Nigel Biggar and Robert Tombs’Our Islands’ Story, published by Swift Press, is not a work of history but a political intervention presented in the language of scholarship. Its title deliberately echoes H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story (1905), the Edwardian children’s book that taught generations of British schoolchildren a sanitised story of kings, battles and imperial destiny. David Cameron named it his favourite childhood book. Biggar and Tombs now offer an adult version for a society in crisis, as the ruling class seeks to rehabilitate empire as part of a broader ideological mobilisation for war.

The publisher’s own description makes its purpose clear. The book is presented as a corrective to what it calls “fashionable” accounts of Britain’s past, which focus on its crimes while overlooking its achievements. One endorsement praises it for highlighting “the good things that Britain and her Empire have done.” This is not scholarship with political implications; it is political propaganda presented as scholarship.

Both authors come to the subject with long-established agendas. In Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023), Biggar weighed the British Empire’s moral record, balancing railways, legal codes, and the suppression of the slave trade against Amritsar, the Bengal famine, and the detention camps in Kenya. Tombs, author of The English and Their History, founded History Reclaimed to oppose what it calls “woke distortions” of Britain’s past. He was also a prominent academic advocate for Brexit. Our Islands’ Story brings these projects together in a single, readable volume for the general public.

The balance‑sheet method: petty‑bourgeois moralism as ideology

The balance-sheet method is the book’s organising principle. It presents empire as a series of discrete policies- some good, some bad- to be judged by an impartial moralist. In doing so, it obscures what defines empire: a system of exploitation driven by British capital’s need for markets, raw materials and investment opportunities. The Irish Famine, the opium wars, the Bengal famine of 1943, Amritsar and the partition of India were not lapses in an otherwise benevolent project. They were logical outcomes of a profit-driven system. Treating these events as isolated “mistakes” falsifies their meaning. They were not deviations from the norm, but expressions of it: the violence required to maintain a global hierarchy of labour, property and political domination.

The balance‑sheet approach is not simply inadequate; it is ideological. It rests on the fiction that empire can be morally audited, its crimes offset by its “achievements.” This is the language of accountancy applied to human suffering. It presupposes that the historian stands outside history, weighing actions on a timeless moral scale. But no such figure exists. The “impartial moralist” is not a neutral observer. It is a class position: the petty‑bourgeois intellectual who claims to stand above classes while in reality serving the ruling class by laundering its crimes into moral verdicts. The balance sheet is the ideological form of this pretence: a way of transforming structural exploitation into a series of moral transactions.

Trotsky demolished this posture in Their Morals and Ours, exposing the appeal to eternal moral truths as a device that invariably justifies the interests of the powerful. He insisted that morality is historically conditioned. The ruling class invokes “universal” principles only to sanctify its own domination. Biggar’s method is a textbook example. His earlier Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning framed empire as a moral puzzle: how to weigh railways against famines, legal codes against massacres. But this is not moral reasoning; it is apologetics. It treats the products of exploitation as moral credits and the consequences of exploitation as moral debits, thereby preserving the system itself from scrutiny.

Biggar’s theological background is not incidental. The balance sheet is a secularised theodicy: sins weighed against graces to vindicate the whole. Theodicy seeks to reconcile evil’s existence with God’s goodness. Biggar’s project is to reconcile imperial violence with the supposed beneficence of British civilisation. The structure is identical. The moral ledger becomes a way to explain away atrocities rather than explain them. The question is never why empire produced famine, massacre and dispossession, but how these can be integrated into a narrative of ultimate righteousness.

This method also serves a crucial ideological function today. By dissolving empire into moral fragments, it obscures the class relations that produced it. Empire was not the collective achievement of “the nation.” It was the instrument of a ruling class whose interests lay in global expansion. The British working class had no more control over the decisions that produced the Irish Famine or the Bengal famine than the colonised populations who suffered them. To weigh empire’s “benefits” and “costs” as if they were shared nationally erases this fundamental division.

The balance‑sheet method therefore serves two purposes. It sanitises the past by transforming systemic violence into isolated moral lapses. And it prepares the present by offering a usable past for a ruling class once again turning to militarism and great‑power conflict. A population taught to see empire as “on balance” a force for good is more easily mobilised for new imperialist ventures. The moral accountant becomes the state’s ideological quartermaster.

The ideological work of “our”

The title’s possessive, Our Islands’ Story, performs essential ideological labour. It asserts a common national inheritance where none existed. The rhetorical move is simple but decisive: by placing the empire within the category of “our” history, Biggar and Tombs dissolve the class divisions that structured both the making of empire and its consequences. The British working class were not shareholders in empire; they were its domestic raw material, the source of the surplus value that financed imperial expansion. Their labour underwrote the industrial and financial power that enabled Britain’s global reach, yet they remained politically disenfranchised, economically exploited and socially subordinated. They had no more say in the decisions that produced famine in Bengal or massacres in Kenya than the peasants and workers who suffered them.

The ideological function of the possessive is therefore to universalise what was in reality a class project. Empire was not the achievement of a unified national community. It was the instrument of a ruling class whose interests lay in global expansion, the suppression of colonial resistance and the extraction of profit from subject peoples. To speak of “our” empire is to erase the fundamental division between those who benefited from imperial plunder and those who paid for it in Britain through exploitation and poverty, and across the colonies through dispossession, famine and repression.

This erasure is central to the book’s political purpose. By claiming empire as a shared inheritance, Biggar and Tombs seek to bind the working class to the ruling class’s ideological needs in the present. The appeal to national unity always precedes reaction. In periods of crisis, the ruling class turns to the myth of a common past to justify the demands it will soon impose: sacrifices for “national security,” acceptance of militarisation, and support for foreign policy adventures dressed up as moral obligations. The possessive in the title is therefore not a stylistic flourish but a strategic device. It lays the ideological groundwork for the argument that Britain’s imperial past is a source of pride, continuity, and collective identity.

But the “inheritance” Biggar and Tombs defend belongs only to those who profited from empire. The working class’s real inheritance is the history of struggle against exploitation at home and abroad: the Levellers, the Chartists, the 1926 General Strike, the solidarity of Lancashire cotton workers with the anti‑slavery cause. To reclaim that history is to reject the false unity of “our” islands and to recognise that the only genuine community of interest is the international working class, whose future lies not in reconciling with empire but in abolishing the system that produced it.

Slavery, abolition and the falsification of history

Although the book must be quoted directly once you have the text, its treatment of slavery and abolition is predictable. The standard apologetic line that Britain’s suppression of the slave trade redeems its earlier participation is a moral fable. It rests on the assumption that abolition was a spontaneous flowering of British civilisation, a moment when the nation’s conscience awoke and corrected its earlier sins. This is mythology. Enlightened rulers did not bestow abolition on enslaved people. It was the product of a specific historical conjuncture: the rise of industrial capitalism, which made slave‑based plantation production increasingly incompatible with British economic interests, combined with mass pressure from below, the working-class abolitionist movement, Caribbean slave revolts, and the political agitation of the oppressed themselves.

By the early nineteenth century, the economic foundations of empire were shifting. Industrial capitalism required wage labour, expanding markets, and new forms of investment. Plantation slavery, with its rigid labour system and limited consumer base, increasingly obstructed these needs. The ruling class did not abolish the slave trade out of moral revulsion but because British capitalism’s economic logic was changing. At the same time, enslaved people were not passive recipients of emancipation. Revolts in Jamaica, Barbados and Demerara shook the foundations of colonial rule. The Haitian Revolution demonstrated that slavery could not be maintained without permanent military occupation and escalating violence. In Britain, working-class abolitionists, including Lancashire cotton workers who later supported the Union during the American Civil War, pressured the ruling class in ways it could not ignore.

Even after abolition, British capital continued to profit from slave‑produced cotton and colonial labour. Lancashire mills were fed by cotton harvested by enslaved workers in the American South. British banks financed slave economies across the Atlantic. Colonial labour systems indenture, forced cultivation, punitive taxation reproduced the essential features of slavery under new names. The balance‑sheet method hides this continuity. By treating abolition as a moral credit that cancels earlier crimes, Biggar and Tombs obscure the fact that exploitation did not end in 1807 or 1833; it merely changed form.

The apologetic narrative of abolition serves the same ideological purpose as the rest of the book: to present empire as a moral project, flawed but ultimately benevolent, rather than as a system of global exploitation whose violence was structural, continuous and indispensable.

India, Ireland and the logic of imperial violence

The same method distorts India’s history. The Bengal famine of 1943 was not a natural disaster but the result of wartime requisitioning, price manipulation, and the diversion of grain by a colonial administration that prioritised imperial military needs. The famine directly expressed imperial policy under crisis: grain was exported from Bengal even as millions starved; Churchill’s War Cabinet rejected pleas for relief shipments because it needed shipping elsewhere; and colonial officials insisted the market must be allowed to “regulate” supply. The result was the death of three million people. To treat this as a tragic lapse, an unfortunate misjudgment in an otherwise benevolent imperial record, is to falsify its meaning. It was the predictable consequence of a system whose overriding priority was prosecuting Britain’s global war effort and protecting imperial interests, not the lives of colonial subjects.

Amritsar, likewise, was not an aberration but the normal operation of colonial rule under conditions of political resistance. The massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians in 1919 was not the product of a rogue officer or a momentary breakdown in discipline. It was the logical extension of a regime built on coercion, surveillance and the suppression of dissent. The colonial state responded to mass political mobilisation with exemplary violence, designed to terrorise the population and reassert imperial authority. To isolate Amritsar as a “mistake” is to deny the structural character of colonial repression.

Ireland exposes the lie most starkly. The Great Famine was not a tragic misfortune but a social catastrophe produced by the enforcement of market discipline under colonial rule. British administrators refused to suspend grain exports, insisted that relief must not interfere with the “natural” operation of the market, and treated mass starvation as an unfortunate but necessary consequence of economic orthodoxy. The ideology of laissez‑faire was applied with lethal rigidity to a colonised population whose land, labour and political rights had already been stripped away. Any attempt to minimise or moralise the Famine as an unavoidable tragedy or a failure of compassion is the book’s most damning evidence of its ideological purpose. It reveals the balance‑sheet method for what it is: a device that dissolves structural violence into isolated moral episodes, preserving the legitimacy of the imperial system itself.

The treatment of India and Ireland thus exposes the core function of Biggar and Tombs’ project: to rehabilitate empire by severing its crimes from their economic and political foundations, transforming systemic exploitation into a series of unfortunate events that can be weighed, excused and ultimately forgiven.

Militarism and the ideological mobilisation for war

The timing of Our Islands’ Story is not accidental. The book arrives as governments across Europe pour money into rearmament and ideologically prepare their populations for war. In Britain, this mobilisation is inseparable from the ruling class’s role as NATO’s most aggressive European participant in the war against Russia, its surge in defence spending, and the media’s demand for an “end to the post‑Cold War peace dividend.” The political establishment speaks openly of a “pre‑war world,” of the need to rebuild munitions stockpiles, expand the arms industry, and prepare society for prolonged conflict. In such a climate, rehabilitating empire is not an academic exercise but an ideological necessity. A ruling class that seeks to wage new imperialist wars must first sanitise the old ones.

Militarism requires a usable past. A population taught to feel shame about colonial massacres is harder to mobilise than one taught that Britain has been, “on balance,” a force for good. The authors’ complaint about a “demoralising” view of history reveals more than it admits. Their concern is not historical accuracy but national morale. They object not to falsehoods but to truths that undermine the ideological cohesion required for war. The balance‑sheet method, with its moral credits and debits, functions as a psychological preparation: it reassures the public that Britain’s global interventions have historically been justified, even noble, and therefore that future interventions may be as well.

The book’s celebrity endorsements fit this pattern. John Grey, the philosopher of liberal disillusionment, praises it as essential reading. Its defence of empire as a remedy for “partisan narratives” speaks volumes about the state of official intellectual life. The liberal intelligentsia, having abandoned any serious critique of capitalism, now embraces a nostalgic nationalism that aligns seamlessly with the geopolitical aims of the ruling class. The ideological convergence between conservative imperial apologetics and liberal pessimism is not accidental. Both currents seek to stabilise a crisis-ridden social order by appealing to a mythologised past.

None of this means that the left‑liberal accounts Biggar and Tombs attack are the alternative. Much of what passes for “decolonising” history in universities substitutes moral denunciation and racial categories for class analysis. It leaves the profit system which produced both empire and its present‑day successors off the hook. The liberal critique of empire often frames itself as a struggle over national identity: whether Britain should feel pride or guilt. This is the mirror image of the right‑wing narrative, which insists on pride and rejects guilt. Both approaches treat history as a moral drama rather than as the unfolding of class relations and economic imperatives.

This symmetry is not new. As Nick Beams demonstrated in his analysis of Australia’s “History Wars,” both the revisionist right and its liberal critics treat history as a question of national identity rather than class struggle. The same pattern repeats here: both sides moralise, and neither offers class analysis. The right defends empire as a civilising mission; the liberal academy condemns it as a racial injustice. But both frameworks obscure the underlying reality: empire was a product of capitalism, driven by the need for markets, raw materials and strategic dominance. Its violence expressed class interests, not national character, whether noble or wicked. To frame empire as either national pride or national shame is to accept the nationalist premise that “the nation” acted as a unified subject. In reality, the British working class had no more control over imperial policy than the colonised populations who suffered its consequences.

The real history of these islands is not the story Biggar and Tombs tell. It includes the Levellers and the Chartists, the Irish national struggle, the 1926 General Strike, and Lancashire cotton workers’ solidarity with the anti‑slavery cause in the American Civil War. It includes the mass movements against imperialist war, the struggles of miners, dockers and engineers, and the internationalist traditions of the British working class. These movements were not marginal footnotes to the national story; they were the decisive expressions of the only social force capable of opposing imperialism: the working class. Their history shows that workers’ interests in Britain never aligned with the ruling class’s interests at home or abroad. The working class fought for democratic rights, social equality and international solidarity, while the ruling class pursued profit, domination and war.

This history points not to reconciliation with Britain’s imperial past but to the international struggle for socialism. The working class’s inheritance is not the empire but the fight against it: the strikes, mutinies, protests, and political movements that challenged capital’s power and its global system of exploitation. Reclaiming that history means rejecting the ideological project embodied in Our Islands’ Story. It is to recognise that the only genuine community of interest is the international working class, whose future lies not in rehabilitating empire but in abolishing the capitalist system that produced it.

Our Islands’ Story is an ideological artefact of a ruling class preparing for war and seeking to rehabilitate its imperial past. Its method is moralistic, its history selective, its politics reactionary. Against this stands the working-class history, the only force capable of opposing imperialism and preventing the catastrophe toward which capitalism is driving humanity. The task today, as in every period of crisis, is to arm the working class with historical truth, not the sanitised myths of bourgeois historians. Only on that basis can a movement oppose war, defend democratic rights, and fight for a socialist future.

Bibliography

Marxist Theory and Method

• Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vols. I–III.
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
• Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours.
• Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution.
• V.I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
• Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital.
• Nick Beams, “The ‘History Wars’ and the Politics of the Past,” World Socialist Web Site, 2000–2001.

World Socialist Web Site Analysis

• Tom Scripps, “British Imperialism and the Drive to War,” WSWS May Day Report, 2023.
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British Empire: Structure, Violence, and Political Economy

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Ireland and Colonial Political Economy

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India, Famine, and Colonial Rule

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Slavery, Abolition, and Capitalism

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Contemporary Ideology, Culture Wars, and Historical Revisionism

• Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent.
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• Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (primary source for critique).