The History Culture War and How to Fight It Justly

A Christian View

I. CONTESTED HISTORY

History has always been contested. The indubitable facts may provide firm common ground, but how to make sense of them, which ones to foreground and which to marginalize, how to distribute the weight of significance among them, and above all how to evaluate them morally will always be a matter of controversy.

So, the American War of Independence is a fact. As are the rebellious colonists’ assertion of the political principle of ‘no taxation without representation’ and the accusation of ‘tyranny’ laid against King George III by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. But to what extent was the revolt against British authority also motivated by the self-interested frustration of land-speculators at the British pledge to native Americans to stop colonists settling west of the Appalachians and stationing several thousand redcoats along the frontier to enforce it? And to what extent was Jefferson’s list of twenty-eight charges against King George justified? In his recent biography of the king, the historian Andrew Roberts dismisses all but two of them.^[1] Such things are contested.

So, too, is the Great Famine of 1846-9 in Ireland a fact. In this, about one million people—12.5 per cent of the population—are estimated to have died of starvation and epidemic disease, and as a result of it about one and a quarter million are estimated to have emigrated between 1845 and 1851. Together this amounts to a loss of more than a quarter of the total population. Charles Trevelyan, secretary of the British Treasury who dominated the British government’s response, believed that that famine was God’s judgement upon the Irish. And grain continued to be exported from Ireland during it. These, too, are facts. But did Trevelyan view God’s judgement as a reason not to intervene and succour the starving, or did he not rather view it as a judgement upon Irish landlords and a providential opportunity to reform Irish agriculture, while coming to the aid of the destitute? And on food exports, the Irish historian Roy Foster comments: “The idea that food produced in the country should not be exported was not adopted anywhere, and would have been considered an economic irrelevance at the time. It would also have required the assumption of powers that no contemporary government possessed, and inevitably caused violent resistance among the farmer classes; in any case, from 1847 Ireland was importing five times as much grain as she was exporting”.^[2] The facts are one thing; their interpretation, another. And interpretations are controversial.

II. THE POLITICAL USES OF HISTORY

Historians, being human beings, have moral and political convictions, which will tend to shape their interpretation of the facts. However, there is a school of historiography, which follows the 19^th century German historian, Leopold von Ranke, in aspiring to absolute objectivity, describing the past as it actually happened—“wie es eigentlich gewesen ist”, to use his famous phrase. As an ethicist, I have been sceptical of this, supposing that moral and political views are invariably bound to leak into an historian’s interpretation, at very least in his choice of language. But I am no longer sure about that. I think that maybe a very self-aware and self-disciplined historian could deliberately put aside his moral and political assumptions and set out to describe the past strictly in its own terms.

An honest alternative would be for the historian to put all his moral and political cards on the table, face up, so that the reader knows what they are and can monitor where and how they colour his account of the past. This is what I have done in my recent book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. While this does contain a lot of history, covering approximately four hundred years of the British Empire from about 1550 to 1960 and territory from Newfoundland to New Zealand, it is not primarily about the past. It is primarily about the present and the future. Or rather, it is about the past only because it is about the present and future. Let me explain.

In May 2015 I published an article in the Scottish Review, offering a moral justification for Britain’s nuclear weapons deterrent, whose naval base is at Faslane in Scotland.^[3] In response, early the following year Michael Fallon, then the UK’s Secretary of State for Defence, invited me into the Ministry of Defence to talk about Scottish nationalism and Trident. As I was taking my leave, Michael asked me what I was planning on doing next, and I replied that I was thinking of writing about the British Empire. I have no idea what he thought, because his face betrayed nothing. But I do remember thinking to myself, “Oh my goodness, that must sound really eccentric”.

The reason I was thinking about writing about the Empire is this. Despite my accent, I am in fact Anglo-Scottish, born in Scotland of a Scottish father and an English mother, and educated both in there and in England. A referendum was due to be held in September 2014 on whether or not the Scots should leave the United Kingdom and become independent. As an Anglo-Scot, I was—and still am—instinctively British, committed to the United Kingdom as a multinational state, comprising four peoples—the English, the Scots, the Welsh, and the (Northern) Irish. I was, therefore, viscerally opposed to Scottish independence. I thought it would be bad for the Scots, bad for the rest of the UK, and bad for the liberal democratic West at a time when illiberal powers in Moscow and Beijing are flexing their violently authoritarian muscles in Ukraine and across the Taiwan Strait. Not many things would delight Presidents Putin or Xi more than the disintegration of the UK. Recalling the final days of the referendum campaign, the then British ambassador to the UN, Mark Lyall Grant, has written: “my Russian opposite number sympathised with barely suppressed glee at the prospect of the UK dismembered and its permanent seat on the security council called into question. it was clear to me that Scottish independence would have had a devastating impact on the UK’s standing in the world, much greater than withdrawal from the EU ever would”.^[4]

Nevertheless, notwithstanding my visceral opposition to Scotland becoming independent, I felt morally obliged to expose myself to the possibility that I was mistaken. After all, seeing myself as a creature and a sinner, I consider it quite possible that I might be wrong. And acknowledging that my primary loyalty is to God and his Kingdom, I am aware that no human institution or nation is divine and deserves my unconditional commitment. Unlike God, nations come and go. The United Kingdom of Great Britain did not exist before 1707, when the Scottish parliament was absorbed into the English one. In the 1860s, the United States, could have ceased to exist, had the southern Confederacy triumphed. And in 1993 Czechoslovakia did cease to exist when it split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. So, as a Christian, I felt myself obliged to contemplate the possibility that the UK had come to the end of its shelf-life and that it was morally right for the Scots to secede.

Accordingly, I took to reading some Scottish nationalist justifications of independence, in order to evaluate their cogency. And among the several arguments I came across there was one that can be distilled into the following equation: Britain equals Empire equals Evil. Therefore, Scotland should cut its ties with the clapped out, morally compromised, post-imperial Britain and sail off into a bright, new, shiny, sin-free, European future. When I read this, I did so against the backdrop of several decades of reading about British imperial history. And I knew that the stark, simplistic, Manichaean equation of empire with evil simply does not stand up, historically. After all, the British Empire was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish slave-trading and slavery. And between May 1940, when France fell, to June 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the Empire had offered the only military opposition to the massively murderous racist regime in Nazi Berlin—with the sole exception of Greece. So, no, we cannot equate empire with evil.

It was this encounter with an argument in favour of Scottish independence that first alerted me to the political significance and power of history. For, a certain interpretation of the British Empire was being used to justify and make morally appealing the disintegration of the United Kingdom. And that is why I first began thinking of writing about the Empire: to defend a political entity that I regard as valuable against a nationalist political crusade that I regard as dangerously delusional. A cogent case for Scottish independence would not need to puff itself up by slandering the British past, and the fact that it does so is a symptom of its sickness. A main aim of my book, Colonialism, is to expose the slander.

I do not complain about the political use of history, therefore, since I myself use it for a political purpose. It is possible to use history in the service of political interests, without abusing it.

But it is also possible to abuse it.

III. THE POLITICAL ABUSES OF HISTORY

One symptom of abuse is that of selecting part of the truth about the past and treating it as if it were the whole. After the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement underwent a resurgence here in the US, which propelled it across the Atlantic to Britain. There, self-styled ‘anti-racist’ groups on the Left exploited it to promote the narrative that the UK, like the US, is systemically racist and that this systemic racism is rooted in British slave-trading and slavery in the late 1600s and 1700s. The causal connection between 18^th century and the present is colonial history, which we British continue to venerate. Therefore, in order to exorcise ourselves of racism, the argument goes, we British must repudiate our colonial past, not least by pulling down statues of Edward Colston and Cecil Rhodes.

There are several fatal problems with this ‘decolonising’ argument. One is that there is plenty of empirical evidence that Britain, far from being systemically racist, is in fact one of the least racist countries in Europe, and probably in the world.^[5]

But the other problem is historical. Because by identifying British colonial history with slavery and the dehumanizing racism towards African people that justified it, the ‘decolonisers’ completely overlook everything that happened after 1807, when the British Empire spent the second half of its existence using its dominant imperial power to suppress slave-trading and slavery all over the world. In the 1820s and ‘30s the Slave Trade Department was the largest unit in the British Foreign Office. And at the height of its endeavours in the mid-1800s to interrupt the Atlantic slave trade, the Royal Navy devoted 13 per cent of its total manpower to patrolling the coast of West Africa. Yet, none of this appears in the ‘decolonisers’’ narrative, because, since it disturbs the simple equation ‘colonialism and slavery’, it is politically inconvenient. So, they simply ignore it. That is dishonest, it abuses the past, and it creates a fraudulent narrative.

The statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford

But it is not the only form of abuse. Another comprises the covert operation of unfair ethical bias. One instance of this can be found in recent historiography about pre- and early colonial history in North America, where some historians are wont to present Europeans as responsible for introducing sin to an indigenous Eden. As Alan Taylor, an historian at the University of Virginia, has written, “[t]o highlight the social inequities and environmental degradation of our own society, some romantics depict pre-1492 Americans as ecological and social saints living in perfect harmony with one another and with their nature”.^[6] One such romantic is Pekka Hämäläinen, the Finnish-born Professor of American History at Oxford University, who exhibits symptoms of what I call ethical schizophrenia: the balm of indulgence is given the natives, while the acid of cynicism is poured over the Europeans in general and the English in particular. In his 2022 book, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, Hämäläinen gives over the first two chapters to the history of North America before the advent of the Europeans, entitling the second one, “Egalitarian continent”. Here we learn that ancient indigenous peoples focused on “reciprocal relationships” between humans and the non-human world, treated animal quarry “with respect and care”, “shunned political centralization”, and created vast regional webs of “reciprocity and sharing”.^[7] They engaged merely in “rivalry”. In time, however, the “extension of reach and ambition” generated “adaptability, compromise, and creativity”, which produced more hierarchical orders able to mobilise labour on a large scale. Accordingly, in Mesoamerica political centralization gave rise to empires that “drew people into their orbit through military might”.^[8] In the 11^th century AD it is “possible” that the Pueblo Bonito (in what is now New Mexico) was built by slave-labour. Slaves were used to construct the city of Cahokia in the ‘American Bottom’ at the junction of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, where “[a]n aristocracy began to command lesser people and their labour, possibly through violence”.^[9] At this time, we are told with clinical dispassion, “approximately 270 people were ritually sacrificed and buried in a series of mass graves to accompany elite persons in death. In another instance, 118 female captives were brought to Cahokia and killed”.^[10] Nevertheless, by the time Europeans appeared on the scene in the 16^th century, the indigenes of North America had learned the error of their social and political ways:

North American Indians had experimented with ranked societies and all-powerful spiritual leaders and had found them wanting and dangerous. They had opted for more horizontal, participatory, and egalitarian ways of being in the world—a communal ethos available to everyone who was capable of proper thoughts and deeds and willing to share their possessions. Their ideal society was a boundless commonwealth that could be—at least in theory—extended to outsiders, infinitely.^[11]

There are many reasons to be sceptical of Hämäläinen’s romantic story here. First of all, the social and political organization of Indians at the time of their first encounter with Europeans was the result less of a political experiment and enlightenment than of a strategy for survival necessitated by overpopulation, environmental degradation, and a subsistence crisis in the late 12^th and early 13^th centuries.^[12] Next, observe how Hämäläinen coyly presents the indigenous peoples as engaged in ‘rivalry’, but never war; and how their empires, merely “extending their reach and ambition”, “drew people into their orbit” through military might, rather than invading, killing, and enslaving them. Observe, too, the matter-of-fact reportage of mass human sacrifice, quite uncoloured by emotive, evaluative adjectives. And as for the boundless commonwealth open to anyone “capable of proper thoughts and deeds”, that sounds entirely innocent—until one realises that exactly the same could have been said of the later European empires with their missions civilatrices, and until one wonders what came of the victims of indigenous empires who did not care to be civilized and incorporated.

Then, when it comes to describing Europe and the expansion of European empires into the Americas, Hämäläinen’s language and tone changes dramatically. Bearing the title, “Blind conquests”, Chapter 3 speaks of “ruthless warlords” reducing peasants to serfs in the 10^th century, of “[w]ar … glorified as a holy affair suffused with notions of duty, honor, and loyalty”, and of the Spanish conquering the Canary Islands in the 15^thcentury with “cruelty and brutality”. And talking about “military imperialism [being] coupled with biological imperialism”, it also unfairly conflates deliberate aggression with the inadvertent spread of disease.^[13]

In contrast to this implausible, partisan account, the evenhanded Alan Taylor writes that “it would be difficult (and pointless) to make the case that either the Indians or the Europeans of the early modern era were by nature or culture more violent and ‘cruel’ than the other. Warfare and the ritual torture and execution of enemies were commonplace in both native America and early modern Europe”.^[14] If colonists sometimes used cruel violence to terrorise Indians, they also used it to discipline their own: when Virginian colonists who had deserted to the Algonquians were recaptured in 1612, some were burned at the stake or had their bones methodically broken on the wheel. Moreover, the Indians had their own cruelties, too. When the Iroquois sought to replenish their numbers after devastation by disease in the 1630s and ‘40s, they would raid neighbouring Indian peoples for captives in so-called ‘mourning wars’. These may have been motivated by grief and aimed at “restoring spiritual balance to their world by transforming others into Iroquois”, as Hämäläinen puts it,^[15] but the ‘transformation’ in question was brutally coercive and sadistically cruel. Female and juvenile captives, having been torn from their homes, were literally adopted as Iroquois. But adult males were less fortunate, being ritually ‘adopted’ by torture and cannibalism: “tied to a stake, … their new relatives took turns to ‘caress’ them with firebrands. Women cut up the corpses and boiled the pieces in kettles so that the Iroquois could absorb the prisoners’ spiritual power”.^[16] Later in 1680 the Iroquois attacked the Illini stronghold of Kaskaskia, where they killed and ate over six-hundred and “cruelly roasted and devoured” unweaned infants, according to one Jesuit witness.^[17]

Hämäläinen’s abuse here consists, not of ignoring politically inconvenient facts, but rather of unfair discrimination, downplaying the aggression, imperial expansion, violence, and cruelty of native Americans, while highlighting those of the European colonists.

IV. ‘THE PAST IS ANOTHER COUNTRY. THEY DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY THERE’: CREATURELY SELF-AWARENESS AND HISTORICAL IMAGINATION

When reading of our forebears in the 16^th and 17^th centuries—indeed, in the 18^th and 19^th centuries—we may well be appalled by the frequency and level of violence in which they indulged. But before we rush to moralistic judgement, we need to pause and consider the difference in circumstances. We need to exercise our historical imagination, transcending the environment we happen to live in and take for granted. The truth is that today in the US, as in the UK, most of us enjoy degrees of health, wealth, and security that are unprecedented in our own history and unequalled in many parts of the world. Compared to our grandparents, even our parents, most of us are extraordinarily fortunate. Our good fortune owes a lot to the fact that we live in states that are strong enough to deter attacks by external enemies and suppress attacks by internal ones. It was not always so, and it behoves us remember that. The world we now inhabit is not eternal, but contingent and creaturely. It was built and bequeathed to us. Which should make us at once humble and grateful. And it should also make us more empathetic and less self-righteous towards those in the past who did not conform to our norms.

Imagine yourself onto the frontier between the world of Europeans and that of native Americans in the 1600s—or between Europeans and aboriginal Australians in the early 1800s. There is no overarching authority to regulate and moderate the encounter. It is not clear exactly where the boundaries are. The two peoples seem very strange to each other, perhaps even appalling. Mutual understanding is low and trust is in short supply. Under such uncertain and insecure circumstances, the scope for conflict is great. Where attack may lurk around every corner, the readiness to resort to violence, even pre-emptively, will be high. And the use of overwhelming, even merciless, violence will seem proportionate—since security depends on deterrence, and deterrence requires the instilling of fear.

As with violence, so with slavery. We rightly find slavery abhorrent and lament the inhuman conditions in which African slaves were transported across the Atlantic and then put to work on the plantations in the Caribbean and the southern American colonies. Yet, our moral indignation needs to pause and absorb the fact that slavery and slave-trading were universal institutions, practiced from the dawn of time on every continent by people of every skin colour.

Slavery was very common, and we need to exercise our historical imaginations in wondering why. One reason is this. In much of the past, when you conquered an enemy, you could do one of two things with the vanquished: either slaughter their men, so that they do not live to attack you again; or enslave them, putting them to work or trading them. As the late-nineteenth-century moral philosopher David Ritchie put it, slavery was

a necessary step in the progress of humanity … [since] [i]t mitigated the horrors of primitive warfare, and thus gave some scope for the growth, however feeble, of kindlier sentiments towards the alien and the weak … Thus slavery made possible the growth of the very ideas which in course of time came to make slavery appear wrong. Slavery seems to us horrible … It used not to seem horrible.^[18]

In the memorable words of the opening line of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-between: “The past is another country. They do things differently there”. ^[19]And they do them differently for reasons, not all of them stupid or wicked. We need to be humble and self-transcending enough to learn what those reasons were. Then, perhaps, we will be in a position to make wise moral judgements about the past.

V. THE NEED FOR INTELLECTUAL VIRTUE IN HISTORICAL CONTROVERSY

So far, I have alluded to the role of intellectual virtue in handling historical controversy. I have spoken of my own sense of obligation to expose my viscerally unionist convictions to the arguments of Scottish secessionists, just in case those contained truths I should learn—that is, I gestured toward the virtue of docility. I have alluded to the duty to be open to the whole truth about the past, not just the convenient parts—that is, the duty to exercise the virtue of honesty. I have spoken of the duty of avoiding moral or political bias—that is, the duty to exercise the virtue of justice-as-fairness. And I have mentioned the virtue of humility in remembering our creaturely limitation by time and place as we judge the behaviour of our ancestors. One of the most shocking revelations of my experience of the history culture war during the past six years is how many university professors of history display a lack of intellectual virtue.

On several occasions I have subjected to critical analysis what some anti-colonialist historians have written, and I have published my analyses. Let me mention just one of them. Richard Drayton is Professor of Imperial and Global History at King’s College London. In 2019 he published a whole book chapter about me as an icon of Brexit under the title, “Biggar vs Little Britain: God, War, Union, Brexit and Empire in Twenty-first Century Conservative Ideology”.^[20] In August of the same year, I published a response in the online journal, Quillette, under the title, “The Drayton Icon and Intellectual Vice”.^[21] I do not have time here to present the evidence with which I substantiated my argument. If you want to see that, I must refer you to the article online. But here is my conclusion:

I think I’ve now done enough to show what I think of Richard Drayton’s attempted critique of me and my work, and why I think it. It’s of little value for what it says about me. It’s more important for what it shows about him. But it’s most important for what it reveals, through him, about the ethos that prevails in certain reaches of the academic world. As we’ve seen, Drayton’s thinking has taken the form of a false interpretation of data, several gratuitous and malicious ad hominem insinuations, a host of misrepresentations, the pulling of professional rank, irrelevant pedantry, distorting caricatures, and a complete failure to engage carefully and rationally with what I actually say. Thereby, it has given expression to the following intellectual vices: carelessness, injustice, uncharity, hubris, and evasiveness. Evidently, these are motivated by a zealous political hostility that so possesses him as to rob him of reason and scruple. This zeal will not brook contradiction; it won’t entertain the possibility that it might be mistaken. So instead of letting a contrary position stand, observing it carefully, doing it justice, and letting it provoke thought—which risks giving rise to doubt—it has to be manhandled into the shape of a risible straw-man to be brushed aside with ease….

The problem that Drayton illustrates, however, is not just narrowly academic, but more broadly public. For sure, the intellectual vices that he and his allies exhibit destroy the possibility of fruitful dialogue with academic colleagues like me. For no useful purpose can be served by trying to converse with people, whose objections are unconstrained by the basic rules of civility, who will not listen, who can’t do justice, and who are too insecure to risk thought. Under those conditions, to attempt communication merely invites heat, not light.

But much, much worse are the wider, public ramifications. This is because generations of students who pass through the zealous hands of Drayton and his ilk will be rewarded for sharing their prejudices and imitating their vices. And then today’s students will become tomorrow’s citizens, voters, journalists, MPs, and political leaders. So, if we care about the future of rational public discourse among us, and if we care to keep political conflict within civilised bounds, then we should start to worry about the illiberal likes of the Rhodes Professor of Imperial History. And we should start to ask university leaders to justify their rewarding and promoting—and funders, their supporting—politically corrosive intellectual vice that harms us all.

The intellectual vices that I have observed in Richard Drayton’s writing are by no means confined to him. The shocking lack of intellectual virtue among historians of empire and colonialism is something that I have encountered time and time again—and I present further examples in my book. Given that phenomenon, one of the most important contributions that Christians can make to academic and public controversy over history is to develop, exercise, and model the intellectual virtues that are vital in keeping controversy civil. These are virtues such as: courage in the face of ideas that are alien and threatening; strict justice in representing them; charity in construing their ambiguities, preferring the strongest rather than the weakest possibility; docility in admitting the possibility that they might have something to teach; humility in admitting the possibility of correction by them; forbearance and temperance in the face of the unfairness and provocation that opponents may perpetrate; and above all, such a love for the truth that one keeps on saying it—prophesying it—in the face of hostility.

Venerable Bede, patron of historians

These virtues are not uniquely Christian, but they are authentically so. In general, my view is that Christians should care to be Christian rather than distinctive. After all, how distinctive we are depends entirely on what issue is at stake and with whom we are being compared. Distinctiveness is relative.

Nevertheless, if the virtues I have mentioned are not uniquely Christian, they are rarely talked about in contemporary Western culture, where rights-talk so dominates as to push almost every other kind of moral vocabulary off the table. That is not to say that no one intuits virtue or exercises it. But it is to say that talk about it is so repressed that it is difficult to name, and being difficult to name, it is difficult to identify, communicate, and promote. The result is that vice flourishes unopposed, even among university professors and teachers.

Therefore, by developing, displaying, and naming intellectual virtues in the midst of the fractious culture war over history, Christians have a very important role to play in giving voice to them and reminding their fellow citizens of their importance.

VI. CONCLUSION

The culture war over history needs to be fought, because valuable political goods are at stake. But there are good and bad ways of fighting, just and unjust, virtuous and vicious. Christians have a very important contribution to make to the welfare of the secular city by developing, displaying, and modelling intellectual virtue in such a way as to help keep public controversy civil. And all that in aid of bearing witness to important truths that many people do not want to hear and are aggressively disposed to repress. Here on the historical front of the culture wars, the Christian is called to play prophet, both in what he says and by how he says it.

This was originally delivered as a Hughes Lecture at Redeemer Theological Seminary, Orlando, Florida

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NOTES

^[1] Andrew Roberts, George III: The life and reign of Britain’s most misunderstood monarch (London: Allen Lane, 2021), pp. 295-308, esp. p. 308.

^[2] Roy Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 325.

^[3] Nigel Biggar, “Living with Trident”, Scottish Review, May 2015: https://www.mcdonaldcentre.org.uk/sites/default/files/content/living_with_trident_biggar_may-2015.pdf

^[4] Mark Lyall Grant, “Keep the rest of the world in view while negotiating a Brexit deal”, FTWeekend, 16-17 September 2017, p. 14.

^[5] See European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Being Black in the EU: Summary of the Second European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey (Vienna: EUAFR, 2019); Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, The Report (London: HMSO, 2021); Tomiwa Owolade, This is Not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter (London: Atlantic Books, 2023); Rakib Ehsan, Beyond Grievance: What the left gets wrong about ethnic minorities (London: Swift Press, 2023).

^[6] Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The settling of North America (New York: Penguin, 2001), p. 4.

^[7] Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America (New York: Liveright, 2022), pp. 7, 9, 10.

^[8] Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, pp. 11, 12, 15.

^[9] Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, pp. 14, 16, 18.

^[10] Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, p. 18.

^[11] Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, p. 24.

^[12] Taylor, American Colonies, pp. 13, 16.

^[13] Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, pp. 25, 26, 27, 31.

^[14] Taylor, American Colonies, p. 4.

^[15] Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, p. 101.

^[16] Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, p. 105; Taylor, American Colonies, pp. 102-3. Hämäläinen’s partisanship is at its starkest when he strains to put the brightest possible gloss on indigenous kidnapping, torture, and cruelty, telling us that “[the Iroquois] needed captives to replenish disease-ravaged populations, mend fractured lineages, alleviate pain through vengeance, and restore the spiritual vitality of their communities” (p. 104); and that they “conducted these ceremonies not because they clamored for war but because they wanted peace. Ritual absorption of enemy bodies and souls … eased the Iroquois’s pain and helped them regain reason; it restored normalcy” (p. 105). Well, that’s all right, then.

^[17] Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, p. 210.

^[18] David Ritchie, Natural Rights: A Criticism of Some Ethical and Political Conceptions (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1895), p. 104.

^[19] L.P. Hartley, The Go-between (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), p. 1.

^[20] Richard Drayton, “Biggar vs Little Britain: God, War, Union, Brexit and Empire in Twenty-first Century Conservative Ideology’, ‘in Stuart Ward and Astrid Rasch, eds, Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2019):https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/biggar-vs-little-britain-god-war-union-brexit-and-empire-in-twentyfirst-century-conservative-ideology(fad94931-c366-4443-8dca-e0d266297eab).html.

^[21] Nigel Biggar, “The Drayton Icon and Intellectual Vice” Quillette, 27 August 2019: https://quillette.com/2019/08/27/the-drayton-icon-and-intellectual-vice/