The British Empire and Us: a civilised disagreement with Nigel Biggar and James Heartfield 

Over the last five to ten years, factious arguments about the British empire, about toppling the monuments that mark it, about making reparations for it, and about to teach it in schools, have swept through our public discourse. This is a relatively new thing. We didn’t used to talk about the British empire so much and when we did, it was in a more positive and nostalgic light. Today there is a daily drip drip of the wrongs of empire.

In this episode, Tiffany is joined by ethicist Nigel Biggar,   the author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, and James Heartfield author of Britain's Empires: A History - 1600-2020 for a discussion about the rights and wrongs of empire. 

Biggar aims to set the record straight on empire, to defend it, and to show why not every critique is right. Heartfield is an anti-imperialist who has long condemned empire but finds himself surprised and disquieted to have won the argument. 

They examine what the British empire was in its different iterations; ask whether is was racist and to what extent violence was essential part of it. (For this part they refer to Caroline Elkin's superb Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire which argues that it was); reflect on the role of history and whether it can and should be moral, and, finally, - this is a longer than usual episode - discuss why the turn towards seeing everything in the past is not as radical as it first appears.

Tiffany Jenkins interviews the anthropologist Adam Kuper about his new book, The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Exhibitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions.

Adam talks about the history of anthropology museums and the crisis in which they find themselves today. They discuss the collections of human remains, and objects that were taken in imperial wars. They talk about the Benin Bronzes and the problems with the drive to return them in the present moment.

Adam Kuper was most recently Centennial Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and a visiting professor at Boston University. A Fellow of the British Academy and a recipient of the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Kuper has appeared many times on BBC TV and radio and he has reviewed regularly for the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Wall Street Journal. Read more about him and The Museum of Other People in this THES interview https://www.timeshighereducation.com/depth/adam-kuper-insiders-understanding-not-always-deeper-experts

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