Despite the current vogue for attacking any and all relics of Britain’s colonial past - especially among the nation’s university students - Nigel Biggar said it was also time to acknowledge the good that British rule brought.

The Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology said the British colonialism was all too often seen as a wholly oppressive evil but it often brought political order and the rule of law to lands where there previously had been none.

He said: “Political order might seem like an unexciting value but without it nothing good can flourish.

“That’s why indigenous peoples sometimes chose to move into territories governed by colonial regimes rather than away from them.

“Thus millions of Chinese took refuge in British Hong Kong during the early years of communist rule in Beijing and especially the anarchy of the Cultural Revolution.

“What gave colonial rule popular legitimacy was not democratic elections but its provision of the goods of security and the rule of law.”

Mr Biggar, whose research has covered everything from human rights to the ethics of nationalism, pointed to the way US political scientist Bruce Gilley was treated after suggesting it might be time to question the favoured orthodoxy that had given western colonialism a bad name.

Mr Gilley’s argument was that European colonial rule, while harsh, did not introduce atrocities per se.

Atrocities had been conducted by the indigenous peoples both before colonialism and after – in Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe oversaw the massacre of 20,000 Ndebele people in the 1980s – decades after independence.

Mr Gilley pointed to the building of coherent political communities, reliable state institutions and housing which allowed communities to flourish.

And he quoted Nigerian writer and anti-colonialist Chinua Achebe who said: “Here is a piece of heresy – the British governed their colony of Nigeria with considerable care.

“There was a very highly competent cadre of government officials imbued with a high level of knowledge of how to run a country. British colonies were more or less expertly run.”

He added that while British justice might have been fierce it could not be bought or sold and said: “Now all that has changed.”

Mr Biggar said if the British continued to hate themselves over colonialism they risked turning in on themselves and refusing to engage with the world even in the face of obvious evil.

He added: “If we believe what strident anti-colonialists tell us – namely that our imperial past was one long unbroken litany of oppression, exploitation and self deception – then our guilt will make us vulnerable to wilful manipulation, and it will confirm the belief that the best way we can serve the world is by leaving it well alone.”

Writing in The Times Mr Biggar said the British could take pride in the Royal Navy’s century-long suppression of the Atlantic slave trade and added: “Bruce Gilley’s case for colonialism calls for us British to moderate our post-imperial guilt.”

A survey last year showed Britons were broadly proud of the nation’s history of colonialism.

YouGov found 44 per cent were proud of Britain's history of colonialism, with 21 per cent regretting it happened and 23 per cent holding neither view.

However, the history of British rule is also littered with atrocities, not least among them the invention of the concentration camp in the Boer War (an idea later infamously re-appropriated by Adolf Hitler).

Other horrors include the 1919 Amritsar massacre which saw as many as 1,000 Indian protesters against British rule shot dead and the Mau Mau Uprising of 1951 which saw between 20,000 and 100,000 Kenyans tortured, abused and killed in British concentration camps.

Recent outspoken opponents of Britain’s colonial past have included academic Kehinde Andrews who argued that UK athletes should protest by taking a knee during the national anthem and Ntokozo Qwabe who helped orchestrate the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign at Oxford University.