It should not be controversial to say that both sides, according to their own lights, have a point. An intrepid explorer from a Spanish perspective can be a cruel master from a native American perspective. In any context except colonialism, we take different standpoints for granted. It is perfectly reasonable for the French to cheer Napoleon, just as it is reasonable for the British to revile him and revere his nemesis, the Duke of Wellington.

But the idea that Britain might celebrate, say, Cecil Rhodes in the way that Spain does Columbus seems almost heretical. The English-speaking peoples evince a peculiar compulsion to apologize for their overseas victories — a compulsion not much shared by Arabs or Portuguese or Russians or Turks or Italians. When it comes to self-criticism, only the Germans give us a run for our money.

Why should that be? Is it some curious manifestation of Protestant guilt? Is it that Anglosphere universities, unusually, remove students from their families and their hometowns, leaving them in each other’s company and making them unusually vulnerable to purity spirals and silly ideas? Or is it simply that everyone loves an underdog and the English-speaking peoples are almost never underdogs?