A decade ago, American sociologist Michael Hechter quipped that ‘good alien government may be better than bad native government,’ a remark that, if made today, would cause instant Twitter meltdown. Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning is a sober assessment of Hechter’s claim.

Biggar does not praise anyone’s sons-of-bitches just because the sons-of-bitches in question are of local origin. Instead, he asks hard questions about governance, and doesn’t care who comes out the other side looking awful. Everyone gets sent home with a smacked bum. Even better – thanks to commendable even-handedness – many of the bums he smacks are not obvious.

He doesn’t only go after the ‘decolonise’ loons and shoddy, unevidenced ‘scholarship’, but free trade boosters and civilisations that produced great art entirely on the back of the slave trade (step up to the plate, Benin). Meanwhile, the US cops a serve as the world’s useless imperial power, perhaps because it pretends it isn’t one.

With that in mind, it’s worth stating what Colonialism is not. Unlike cognitive scientist Steven Pinker or statistician Matthew White, Biggar refuses to compare various empires with each other, concluding on the numbers that British and Roman were best while Mongol and Soviet were worst (with dishonourable mentions for Ottomans and Belgians by-the-by).

Instead, he eschews graphs and charts, analysing the British empire – and only the British Empire – from an ethical perspective, setting out and answering a series of questions, each with a dedicated chapter. He asks whether it was driven by greed; whether it was racist and facilitated slavery; whether it was based on territorial conquest; whether it led to genocide; whether its lack of democracy made it illegitimate; and whether it was intrinsically violent. Statistics play at most a supporting role.

Given many people are unmoved by graphs but are moved by narrative, it’s possible Colonialism will persuade where Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature and White’s Great Big Book of Horrible Things did not.

Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner is an aphorism attributed to Spinoza, Madame de Staël, and Tolstoy, and it’s tempting to apply it here. However, Biggar’s desire for understanding is never a vehicle for something like the criminal law’s defence or excuse in a murder trial. Rather, he comes closest to a cautious form of mitigation. He acknowledges that colonialism disrupted existing patterns of indigenous life. He accepts it was often achieved through violence and injustice.

Nonetheless, he’s also aware that states maintain themselves by force or the threat of it, and that imperialism is often simply what powerful states do. Empires ruled a world that for much of its history lacked stable frontiers. Government, imperial or domestic, has always involved light and shade, success and failure, good and evil. Biggar suggests it falsifies the record to collate everything bad about a lengthy historical period or large institution and offer it up as if it were the whole.

Colonialism makes three broad points by way of mitigation when it comes to the British empire’s legacy. First, many of the worst things were not the result of ideology or deliberate policy. They were abuses –recognised as such – and (often) addressed. Secondly, the disruption brought benefits as well as suffering. Practices such as slavery, cannibalism, sati and human sacrifice – which were by any standards barbarous –were ended. ‘Resistance to dominant power is not its own justification,’ he observes at one point. ‘Some dominant powers deserve to be accepted’.

Further, ground was laid for an economic transformation that lifted much of the world out of extreme poverty. The British interfered, yes, but they also brought the rule of law, constitutional government, honest administration, and modern educational and research facilities, all long before they would have been achieved without intervention.

As Biggar threads the ethical needle over the course of some 400 pages, various things fall out – at least to this reviewer. The East India Company does not emerge well, while doux commerce hasn’t always been doux. An ongoing theme in the British India sections is the extent to which governance improved once administration was taken out of the Company’s hands and given to civil servants, lawyers, and the military (collectively, ‘the Crown’) after the 1857 Indian Mutiny.

Meanwhile, there was a persistent link between colonial-era famines and the Empire’s reigning doctrine of free trade. These were made worse because free trade came to be imbued with good moral standing: conventional economic arguments in its favour played second fiddle. People across the political spectrum supported it, too: Whig politicians and trade unionists; peace campaigners and religious groups. This had repeated, disastrous consequences, something of which modern free market boosters would do well to be aware. ‘In 1865, adherence to the doctrine of the free market obstructed the importation of rice into Orissa,’ says Biggar of one such incident, ‘where almost one million people died of starvation and resultant disease’.

Another storied group to have their haloes knocked off or at least tarnished – albeit not in the way one expects – is America’s Founders. Biggar does not recapitulate the ahistorical 1619 Project, though. Instead, he marshals compelling evidence of the extent to which Crown and Empire protected Native Americans from the depredations of America’s revolutionaries. Native Americans then took Britain’s side in the War of Independence, with many of them later fleeing to loyalist Canada.

The great modern objection to empires is their denial of national self-determination to native populations. This is at the root of Ukraine’s current war of necessity against Russia.

However, while self-determination is an ethical good, it’s not the only one. Generations of smart people before modernity thought sound governance superior to self-government. Of course, we disagree. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning is a reminder they had a point.