Pratinav Anil's careless (and possibly dishonest) criticism

An open letter to the TLS.

In his review of my book, Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt (January 23), Pratinav Anil saddles me with the idea of a “credulous ‘balance sheet’ of the British Empire”. Yet, in Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023) I wrote three times that we cannot sensibly make a utilitarian calculation, ‘weighing up’ the incommensurable goods and evils in the credit and debit columns of the imperial ledger, to decide which weighs more heavily (pp. 284-5, 317, 368). So, Anil’s attribution is false—as he must know, since he reviewed Colonialism for the Times.

Next, he reports that I claim that “Britain … was uniquely virtuous in rapidly abolishing the slave trade” and that “’Britain came first’ is the gist of [my] account of abolition”. But I have never claimed that. What I wrote in Reparations, and have consistently said elsewhere, is that the British were “among the first” peoples in the history of the world to abolish slave-trading and slavery. Again, Anil cannot have missed this, since I repeated it three times (pp. 61, 137, 142). This report, too, is false.

Anil, via social media.

Further, he tells the reader that “[t]here is, in these pages, no sense of the slaves’ own agency—of the part played by the likes of Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines in overthrowing slavery”. Yet I mentioned Louverture on page 62 and Olaudah Equiano on p. 66. On that page I also wrote that the 1791 slave revolt in Saint-Domingue “played an important part” in moving British public opinion in favour of abolishing the slave-trade, and on page 68 I say that the 1823 and 1831-2 revolts in Demerara and Jamaica, respectively, were among the factors that converted abolitionists favouring a gradual approach to demanding it immediately. So, for a third time, Anil is guilty of false representation.

Further still, he reports that I view the Royal Navy’s suppression of trans-Atlantic slavery “as pure do-gooding philanthropy”, whereas it was in fact “a modest premium to ensure that slave societies did not undercut British exporters, who, post-abolition, were obliged to pay wages”. In substantiation, he claims that “Biggar’s anti-slavery humanitarians are nowhere to be found in the Muslim world, where slavery persisted into the twentieth century but posed no threat to British profits”. But Anil knows that none of this is true. He knows that I think that British motives were probably a mixture of humanitarian and commercial interests, because I said so in my response to his Times review in the second edition of Colonialism (p. 302). And we know that Anil knows that, because he admits to having read my response in his review of Reparations.

As for his claim that there was no British anti-slavery endeavour in the Muslim world, that is obviously not true. The British did not only suppress slave-trading on the Atlantic coast of Africa. They also suppressed it on Africa’s east coast—most famously using gunboat diplomacy to shut down the (Muslim) Arab slave-market in Zanzibar in 1873 and later moving to suppress the Arab slave-trade and slavery in East Africa, the Sudan, and Egypt. Anil knows this, because I wrote it first in my response to his Times review (Colonialism, p. 302) and again on pp. 80-1 of Reparations. And yet he ignored it, repeating his false claim on your pages.

I quite understand why the TLS (and the Times) like to publish Dr Anil. He’s a clever chap, opines in strong colours, and writes with brio. But his enthusiasm goes to his head and propels him way out ahead of what he actually knows. For, the book that he, a junior scholar of postcolonial India, dismisses as “pulpit-thumping Podsnappery”, the most eminent living historian of transatlantic slavery, David Eltis, has soberly commended as “a major contribution”. But the basic problem with Dr Anil is that what he reports and claims is too often false, and so what he writes cannot be trusted. And if the TLS continues to publish him, it won’t be trusted either.