The Historians Who've Had Enough of Woke History - Nigel Biggar and Robert Tombs

August 29, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In 15,000 words of criticism, a Sussex University academic could find nothing—absolutely nothing—good to say about the British Empire. Not that it suppressed the slave trade worldwide. Not that it chose to fight Hitler in 1939. Not a single positive facet. For historians Nigel Biggar and Robert Tombs, this refusal to acknowledge inconvenient data is the defining problem with how history is now taught, written, and policed. Their central argument is that Britain's past is being reduced to a one-sided story of racism, oppression, and exploitation, and that this is doing real political damage: eroding patriotism, undermining solidarity, and leaving young people with no coherent understanding of how their country came to be.

The hollowing out of historical knowledge

The problem begins before ideology enters the picture. Biggar describes a school system that has abandoned narrative continuity altogether. When he was a student in the 1960s and 70s, he absorbed a sense of Britain's development "from Roman times to the present, of the whole." Now, children get "blobs"—isolated topics like life in the trenches or the experience of slavery, with no connecting thread. Ten years ago, an intelligent, well-educated young man from one of Britain's best private schools told Biggar he did not know when the English Civil War happened. "He had no sense of the whole."

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What you'll learn

1 (01:04) **The Two Crises in History Education** - Nigel Biggar identifies a loss of the "whole story" narrative and the rise of an ideologically-driven, guilt-focused curriculum.
2 (06:51) **The Political Consequences of a Shame-Based History** - Francis Foster and the guests argue that a purely negative national story destroys civic solidarity and the will to defend the country.
3 (08:25) **The "Skills" Trap and Postmodernist Excuses** - Tombs explains how a focus on transferable skills and postmodern relativism hollowed out historical knowledge and opened the door to ideological manipulation.
4 (14:01) **Objectivity vs. Relativism in Historical Method** - The guests defend the core of history as an evidence-based discipline, rejecting the idea that all accounts are equally valid.
5 (17:44) **Censorship and the Spirits of the Ancestors** - Biggar reports that historical documents are now being withheld from researchers on the grounds that they might offend the spirits of long-dead indigenous peoples.
6 (27:23) **What is an Empire?** - Biggar defines empire as an "expanding people," a common and often consensual political form, not a uniquely evil European invention.
7 (35:07) **The "Happy Subjects" of Empire** - The guests challenge the narrative of universal colonial resentment by citing evidence that many colonial subjects preferred British rule.

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Show Notes

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