values of the Free World’ — makes reference to ‘liberal champions Gladstone and John Stuart Mill’ being cancelled by the Woke, and parrots every single History Reclaimed talking point verbatim in arguing that the UK and the US must band together to regain confidence in our liberal values, and defeat the narratives of ‘white privilege’ and ‘decolonisation’ in order to face the challenges of those ‘rogue states challenging the international order’.

It’s easy to see why these liberal apologetics for the British Empire and their concomitant ideological visions might appeal to Conservative MPs and pundits: most of them are basically liberal internationalists themselves, and have spent most of their careers in service to the EU, only recently being forced to fully turn their heads back to Brexit Island as a result of David Cameron’s gargantuan miscalculation. It therefore comes as no surprise that their only regret about the decline of the British Empire — if they know anything at all about it — is that it hampers our ability to spread democracy and free trade worldwide. Ostensibly right-wing MPs have very little to say about the positives of the British Empire except insofar as it relates to the experience of the colonised: Suella Braverman is proud of the British Empire because of our influence on ‘the legal system’ and ‘some of the educational norms' in Mauritius; Nadhim Zahawi thinks kids should learn about the ‘legacy of a British Civil Service’ in Iraq; Kemi Badenoch didn’t have much to say about the British Empire when asked, but made brief reference to missionaries in Nigeria as a redeeming factor. We might forgive the three names above for thinking of the Empire in terms of their own respective ethnic backgrounds, but white MPs don’t have that excuse: globalists like Boris Johnson wax lyrical about the empire’s tradition of freedom, and how it somehow follows that Britain must therefore have its demographic character transformed even further beyond recognition by accommodating millions of Hong Kong nationals; the aforementioned CSG manifesto laments that the British Empire is ‘no longer seen as a modernising, civilising force that spread trade, wealth and the rule of law around the globe’ (Bacon 2021, p. 20); even the Honourable Member for the Eighteenth Century himself, Jacob Rees-Mogg, can’t come up with much except for the abolition of the slave trade and quashing thuggee when questioned about the positives of the empire.

Of course, there’s no doubt that modern British history is intrinsically linked with the histories and experiences of the people who ended up being subject to our rule, and nobody would deny that these episodes are important facets of our history, in which we may (understandably) take pride. But doesn’t it feel like there’s something missing? Is any of this supposed to inspire British people under a British government today? Don’t worry lad, it wasn’t all for nought: think of those educational norms in Mauritius, yeah? Whenever you feel despondent looking at our collapsing economy and our unrecognisable towns, just lay back and think of how proud you are that South Africa has a bicameral legislature and can act out its freakish caricature of parliamentary governance for years to come.

For most voters today, Britain’s most conspicuous example of involvement in the liberal international order has been our membership of the EU. For native Britons, the fruits of this project has been mass immigration (and all its inevitable problems), deindustrialisation, depressed wages, and the undermining of our sovereignty (Mearsheimer 2019). The Conservative Party, which has led our government for the past fourteen years, openly supported Remain during the referendum, and since Brexit, their commitment to undermining the wellbeing of British people by their prioritisation of ‘global governance’ (and record-breaking levels of immigration) has only increased. The work of the History Reclaimed set is yet another instance of a group of supposedly right-wing warriors determined to cement and promote a globalist ideological framework among our ruling class in service of a set of values that have, by the estimations of many, worked against the material interests of the native British population.

Ultimately, a counter-narrative is needed for the contemporary British right. Constructing a complete and historically sound counter-narrative is no simple task, and so the following section will merely provide an outline of what such a narrative might look like, and suggest some lines of future inquiry for those who find the liberal narrative unconvincing.

---

A Counter-Narrative: Empire and the National Interest

The focus of the History Reclaimed historical narrative is that of representative government, political and economic liberalism, and globalisation. We cannot deny that these are facets of modern British history, nor can we deny that the British Empire played its part in facilitating much of this to one degree or another. However, much remains left out. One glaring issue with this narrative is that the British Empire is much older than these phenomena. Democratisation in Britain didn’t really get going until the nineteenth century (Smith 2004, p. 168), and while scholars of liberalism argue endlessly about where the seeds of liberalism truly lie — whether that be in Adam Smith, John Locke or in ancient Athens — political liberalism as such did not emerge in Britain until the 1820s (Bell 2016, p. 74). History Reclaimed writers spend comparatively little time on the eighteenth century and with what academics often refer to as the ‘First British Empire’ (Marshall, 1999), and so it is difficult to conclude how this period fits into their narrative, if at all.

One writer who does engage with this period is historian and documentarian Dr Zareer Masani, who serves as History Reclaimed’s commander in the Indian Theatre of the British Historikerstreit. Typical articles and talks from Masani defend the Raj on the grounds of democracy and infrastructure, and he has also written a biography of ‘Britain’s Liberal Imperialist’, Thomas Macaulay, reclaiming his legacy from post-colonial and Marxist theorists and casting him as a liberal interventionist in the same vein as Blair (Masani 2013, p. xi). In response to the controversy around the legacy of Robert Clive, Masani was interviewed on The Telegraph’s ‘History Defended’ podcast, in which twenty minutes are spent carefully and effectively refuting a host of leftist smears about how Clive was an evil sociopath who designed to take over India by skulduggery, steal their treasure by conquest, and turn the rain off by laxity. However, when asked why Clive’s statue should remain, Masani can only answer that Clive was a self-made man, hated by the entrenched Whig aristocracy (sticking it to Those Toffs at the Top, brilliant mate), struggling against — and eventually succumbing to — symptoms of what we would now call bipolar disorder (mental health bruv, let’s talk about it yeah?) — both points seemingly made to appeal to left-of-centre sensibilities.

What’s odd about this is that just one month earlier, Masani wrote an excellent article on Clive that actually bucks the moralising trend by focusing on something that History Reclaimed writers rarely consider: Clive’s contributions to the British national interest. The article focuses on his achievement of driving the French (Britain’s primary opponent throughout the eighteenth century) out of India. It also shines light on Clive’s understanding of the geopolitical implications of his victory at Plassey, as well as his subsequent hard-fought battle to prevent the Company’s Directors from undermining Britain’s position in India. Did Robert Clive lead the Company to dominance in Bengal because he cared about the poor, oppressed subjects of the corrupt Nawab? Was the goal of Warren Hastings to turn the people of the subcontinent into upstanding democratic citizens in a globalised, liberal international order? Not in the slightest. Clive’s actions were for the benefit of the East India Company and for the Kingdom of Great Britain, and Clive would put the interests of his nation over that of his Company when he felt as though the latter were diverging from the former (Bryant 2013, p. 13). Hastings’ goal was to manage the territorial gains of Britain, for Britain. Once entrenched at Bengal, both men would express opposition to further territorial gains as not conducive to British interests (Bryant 2013, p. 9).

Quite reasonably, some rightists may counter this view of Clive and Hastings by arguing, in Burkean fashion, that the establishment of the British power in India was overall a corrupting influence on the body politic, and that we would have been better off heavily curtailing the influence of the Nabobs early on, or perhaps even abandoning India to the French. Either way, the framing of the argument has now shifted away from the effects of British rule on the subaltern to that of the British nation and its people.

There is an overlooked tradition of writers that stand, to varying degrees, in opposition to the High Victorian liberal titans like Macaulay and John Stuart Mill. When writers like James Anthony Froude and Sir John Robert Seeley wrote about the empire, they considered it primarily in terms of its benefit to the nation, and in relation to the growing competitor world powers like Germany, Russia, and the United States (Bell 2016, p. 105). Seeley (later of library fame), Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, published The Expansion of England in 1883, when Britain was the foremost world power. Being a member of the Cambridge Historical School, which rejected the Romantic style of earlier historians like Macaulay, Seeley’s work is intentionally dry, descriptive, and academic; not obviously placed to become a best-seller. But concealed just underneath the dry tone lies a great agitated spirit. Seeley saw a storm on the horizon: the panic of 1873 had shaken British confidence in the economic system of free trade; the United States and Germany were fast becoming world powers, expanding rapidly under their respective protectionist systems; and Russia was bearing down on the Middle East. Seeley saw the coming twentieth century as a period in which Britain would either retain its prime position, or lose everything.

The central thesis of the first half of The Expansion of England is that the most important phenomenon in English history since 1688 — far more important than parliamentary wrangling or constitutional developments — was the extension of the English people into other countries of the globe. This first course, compiled from lecture notes during his time at Cambridge, aimed to equip students with an understanding of how the British Empire came to be. This was done in preparation for the second course, which aimed to apply the lessons of Britain’s expansion to the contemporary geopolitical situation, with a particular focus on the question of whether or not to retain India as part of the Empire. Despite being more-or-less a liberal himself, we see the primacy of the national interest assert itself with Seeley arguing (all but outright) that retaining India is not in the interests of the British nation, and that the government should instead focus on — or at least make an attempt to think about — renewing and maintaining its relationships with the white settler colonies: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

It is useful here to engage in the counterfactual question of where we might be today if Seeley’s hopes had been realised, and the Empire consolidated around the white settlements: at the close of the 19th Century, the British Empire encompassed roughly 335 million people, the majority of whom were ethnically Indian. Before the major gains for the British with the scramble for Africa, the African population was even lower. Excluding India, the British Empire was primarily composed of whites of Anglo-Saxon descent. Seeley estimated in 1883 that ten million British subjects ‘of mainly English blood’ existed outside the British Isles. Seeley also rightly discerned that this was just the beginning of the population increase, given that the vast domains of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were sparsely populated at the time. The fall of the empire puts these figures into stark relief: during the post-war period, the granting of independence to the settlements would see Greater Britain lose around twenty percent of its native population. Today, there are twenty-five million European Canadians; the majority of Australia’s twenty-five million people are of European ancestry, likewise with New Zealand’s five million. Taken as a whole, the collapse of the Empire can be seen in a new light, as far more important a phenomenon for the contemporary rightist than any questions about whether our conduct in Africa was moral, or whether the railroads were a net benefit for the subcontinent. In any other context, such a tremendous loss of population (as well as of millions of acres of land) would immediately be recognised as one of the most tremendous events to ever befall a nation.

One twentieth-century writer following in the footsteps of Seeley is Correlli Barnett, whose ‘Pride and Fall’ sequence details the transformation of the outlook of the British ruling elite from that of ruthless national interest to that of idealistic moralism, and its concomitant detriment to Britain’s power and safety. The Collapse of British Power castigates the moralistic Victorians for viewing the empire as an instrument of ‘civilisation and enlightenment’ (Barnett 1972, p. 43) instead of through the lens of the British interest, as well as the twentieth-century internationalists who saw the British Empire as a template for a future ‘World Commonwealth’ (Barnett 1972, p. 58), such neglect leaving the empire’s rulers woefully unprepared to face its twentieth-century competitors. Some of Barnett’s conclusions about the utility of certain portions of the empire for Britain may grate on certain sections of the right, but it is clear nevertheless that his impetus in interpreting our imperial history is the same as Seeley’s. It is this national perspective which the contemporary right-winger should wholly adopt in the construction of an effective counter-narrative.

Seeley tells us that history should pursue a practical object, for ‘history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics’ (Seeley 1883, p. 166). Our ultimate aim in constructing a counter-narrative is to affect a real change in how our ruling class views Britain, in itself and in relation to the contemporary geopolitical situation. Our empire’s decline has seen us divest from one set of international commitments and substitute another set, the benefits of which are even less clear than those of the former. Does today’s confluence of Western populist backlash, Brexit, and the emergence of a multipolar world not afford us any opportunity of relinquishing, even partially, the role of willing participant in liberal world order?

This urge is no longer confined to the online ‘dissident right’. On the same panel as Professor Prins at NatCon 2023 was Michael Anton, a Trump National Security Council appointee, who argued that a transnational liberal-left ‘regime’ is the primary domestic threat to both the USA and the UK, and suggested that chasing international bad guys and spreading ‘universal values’ ought to be put on hold until our countries can put their respective houses in order. Nevertheless, this is no easy task given the degree to which we are integrated; anti-woke liberals may allege that our attempts are fruitless on the grounds that we’re in too deep and that it’s best for Britain to play the game — if in a cynical sense — and remain on America’s side in the fight against evil in a multipolar world, while attempting to retain some scraps of sovereignty that might be up for grabs as power shifts away from the West.

If it turns out that they’re correct, then so be it. Politics is the art of the possible, after all. But at least the framing of the question will be back where it belongs: on the interests of the British people.

---

Bibliography

Bacon, G. (2021). ‘What is wokeism and how can it be defeated?’ in Common Sense: Conservative Thinking for a Post-Liberal Age, pp. 19-26.

Barnett, C. (1972). The Collapse of British Power. Reprint, Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1984.

Bell, D. (2016). Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire. Princeton University Press.

Biggar, N. (2023). Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. HarperCollins UK.

Biggar, N. & Stokes, D. (2021). ‘How “progressive” anti-imperialism threatens the United Kingdom’. Council on Geostrategy. Retrieved December 10, 2023, from https://www.geostrategy.org.uk/research/ how-progressive-anti-imperialism-threatens-the-united-kingdom/

Bryant, G. J. (2013). The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600-1784 : a Grand Strategic Interpretation. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: The Boydell Press.

Centre for Brexit Policy. (2022). Defining Britain’s post-brexit role in the world. London: Centre for Brexit Policy. Retrieved December 10, 2023, from https://centreforbrexitpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Defining-Britains-Post-Brexit-Role-in-the-World-Final-20-June-22.pdf

Gilley, B. (2017). ‘The case for colonialism’. Third World Quarterly, 38(10), DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2017.1369037

Marshall, P. J. (1999). ‘The First British Empire’, in Winks, R. W., The Oxford History of the British Empire: Historiography (Vol. 5). Oxford University Press.

Masani, Z. (2013). Macaulay: Britain’s Liberal Imperialist. Random House India.

Mearsheimer, J.J. (2019). ‘Bound to fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order’. International Security, 43(4): 7–50. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00342

Seeley, J. R. (1883). The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures. Reprint, Macmillan And Co., 1888.

Smith, M. S. (2004). ‘Parliamentary reform and the electorate’, in Williams, C., A companion to nineteenth-century Britain. Oxford: Blackwell.

Stokes, D. (2023). Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West. John Wiley & Sons.