Ian Jack’s article on Professor Nigel Biggar’s “Ethics and Empire” project (The sun may never set on British misconceptions of our lost empire, 6 January) misses an intriguing mystery. Jack suggests that an article in the Times about colonialism by Biggar in November “alerted” his critics to the existence of the project. In fact, at no point in the piece does Biggar mention having his own research programme. It was only on 2 December that Oxford’s McDonald Centre linked the piece to something called “The Ethics of Colonial History”, describing it as “a five-year interdisciplinary project” led jointly by Biggar and the distinguished historian, John Darwin. And it was a full two weeks after the Times article appeared before a detailed description of the aims of the project (including the development of a “nuanced and historically intelligent Christian ethic of empire”) was available on the centre’s website. Even more curiously, this fuller account mentioned that the project had already been launched earlier in the year with a two-day workshop in early July on “Ethics and Empire: The Ancient Period”.

Confronted by this confusing chronology, cynics might possibly wonder whether Biggar “sexed-up” the aims of a pre-existing project after reactions to his Times article in order to suit a rightwing news agenda. And whether in doing so he embarrassed some of his original collaborators. Certainly, as Jack mentioned, Darwin has now left the project. I’m sure that many of us who care about the integrity of Oxford scholarship would be grateful for reassurance on this point.

Professor Philip Murphy

Director, Institute of Commonwealth Studies

• In recent years there has been an increasing awareness of the questionable imprint of the extreme wealth that had been generated in Britain by the slave trade, including, for example, moves to change the names of buildings and streets in cities such as Bristol and Liverpool that had been named after those merchants and others who had grown rich and successful through their involvement in slavery and which were widely publicised in your pages.

It is well known that it was the introduction of sugar to the Caribbean colonies that was the driving force behind the establishment of the triangular trade of enslaved Africans. So in this context, surely the move to raise millions of pounds to keep in this country a painting that had been commissioned in 1768 by an “English MP and Jamaican sugar plantation owner” (Report, 6 January) is questionable on ethical grounds, as without the wealth generated on the backs of the enslaved plantation workers the painting in question is likely to never have come into being.

Harvey Sanders

London

• The evaluation of the empire discussed by Ian Jack should include its less familiar ill effects on the British population. When James Penny, made famous by the Beatles, gave evidence to a parliamentary inquiry on the slave trade in 1788, he stressed that one of its principal advantages was that it had put up Liverpool property values, (something that would have left most of its inhabitants worse off). In the same vein, Oliver Goldsmith in the verse of The Deserted Village (1770) showed hot money from imperial trade setting off waves of enclosures that adversely affected all the existing social classes, which he described in turn.

“Proud swells the tide with loads of freighted ore

and shouting Folly hails them from her shore;

Hoards even beyond the miser’s wish abound

And rich men flock from all the world around.

Yet count our gains. This wealth is but a name

That leaves our useful products still the same.

Not so the loss. The man of wealth and pride

Takes up a space that many poor supplied.”

DBC Reed

Northampton

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