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.
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Helen Dale won the Miles Franklin Award for her first novel, ‘The Hand that Signed the Paper’, and read law at Oxford. Her most recent novel is ‘Kingdom of the Wicked’.
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