A few years ago, at a conference in England on the history of empire, we had a lecture by a retired civil servant who had once served as the governor of one of Britain’s few remaining overseas territories. He was describing his experiences responding to some minor constitutional crisis, when a mob of local protestors had descended upon his pocket-sized Government House and he panicked, frantically calling colleagues in London for advice to try to muddle through to some acceptable solution. When the talk was over, a young scholar on my left—an expert (no doubt) on Imperialist Racist Fascists—turned to me, eyes wide with astonishment, head gently shaking, and said: “You know, I’d just never thought that the British colonialists were people, before.”

Perhaps this can go some way toward explaining the unhappy fate of Bruce Gilley, the political science professor at Portland State University who has become a lightning rod in debates over empire. In 2017, Gilley published an eight-thousand-word defense of Britain’s colonial past in a peer-reviewed academic journal, arguing that the empire tended to do more good than harm in its colonies and that much worse was to follow its premature decolonization. The result was pandemonium. The journal’s editorial board resigned en masse. Its editor received “serious and credible threats of personal violence.” An online petition charging Gilley with being (among other things) a “White Supremacist” gained thousands of signatures. And the journal’s publisher obligingly popped “A Case for Colonialism” down the memory hole.