Twilight: The Decline of the British Empire

by Caroline Elkins

**Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2022**
**A NEW YORK TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, HISTORY TODAY and HISTORY EXTRA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022**


'This book is dynamite' - ROBERT GILDEA, author of Empires of the Mind

A searing, landmark study of the British Empire that lays bare its pervasive use of violence throughout the twentieth century.

Sprawling across a quarter of the world's land mass and claiming nearly seven hundred million people, Britain's empire was the largest in human history. For many, it epitomized the nation's cultural superiority, but what legacy have we delivered to the world?

Spanning more than two hundred years of history, Caroline Elkins reveals an evolutionary and racialized doctrine that espoused an unrelenting deployment of violence to secure and preserve British imperial interests. She outlines how ideological foundations of violence were rooted in Victorian calls for punishing indigenous peoples who resisted subjugation, and how over time this treatment became increasingly systematised. And she makes clear that when Britain could no longer maintain control over the violence it provoked and enacted, Britain retreated from its empire, destroying and hiding incriminating evidence of its policies and practices.

Drawing on more than a decade of research on four continents, Legacy of Violence implicates all sides of the political divide regarding the creation, execution, and cover-up of imperial violence. By demonstrating how and why violence was the most salient factor underwriting both the empire and British imperial identity, Elkins explodes long-held myths and sheds a disturbing new light on empire's role in shaping the world today.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, World History, Audiobook, British Literature, European History

ebook

First published January 18, 2022

About the author

Caroline Elkins is Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, the Thomas Henry Carroll/Ford Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School, Affiliated Professor at Harvard Law School, and the Founding Oppenheimer Director of Harvard's Center for African Studies.

Reviews

[Dmitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Here, sure enough, are peculiar views on the rights of the negroes, and involving probably innumerable other duties, expectations, wrongs and disappointments, much argued by logic and grapeshot in these emancipated epochs of the human mind. There is an immense fund of human stupidity circulating among us and much clogging our affairs for some time past.” - Thomas Carlyle, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question”, 1849

“It was clear that to bring English functionaries to the bar of a criminal court for abuses of power, committed against the negroes and mulattoes, was not a popular proceeding with the English middle classes.” - John Stuart Mill, 1865

“It cannot be far distant when England will have to decide between national and cosmopolitan principles. It is whether you’ll be content to be a comfortable England, modeled and molded on continental principles, and meeting in due course an inevitable fate, or whether you will be a great country - an imperial country - and command the respect of the world.” - Benjamin Disraeli, Crystal Palace Speech, 1872

“Force is an absolutely essential element of all law. The abolition of the law of force cannot mean the withdrawal of force for that would be the destruction of law itself. If the government decides to remove law from India they should remove themselves and their countrymen.” - James Fitzjames Stephen, “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”, 1873

“Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation, and it is for this reason that the progress of historical studies poses a threat to nationality. Historical inquiry in effect throws light on the violent acts that have taken place at the origin of every political formation.”- Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?”, 1882

“We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs. As the villages were in the plains this was quite easy. The tribesmen sat on the mountains and sullenly watched the destruction of their homes and means of livelihood. At the end of a fortnight the valley was a desert and honour was satisfied.” - Winston Churchill reporting on the Peshawar Campaign of 1897

”Take up the White Man's burden
 
Send forth the best ye breed -

Go bind your sons to exile,
To serve your captives need;

To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild -

Your new caught sullen peoples,
 
Half devil and half child.”
- Rudyard Kipling, ”The White Man’s Burden”, 1899 encouraging US President McKinley to annex the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, killing a quarter million Philippino civilians and revolutionaries

************

Caroline Elkins, American historian at Harvard, who won a Pulitzer Prize for ‘Imperial Reckoning’ about concentration camps in Kenya, reprises with this ambitious 2022 attempt to explain the British empire en tout. How did it come to pass that the sun never set on the British empire and, as she asks in preface, was it a good or bad thing? Elkins references Niall Ferguson’s ‘How Britain Made the Modern World’ as a foil to her argument. This book focuses on what she terms as the Second Empire, or countries directly ruled from London via colonial governors, parts of India, Africa, Ireland and the Caribbean. The First Empire (America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) isn’t included. The rationalization behind the British Empire was a mission to reform native people and to usher them into the world with paternalistic guidance. She explores how state sanctioned violence was used to bring liberal imperialism to “the uttermost ends of the earth.”

The Black Hole
Elkins opens with a 1756 imprisonment of 146 soldiers after the fall of the British fort in the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’, a 14’ by 18’ cubicle with 23 survivors alive in the next day. Research has shown there were less than 40 prisoners and 20 died from prior battle wounds, but the story became a legend of the savagery threatening English people. It had been over 150 years since the charter of the East India Co., a proxy for British political interests on the subcontinent. A retaliatory expedition led by Robert Clive culminated in the Battle of Plassey which consolidated control over Bengal. Predatory tax led to fabulous profit and widespread famine. Clive’s successor Hastings was impeached in 1788 by Burke on charges of embezzlement and extortion. Victorian writers would argue for a British role in enlightening the backward, tied to missionary work. By 1900 a quarter of the planet’s land and a half billion of its people were part of the empire.

The Sun Never Sets
While the empire was vastly diverse in geography, language and religion, the universalist project of liberal imperialism was narrowly defined by race and a ladder of civilization on which the British sat atop. Africans and Asians were deemed not yet ready for self determination without the prerequisite attributes of respect for law and property. The governance of the empire would require a despotic relationship between the ruler and ruled until its subjects were capable of social and economic progress. John Stuart Mill and others formulated the concept of black and brown people requiring reform to assume the responsibility of sovereignty as justification for coercion in colonial rule. In the decades before martial law had been practiced from the Caribbean to the South Seas in order to inculcate those values by suspension of due process. The political debates went on for centuries but both Liberal and Conservative parties upheld the British right to empire.

A Strong Hand
Violence, torture and executions in the 1857 Sepoy and 1865 Morant Bay rebellions were challenged by moral and legal philosophers, but the exigencies of sugar cane, cotton and tea profits went unabated. Thomas Carlisle posited idleness and backwardness of blacks needing a strong hand of white rule. After the American Revolution Britain had abolished the slave trade in 1807, and use of slave labor in 1838, but in the wake of the Jamaican rebellion it was seen indispensable to use martial law as a pre-emptive measure rather than a last resort. Moral imperatives of Protestant evangelism shifted in the Victorian era from liberal imperialism to the use of force as a necessary and intrinsic component of control. Over the next century increasingly complex sets of arguments were offered to explain the project of empire in a rapidly changing world. In India and Jamaica elective representation ended, the land and people brought under direct colonial control.

Turn of the Century
With the extension of suffrage and expansion of the market economy a shift in dominance from ruling elites to a class based hierarchy began. Conservative politicians such as Benjamin Disraeli voiced patriotic appeals to bond the new electorate to the old and preserve an economy largely reliant on empire. Popular culture also played a key role promoting the nationalist narrative of liberal imperialism. The Queen Victoria held a public image in decline until the Conservative press praised her virtues and Disraeli passed an act giving her title as Empress of India in 1878. The Diamond Jubilee of 1897, imperial music of Elgar, monuments to Queen and Empire were celebrated with national pride. Differences were taught between the white and black colonies in toddler’s books, boy’s magazines and history classes. In the 20th century conquered lands became elaborate systems of police and military forces controlling natives by labor and law.

Dark Continent
Discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1884 in South Africa led to war with descendants of Dutch settlers in 1899. The conflict lasted three years and required 450,000 British soldiers, the most costly war between Napoleon and Kaiser. The Boers were subdued using scorched earth tactics and internment of women and children. Among the commanders was Lord Kitchener, leader of an 1898 mission to Sudan to punish a Muslim army that had defeated and killed Charles “Chinese” Gordon, British hero in China’s Taiping Rebellion. Future PM David Lloyd George accused the government of pursuing “a policy of extermination” in South Africa, where in addition to Boers 100,000 Africans were held in camps. The war was over in 1902 and by 1910 the British colonies were combined into the Union of South Africa, while laying the groundwork for a future apartheid state. Lord Kitchener went on to become Secretary of State for War during WWI.

Absence of Mind
A network of civil servants, usually graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, was established across far flung regions, with young administrators assigned to vast populations. They reported to the Foreign Office at home, who reported to Parliament, but were typically left to their own devices as “the men on the spot”. Local ruling elites were co-opted to assist in managing the natives. The culture led to a wide diversity of how things were handled from place to place, and divergence from British constitutional and common law to what was practiced inside the colonies. The monopoly of power remained with the military, directed by politicians at Downing and Whitehall, who had theorized a moral force founded upon European superiority and the occasional need “to teach savages a lesson they would not forget”. Although the conventions of war and international law existed among European nations they were thought not to apply to colonies.

WWI
WWI brought the threat of a divided Europe to the stability of the colonies. Millions of soldiers from India and Africa fought in the trenches of Verdun and on the beaches of Gallipoli, and expected they would receive the right to self rule. Ireland, annexed by Britain in 1801, oppressed by their absentee landlords, tax exploitation and famine, hoped to be rewarded for loyalty with home rule. David Lloyd George acquired a coalition government of liberal imperialists after PM Asquith resigned in 1916. He had suppressed Dublin’s Easter Rising with a paramilitary police and extrajudicial courts, killing 500 and arresting 3500, the Irish considered uncivilized and Catholic. After a world war fueled by imperial ambitions leaders at the Paris Peace Conference strove for a world government in the League of Nations, modeled after the British Empire or United States. Backward nations would be tutored by an international organization of white men.

In Between Wars
Britain assumed control of larger parts of Africa and Mideast after dividing German and Ottoman territories. Poets Yeats and Tagore, Nobel Prize winners, are highlighted as critics of empire. Gandhi had returned to India after 20 years as an activist in South Africa and began anti-imperial protests. In 1919 British troops shot 1200 and killed 400 protesters of an emergency powers act in Amritsar and Tagore renounced his knighthood. Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement led to more protests and deaths and earned him six years in prison. Churchill rallied “to keep the flag flying” over India and to “preserve the prestige and authority of the white man”. Black activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois organized the first Pan-African Congress in Paris to debate their response to empire. Egyptians who provided a million and a half men in the war demanded independence. Britain arrested the leader and 3000 civilians were killed until world order was restored.

WWII
As FDR struggled to procure weapons and equipment for Britain Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter, stating all countries had the right to self determination, but walked back its meaning to the return of sovereign nations that Hitler had invaded. With the Battle of Britain approaching, and fears of a channel invasion growing, war power acts were invoked and 30,000 foreigners corralled into detention centers, mainly European Jews who had escaped from the continent. The Empire’s forces tied up in the Mideast and Mediterranean, Hong Kong and Singapore fell to Japan. In November 1942 PM Churchill proclaimed to the House of Commons: “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire”. Nearly 15 million commonwealth and colonial troops joined the war. Gandhi launched the Quit India movement, urging not to fight until independence was given, and was arrested along with 100,000 of his fellow Congress Party members.

After the Wars
In the aftermath of the war Churchill and Conservatives were replaced by a Labour Party, promising a new social contract focused on workers welfare, but it had no real program for the future of the empire. 400,000 Africans returned home from war with a new knowledge of the world. India achieved its independence in 1947 at the cost of one million Muslim and Hindu deaths due to religious hate. The Commonwealth of Nations lives on in Canada, the Caribbean, South America, Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. English is the worldwide business language and international capitalism has spread from sea to shining sea. Churchill once pronounced “Each time we must choose between Europe and the open sea we shall always choose the open sea” as was proven most recently by Brexit. In the end the “fluttered and wild folk” were released upon their own recognizance and they are now for better or worse free.

The idea that the conquest of foreign land and subjection of indigenous people required violence and racism seems today to be obvious, not a thesis requiring a startling explanation. There may yet be some outlying arguments for the empire’s beneficial effects, such as those of Niall Ferguson that still bear addressing, but the book is not a polemical exercise. The value of Elkins study is in the details of how the empire operated on its political, legal, economic and cultural levels. This 900 page gorilla could have been reduced by a third. There is frequent repetition of concepts covered earlier in the text to provide further reinforcement that seems to be unnecessary. Some sentences stretch to nearly a paragraph. On the whole this is a minor criticism and with patience there is a lot of information that can be learned. Elkins provides a successful and well conceived overview of the empire in three dimensions, over time, place and thought.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Caroline Elkins' Legacy of Violence painstakingly details the bloody decline of the British Empire in the 20th Century. The subtitle of the book is a bit of a misnomer: although Elkins briefly details a few Victorian era conflicts like the Indian Mutiny and the Boer War, the balance of the book focuses on Britain's increasingly violent efforts to hold its empire together post-WWI. The book traces strong throughlines between the Easter Rebellion and Irish War of Independence through interwar rebellions in Iraq, Egypt and Palestine, attempts to retain control over India and the postwar "decolonization" struggles in Malaya, Egypt and Kenya (to which Elkins devoted an earlier book, Imperial Reckoning). Under the guise of "liberal imperialism" - the idea that the British brought civilization and law to their colonies - the British availed themselves of ruthless behavior: torture and mass arrests, extrajudicial killings and massacres of civilians. A "legalized lawlessness," in Elkins' terms, that justified unethical behavior in maintenance of the Empire. Elkins ably portrays these bloody conflicts, the personalities who waged them (from Orde Wingate, the future Chindit leader who broke Palestinian Arabs in the '30s with mass detention and paramilitary Special Police, to Gerald Templar, who stage-managed a ruthless crackdown in Malaya) and how many of them flitted from one theater to the next, bringing their atrocities to bear on multiple continents. The book is so absorbing in its bloodiness that Elkins, like many revisionists historians, neglects to provide more than a glancing examination of nationalists who opposed the Empire. A handful of activists (from left-wing whites like George Orwell and Barbara Castle to Black intellectuals C.L.R. James and George Padmore) receive compelling sketches but overall, the impression is of victims of imperialism being acted upon by evil Brits. Not that it negates Elkins' overall point - that the very idea of "liberal imperialism" is an Orwellian oxymoron, justifying domination on the grounds that the perpetrators are enlightened and free. But it does leave a significant hollow in what's otherwise a commendable reminder that if Britain was no worse than its peers in imperialism (France, Belgium and Germany), it certainly wasn't much better.

[Sean O'Donoghue · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the UK government is working to change how the British Empire is taught at O & A levels in our schools, having read this book it might perhaps be a good ideas. Polls taken in 1951 just before the snap general election found that 75% were pro empire : alas, 40% couldn’t name a single colony. That was at a time when Monarch & Empire were greatly esteemed in British society, with Labour supporters just as loyal as those of other hues. Certainly little or nothing critical was ever said or written about it, other than by the few critics of Empire, such as CR James and George Padmore, whose voices were only heard on small newsletters and gatherings in back rooms of pubs.
Eric Williams magnificent British Capitalism and British Slavery was rejected by many British publishers, who felt that it was not within the dominant uncritical narrative of the British Empires. Williams found a publisher for it in the USA in 1944. Thankfully, these days there are people, many who are descendants of of the Empires, who have dished us up non-hagiographical stories of Empire. Shashi Tharoor’s scathing Inglorious Empire is one such, as is Priyamvada Gopal’s Insurgent Empire linking up how resistance in Empire influenced the evolution of British politics, especially from the left. And Afua Hirsch informs me that , despite going to very expensive private schooling, the only mention that she’d heard about slavery was that Britain ended world slavery, no mention of the fact that the Industrial Revolution and just about every major country house in the UK were built on the proceeds of slavery. There is also the fact that the best known incident ever in the history of the British Empire is The Black Hole of Calcutta – every school child has heard of this. Theevent happened 1775 and up to 200 British prisoners were held to have died. This number has now been reduced down to 18. The Bengal Famine of 1769, in which up to ten million died did not appear to be worthy of transmitting along the propaganda pipeline to Britain, then or indeed now.
This book is written by an American academic, with a very noble and magnificent pedigree regarding her work. It was her, Caroline Elkins, who first brought to our attention the dreadful treatment meted out to the members of the Kikuya tribe in Kenya, round about 1952-53. Like all end- of- colony ceremonies throughout the Empire, tons of official documents were destroyed to ensure nothing compromising was found to incriminate the departing forces. But our hero detective historian did find more than enough that had escaped the censorship bonfires, which led to the famous Mau Mau case in our High Courts where 5000 of those still living received £20m in compensation from the British Government in 2012 for arbitrary killings, imprisonment, regular collective punishment, severe beatings and extreme acts of inhuman and degrading treatment, with castrations and severe sexual assault being regular inflictions. This was the civilising Upwards of 150,000 of their number were detained without trial at any one time. From my understanding of this episode, the only person who was ever charged for this treatment of these people was a local chief, who had taken the Kings Shilling by siding with the British, but his case was dropped in case it embarrassed the British Government. Dr Elkins’ last book was on the Mau Mau, and at whose trial she, with some other British historians, was an expert witness. The good people of Britain were sold the notion that Empire was about the civilising mission – those subject to it were demonised in the British media as less than human. As happened in Kenya, this was also how it manifested in every colony Britain ruled
And so to “ Legacy of Violence”. This book covers India, Ireland, Palestine, Kenya, Singapore / Malaysia, British Guiana, Jamaica, Cape Province – the Boers, & Cyprus. Much the same brutality inflicted on Kenya was replicated everywhere they imposed their will. The same groupings of soldiers and administrators, experienced at repressing the “natives” went from one country to another. The Black and Tans used in Ireland were sent off to Palestine. Their modus operendi was the suppression of political dissent.

These men most certainly had a vocation, undoubtedly taking root in the propaganda fields of empire in Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, the major conduits through which they passed before heading off to the colonies to fulfil their destinations. Undoubtedly, they worked hard, often in dangerous space in far from ideal conditions.
George Padmore & CR James, Trinidian and Jamaican emigres to London, were two early UK dissenters from the dominant view on Empire in the 1930s. They saw no difference between fascism and Imperialism when, after Italy annexed Abyssinia in 1935, no sanctions were applied by the newly set up League of Nations. The 1945 Labour Government were just as imperial-minded as the Conservatives and were depending on the Empire’s bounty, especially the Malayan rubber yield, to pay for their Welfare State,
When the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions came into being in the 1940s/ 1950 the British and the French took it as a given that the “human rights” of the colonised didn’t count. And if this rationalisation failed, the rules were allowed to be suspended in the event of uprisings or emergencies. The British were constantly creating such scenarios, allowing them carte blanche in their operations.
Some of the gems I got from this book were :
1.8m Brits moved Canada, Aussie and New Zealand between 1945 -65
Ireland’s revolt against Britain was the template for Indian revolt against coloniser. Dan Breen’s My fight for Irish Freedom 1924 translated in Punjabi, Hindi and Tamil. And the SOE, the British Special Operations Executive modelled themselves on the IRA.
And I love this one…..President Truman “Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was here on earth, so how could anyone expect I could have any luck”…ref US Zionist Lobby. How true this is even today. There is no doubt that without American support, Israel would not have come into being back in 1948, when Britain was on its arse. This support would have been primarily premised on anti-Semite Truman not wanting boatloads boatloads of Jewish refugees descending on the USA.
Fighting communism was often the rationale for imperialism. The UK Government assumed EOKA were communists – their intelligence was not great because EOKA were a very right wing group.
Hitler was impressed by the British Empire- it’s where he acquired his idea of Lebenstraum from….more room, room to expand. Whilst it is well known that it was Britain who first developed the concentration, back during the Boer War, it is not as well known that they also practiced what has become known as extraordinary rendition. In 1866 George Gordon was transported from Jamaica to an area under martial law so that he could be executed without trial. The post 1945 Labour Government did likewise with detainees at their infamous Camp 020 and Cage project, then based in London’s Kensington Palace Gardens, now the wealthiest street in London, were sent abroad to be tortured in countries which were not signaturies of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Churchill on his own would take a full book….which is why I haven’t mentioned him other than this sentence.
All in all, a magnificent tour de force, if you’ll excuse the expression. A worthwhile antidote to the hagiographic offerings of people like Niall Ferguson.



This book is quite brilliant. Nearly 700 pages ....and every one of them a gem. The author at one time had 6 of her research students going through files from British Archives to find apposite information for her work on Kenya.

[Cheenu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not a huge fan of pithy sayings. However, "History is written by the victors" is one of the few exceptions.

And no historical institution has been so successful in controlling their narrative of their own history as the colonial empire of Britain.

The narrative usually goes like this - yeah, colonialism was bad. But at least the British weren't as bad as the others.

Apparently, they didn't massacre half of the Americas as the Spaniards and Portuguese did. Their colonial king didn't sever hands of his colonial subjects in Africa. They didn't allow slavery in their colonies to perpetuate well into the 20th century as the Dutch did in the East Indies.

This book is an attempt to challenge the narrative.

It shows that how Britain hid a very, very violent colonial empire behind euphemisms in their reports, control of press at home and many, many other tactics to propagate the narrative that they were bringing "reform" to "savage" populations through "coercive" methods.

A short note - this isn't the most engaging book and is quite dry in parts (though, not textbook-like) and therefore, will appeal to only people really, really interested in this topic.

It is unlikely to appeal to someone looking for a random historical read.

For personal usage, I've listed key events below but it is by no means comprehensive and also the book is more than just a list of key events of British colonialism (it's more about how the British built the narrative and how it changed flavours through the 200 years of British colonialism)

(It's also a bit of a spoiler in as much as a nonfiction book can have spoilers so you might not want to continue reading further if your preference is to go into books fully blind)

---
Notes

Chapter 1
===

* India - Bengal Famine, 10M (1/3rd of Bengal's population) dead because of changes EIC brought about after conquering Bengal
* India & Jamaica - Indian Mutiny & Morant Bay Rebellion, violent suppression using martial law with documented excesses but no action taken by committees and inquires in Britain.

Chapter 2
===

* South Africa - Boer war, concentration camps filled with women and children of Afrikaners.
* Ireland - Easter Uprising, violent suppression using martial law that caused deaths of mostly innocent civilians. Britain refused to hold anyone accountable.

Chapter 3
===

* India - Jallianwala Bagh massacre, opened fire on a civilian crowd of 15,000 in a park until ammunition ended. 400 dead, 1200 killed. Ranking officer Dyer was not held accountable, massive public support and funds raised in Britian.
* Ireland - Irish war of independence, systematic targeting of civilians by "Black and Tan" & "Auxillaries" police forces resulting in thousands of civilians deaths. None of them held accountable.

Chapter 4
===

* Mesopotamia (Iraq) - Systematic aerial bombardment of villages. Commision reports removed all internal criticism from military officers as well as comments by RAF praising the ability of aerial bombardments to put fear into the populace.
* Palestine - Balfour Declaration gives life to Zionism & breaks the fragile peace existing between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. Police force imported from Ireland uses the same techniques to suppress local population.

Chapter 5
===

* Palestine - 2nd Arab Revolt brings even more brutal tactics. Civilians targeted more extensively by both ground squads and aerial bombardment. Jews also provide volunteer armed support to British squads.
* Palestine - As WWII breaks out and troops are needed elsewhere, Britain walks back Balfour declaration, restricts Jewish immigration cutting off access to Jewish refugees at the most inopportune moment, declares for the creation of a single Arab state with Jewish minority protection within 10 years. This leads to the Zionists turning on Britain.

Chapters 6 & 7
===
* Postwar - Atlantic Charter signed for US to ally with the Allied. US starts pushing Britain for independence of its colonies. Uses its leverage to remove high tariffs on trade with the colonies for entities outside Britain and its colonies (i.e. its motivation for pushing for independence).


Chapter 8
===

* India - Bengal famine in 1943 as British diverted foodgrains for wartime rations.
* Britain - Labour comes into power but nothing much changes in its colonies, only domestically.
* Britain - Sterling area bloc financial system causes an indirect transfer of wealth from colonies to Britain

Chapter 9
===

* Britain - Labour govt comes to power after shock defeat of Conservatives. Comes to power on platform of welfare state and promises of sweeping domestic changes. But nothing changes as per colonial policy & they look to the colonies, especially commodity producing ones, to pay their debts

Chapter 10
===

* India - Postwar resentment by Indian Army personnel who spent several years fighting WW2 and came back home to low relative wages due to massive inflation created by British colonial fiscal policies + public outrage at postwar trials of 20,000 Indian National Army (INA) members creates untenable situation for British colonial rule in India.
* India - Mountbatten appointed for transitions, rushes - independence fixed 10 months ahead of British's PM deadline, India/Pakistan borders drawn by bureaucrat who has never served in India & finished ahead of schedule. Withdrawals of British Army personnel mean no one is there to prevent sectarian violence which erupts. 1-2M people dead.
* Palestine - Britain desperately tries to hold on to Palestine because it bets on Middle East oil to pay postwar debts. Both Arabs and Jews in open armed revolt against Britain which try they to violently suppress.

Chapter 11
===

* Palestine - Does not remove Jewish immigration into Palestine quota despite pressure from Zionists and Americans. Leads to violent reprisals from radical Jewish groups who are now at open war with Britain.
* Palestine - Borders divided by UN, Britain makes quick exit leaving the Arabs and Jews in civil war.
* Malay - Malay is largest exporter to US among the colonies, rubber and tin makes up 30% of exports of these comodities to US. Import restrictions ensure dollar surplus which is good for repayment of British loans but leads to economic hardship.
* Malay - Chinese guerillas who fought against the Japanese turn against the British and Malays sultans. Leads of rebellion against British and civil war with Malay protectorate states who don't want to give them citizenship.

Chapter 12
===
* Malay - To deal with the Communist rebels (who were mostly Chinese), Britain starts mass deportations and mass resettlements of rural areas who are suspected of aiding rebels. 1.2M total people resettled into camps.
* Malay - Britain eventually grants independence with riders protecting its interests such as Malay remaining in the sterling area and British troops are still stationed in Singapore. First leaders of Malaysia and Singapore, Rahman and Lee Kuan Yew continue to repress Communist rebels.
* Kenya - Similar playbook is applied in Kenya. Permanent exile, reserves and labour lines camp set up and almost the entire population of Kikuyus resettled there to crush the Mau Mau rebellion and provide cheap labour for the white Kenyan settlers.

Chapter 14
===
* Cyprus - 80% Greek Cypriot, 20% Turkish Cypriot. Former wants union with Greece, later wants an independent country. Britain suppresses EOKA rebels with similar tactics as in Malaya and Kenya. Greece files human rights violation case with ECHR - to avoid a damaging report from getting out, compromise is reached where Cyprus becomes an independent state as Britain and America get rights to build military bases on the island so that they can monitor the Soviets.

[Randall Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many Brits are concerned that if British imperial history were reduced to “a litany of atrocity, then the moral authority of the West is eroded.” Niall Ferguson is famous for bootlicking British Empire and calling it “a good thing.” "Vile Niall" is not alone, as almost 60% of Brits, polled in 2014, said they felt “the British Empire was something to be proud of.” This book looks at what 60% of Brits don’t want to read about or know about. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, “I cannot help remembering that this country over the last two hundred years has directed the invasion or conquest of 178 countries – that is most of the members of the UN.”

“Britain always managed to reconcile the logic of necessary violence with its civilizing mission.” “For hundreds of millions who lived in Britain’s imperial expanse, the empire’s velvet glove concealed an all-to familiar iron fist.” That British iron fist contained “electric shock, fecal and water torture, castration, forced hard labor, sodomy with broken bottles and vermin, forced marches through landmines, shin screwing, fingernail extraction, and public execution.” Many Brits and colonial subjects did write and speak scathingly about British actions, but as you can imagine, their views were consistently sidelined throughout history.

Civilization was considered a priori Western, “and race became the physical marker of difference.” John Stuart Mill “advocated for paternal despotism”. Thomas Carlyle was an authoritarian racist douchebag who said blacks need the strong hand of white rule and humanitarians were misguided because the day’s answer was enslavement and indentured servitude. Cecil Rhodes (creator of the Rhodes scholarship) was a “race patriot” who exploited cheap slave labor in the British colonies. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” was written above the entrance of a British detention camp in Kenya. “Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation.” That’s why the Brit-induced Bengal Famine where ten million died (and the Brit’s WWI Iran famine, (see Mohammad Gholi Majd’s book – it killed 8-10 million) is not talked about.

Nazis learned from the Brits: One British officer recalled, “The orders went out to shoot every soul… It was literally murder. The women were all spared but their screams on seeing their husbands and sons butchered, were most painful.” “British forces tied suspected Indian rebels to the mouths of cannons, lit the fuse, and blew them to pieces.” Napoleon Blownapart. Here’s Winston Churchill explaining his day back in 1897, “We destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation. At the end of the fortnight the valley was a desert and honor was satisfied.” I picture Hitler reading Churchill writing about this years later approvingly. Such honor in destroying self-determination. At that time Churchill refused to take any prisoners, “including those wounded.” Sorry, you’ll have to die. Keep a stiff upper lip – actually soon you’ll be stiff all over. Churchill saw India as a battle against militant Mohammedanism; of good versus evil, or at least this little sociopath versus many nations that merely wanted to be left alone.

Brits in Africa: At the time Britain was the world’s banker and that demanded lots of gold. Britain stole South Africa from the Dutch in 1806 for its gold deposits. Retreating Boers created the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Afrikaners/Boers were descendants of Dutch settlers. It took 450,000 British and colonial troops to get Afrikaners to “negotiate” (22,000 Brit soldiers died). Brits then forced 100,000 Afrikaners into camps where 30,000, mostly children, died. Later the Nazis would note here that the Brits had successfully targeted a single ethnic group en masse for deportation to brutal concentration camps. Page 88 has a photo of an emaciated Afrikaner girl about to die. “In Parliament, Lloyd George openly accused the British government of pursuing ‘a policy of extermination’.” At this time, Brit diplomat Alfred Milner mused of Britain’s Imperial South African future, “You have only to sacrifice ‘the nigger’ absolutely, and the game is easy.” Of Kitchener’s Battle of Omdurman (1898), “It was not a battle but an execution”. Churchill bore witness to Brits killing 10,000 and wounding 13,000 Sudanese. Brit dead there was only 47 with 382 wounded. After the butchery, ‘civilized’ Kitchener “systematically burnt crops and dumped salt to prevent future cultivation.” Could the Nazi’s have done it any better? Historian Aidan Forth wrote that South Africa “showcased the idea of mass internment to the world.” The Nazis would soon be deeply indebted to the Brits for the idea and execution.

WWI: During WWI, Lloyd George wrote, “if people really knew [what was going on in the trenches] the war would be stopped tomorrow.” “Reporters with an independent streak were arrested and deported from the war zones.”

One white Brit empire administrator could easily find himself stretched and responsible for 100,000 colonial subjects. For Britain’s treatment of resistance to empire, look at Britain’s nasty burning of Cork, Ireland in 1910. “No one was held accountable for the razing of Cork.” England wanted peace in Ireland mostly because it wanted “to bring her troops over to India and Egypt.” “Palestine was not empty land, 700,000 Arabs – compared to 60,000 Jews - lived there with legitimate territorial claims. Clearly the small arid territory could not absorb the large proportion of the world’s 12 million Jews.”

Winston Churchill’s sadistic mention of Dum-Dum ammunition: “The Dum-Dum bullet is a wonderful and from a technical point of view a beautiful machine. On striking a bone this causes the bullet to spread out, and then it tears and splinters everything before it, causing wounds which in the body must be generally mortal and in any limb necessitate amputation.” It’s “wonderful” and “beautiful” to do this to people merely resisting being colonized by force? Kitchener used these nasty bullets in Omdurman in 1898, where Churchill got his first-hand look. Britain and Luxemburg were the only two countries who wouldn’t sign the ban of them at the Hague Conference in 1902. British colonial forces continued using them through the 1930’s. A British police officer in Palestine as late as 1939 said “when you get shot here it is a nasty business as they are using Dum Dum bullets, but so are we unofficially.”


Human mine sweeping became a sport in Palestine in the late 30’s. At first Arabs were sent in taxis in front of patrols to “sweep” for mines but sometimes taxis didn’t have enough weight to trigger the bombs so then Arabs were packed in buses and sent ahead of the convoy. Villagers who objected to being put on the bus “were shot”. After the road bombs went off, “villagers were then forced to dig a pit, collect the maimed and mutilated bodies, and throw them unceremoniously into it.” One Brits said of this, “By Jove, it paid dividends, but of course, you can’t do those sort of things today.” “Death sentences were often carried out on minimal evidence, much of which was amassed from suspects under torture. “The civilian population, all but decimated were willing to do just about anything to survive and began to fall in line.”

At that time, Singapore was the “bastion of the empire” 25% of the empires trade went through there and Britain had placed a very expensive Naval base there (Suez was another bastion). After Japan takes Singapore from the British, “the entire region was decimated.” 130,000 British personnel were then captured and by the end of the war “over 100,000 British subjects in Malaya (Malaysia) and Singapore would perish from Japanese brutality, disease, and starvation.” When Japan had invaded Malaya, the Malayan Raj died after over a century and a half of British rule. Japan also invades Siam (Thailand), and Burma.

FDR “disliked Churchill’s ‘eighteenth century methods’ of ruling 700 million subjects around the globe” while Churchill hated FDR’s ‘sentimental’ attitude towards the “pigtails” and the “Chinks”. Three days after the US declares war on Japan, Germany declares war on the US. “India contributed more to the war effort than any other imperial possession.” “Factories near Calcutta were turning out ammunition, grenades, bombs, guns and other weaponry.” Bombay was making uniforms and parachutes, while other places made boots jeep bodies, machine parts and binoculars. Field Marshall Claude Auchinleck said Britain, “couldn’t have come through [WWI and WWII) if they hadn’t had the Indian Army”.

Eric Williams wrote that Britain stopped slavery not for matters of conscience but for “hard economic calculations.” This was the time of CLR James, Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, WEB DuBois, and George Padmore looking hard at what makes colonialism tick/suck. British colonial lands were seen as one large concentration camp. Padmore called it “colonial fascism”. Imperialism as similar to Nazism. Was it not all sustained through violence? Padmore wrote, “it seems to me that violence is the high priest of imperialism.” The Japanese told the British colonized after invading, “It will be foolish to lose your lives by fighting for Britain who has been keeping you in slavery for years and has been ill-treating you.” Jews were 1% of Britain then while there were also only 30,000 people of color (max) in Britain.

During a House of Commons Discussion, Montague askes his peers, “are you going to keep your hold upon India by terrorism, racial humiliation, subordination and frightfulness?” Interrupting Conservative MPs cried out, “Bolshevism” and “you are making an incendiary speech.” “Within two years, tarred for his moralizing and relentless demands for accountability in the empire, Montagu was dead at forty-five.”

1858 was the end of the East India Company and the beginning of direct rule by the British Raj, in India. Queen Victoria becomes Empress of India; after 1877 it’s all about celebrating the monarchy, pomp and circumstance. The biggest of these events was the Diamond Jubilee in 1897 for Victoria. Had she lived another 100 years, she could have rolled in a Crown Victoria.

The Rise of Children’s Adventure Stories in Imperial Contexts: Developing the imperial imagination of Britain’s youth. Victorian literature has many children stories about colonized local characters who need white input. A huge influence on British youth, George Alfred Henty wrote tale after tale about “Native savagery” against British civility. It was a time of evangelical adventurer David Livingstone in Africa. All this “depicted their nation as waging a moral battle to defend civilization while also bringing light to the world’s so-called savages.” Uncontested in Britain was “the general ‘fact’ that the ruling race in British India has a higher and more vigorous civilization than the native races.” Think of Britain as more Kipling than Orwell.

Political philosopher James Fitzjames Stephen’s wrote that “law is nothing but regulated force.” An Irishman’s book about his struggle for Irish Freedom became for Indians a how-to manual for rebellion. For some Bengalis it became their Bible.

WWII: Hitler admired Britain because though small, it wielded great power by dominating people. In Mein Kampf, he wrote, “No people has ever with greater brutality prepared its economic conquests with the sword, and later ruthlessly defended them, than the English nation.” Hitler noticed Britain’s terra nullius policies of “wiping out the local population”, the South African concentration camps, and the aerial bombings in Iraq. Nazi Germany “turned international law on its head” by violently claiming the lands it went through (like Poland and Czechoslovakia) as though it were the French and Britain in Africa. The League of Nations did nothing when Mussolini reversed Ethiopia’s sovereignty, and only morally woke up when the Nazi’s conquered Eastern Europe. Apparently, no one had clearly spelled out that imperialism HAD to be confined to the non-European world. Fun Fact: The Zionist Stern Gang (Lehi) offered “support for a Nazi conquest of Palestine if, in return Germany would back mass settlement of Jews in the Mandate.”

WWII led to colonial subjects reading, becoming intellectuals and sending a “widespread anticolonial ethos down to the grassroots of African society. “When Gallup polled Americans, it found that nearly 60% disapproved of giving any further loans to their one-time colonizers.” Britain, once the world’s banker, after WWII owed 1.3 billion pounds to India alone. Britain had a “staggering” post-war debt and soon became extremely indebted to the US, ending payments only in 2006. Britain’s Empire still covered ¼ of the planet’s landmass while George VI ruled over 700 million subjects. To keep so many people down by force, 3.5 million Brits were then stationed around the world. Britain moved on from water torture (so passe) to sewage torture and starvation; so civilized, those Brits. Instead of classically picturing Brits holding a cup of tea saying, “By Jove, Good Show!” I’m starting to picture them brandishing a barbed riding whip saying, “Do be a good chap!”

In Malaya, the British half-starved workers and enticed them with opium to work. Britain killed “3 million Bengalis in 1943-44”. Bengal had seen “over two centuries of rapes, village burnings, crowd shootings, and widespread famine, for which the British were responsible.” Many British colonial subjects saw Brits methods as no different from the Nazis. They wanted to know, when would the UN hold trials about British crimes? Lord Mountbatten became the dashing face of the last days of the British Raj; for a few minutes he was the “most powerful man on earth.” For weeks, endless wheelbarrows brought incriminating British documents to be burnt in New Delhi’s red Fort’s courtyard. You wouldn’t want people with actual morals to question British moral authority.

The Partition and End of the Raj in India: After the Partition of India began, the Raj’s divide and rule ethos set off a bloodbath, a chain reaction that killed one to two million. In a cruel game of musical chairs, when the music stopped, Muslims fled their old homes in India for Pakistan, while Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan for India. It was not uncommon for those who stayed to be slaughtered, and those who fled to be slaughtered as refugees. Gangs of killers and rapists roamed. Violence was so bad that British soldiers saw babies roasted on spits, while mounted guerillas “culled (refugees) like sheep”. For a thousand years everyone on the Indian subcontinent lived together fine and “a hybrid Indo-Islamic civilization emerged.” Refugees centers were called human dumps.

Britain loses Palestine, ending thirty years of British rule there. Half of the Palestinians (800,000) in Palestine were uprooted. 531 of their villages destroyed. In 1948, Britain had a $1.8 billion deficit and was siphoning cash off of Malaya, Gold Coast, Gambia and Ceylon, but Malaya was its cash cow. In 1951, back in Britain, almost 60% of Brits couldn’t name a single British colony, yet 75% of them believed Britain would be worse off without her empire. Uninformed and co-dependent.

If the US wasn’t a rogue state that boldly defies international law, you would want to know that today’s corpus of international law is: The Geneva Conventions of 1864, 1906, 1929, 1949, added protocols of 1977, 2005, and the two Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907. Often Japanese mistreatment (massacres etc.) of East Asians during WWII (and by the British before the Japanese) drove many villagers to look favorably towards communism. If you just don’t kill me or beat me, I’ll favor you.

Chemical Warfare: Britain worked hard to find chemicals that would “destroy large areas of cultivation planted by bandits driven out of populated areas and forced to rely on their own resources.” They discovered the Agent Orange compounds during this search: clever chaps! Hurting total strangers for profit – so laudable. Fun fact: “If leeches aren’t removed with a cigarette, they will turn a wound septic.” In 1956, Brits in Malaya spent eighteen months destroying all their colonial paperwork – culling files. They reported the job done “with confidence that the risk of compromise or embarrassment arising out of any paper left behind is very slight.” The definition of British thoroughness.

Africa: Study what the Brits did to the 1.5 million Kikuyu in Kenya. Settlers grew coffee and tea on their land and the Kikuyu lived there under harsh restrictive laws. Just as US slavery was unadorned “racial capitalism”, so was this. Jomo Kenyatta became the Kikuyu leader. A subset of Kikuyu were the Mau Mau, a movement that was tired of waiting and sought land and freedom. 90% of Kikuyu took the first Mau Mau oath of unity. Britain’s problem was how to break all these Kikuyu civilians committed to land and freedom.

This book includes a full page of all the nasty stuff done to Mau Mau in Britain’s name. Here’s what one settler and member of the Kenya regiment remembered: “Things got a little out of hand. By the time I cut his balls off, he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket. Too bad, he died before we got much out of him.” Kenya became “the largest archipelago of detention and prison camps in the history of Britain’s empire”. Parts of the empire engaged in “food denial” where “the point was to starve villagers into submission while working them without respite.” “Rapes and beatings were widespread” by British “military members who defiled women and young girls.” “Ten of the army soldiers would rape one woman. In other cases, five of them would rape one woman.” “Hell on earth is the name detainees gave the Mwea camps.”

George Orwell explained the British Empire, “Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation.” “Military costs were 20% of public expenditure.” British colonial defense was four million pounds annually while the profit from controlling others by force was only eight million. In 1884 and 1885 European powers met in Berlin to carve up Africa. The Sharpsville Massacre in South Africa committed by the British, happens on March 21st, 1960.

My review concludes in the comment section below.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Caroline Elkins’s history of the British empire offers a critique of it on two levels. The first of these is advertised prominently in its title, which is in how the British maintained their empire through a regular employment of brutality that was refined over the course of decades. Though this violence is far from unknown, with infamous atrocities in places like Ireland, India, and Kenya well remembered today, what Elkins describes is a far more systematic practice of it than is commonly appreciated. In the process, what she demonstrates is that, contrary to many of the empire’s defenders, the use of violence by British personnel on subject populations was not the actions of a few bad actors, but a tool frequently employed to maintain British control.

This violence belies of both the imperial rhetoric of the time and national memories today. As polls frequently demonstrate, many Britons remain proud of their empire and its legacy. That they enjoy such golden memories of their empire is thanks in considerable part to a deliberate campaign undertaken over decades to hide the truth, which forms the second and less overt part of Elkins’s critique. It is a campaign with which she had firsthand experience as a participant in the 2011 case brought by five Kenyans seeking compensation from the British for the torture they experienced while in captivity during the Mau Mau uprising. During that trial, over a million pages of documents from former colonial possessions that were previously thought lost were made public and transferred to the National Archives in Kew. Prior to the discovery of the “migrated archives,” it was a lot easier for Britons to pretend that their empire was a force for good than was the case.

Such mythmaking played an integral role in the empire’s self-image long before decolonization. This Elkins represents with the phrase “liberal imperialism,” which embodies the idea of an empire built on capitalist values that was dedicated to progress and reform. From the start, however, this “civilizing mission” ran headlong into the frequent extralegal use of state violence throughout the empire, from Ireland to Jamaica and the Cape Colony. While these episodes contradicted claims that British rule represented the rule of law, they were rationalized as necessary compromises, with the justification interwoven into the public perceptions of the empire as providing order as a precondition for advancing the liberal goals.

Though this was strained by British campaigns against the Boers during the second Boer War, what exposed fully the hypocrisy of the claim was the British response to the outbreak of nationalism in the aftermath of the First World War. The embrace of nationalist self-determination at the Paris peace conference sparked movements throughout the empire, with India and Ireland at the forefront. Wartime promises of Indian sovereignty went unfulfilled, prompting protests which were met by the state with bloodshed. Yet it was Ireland which demonstrated the hollowness of British claims. The spark of Irish nationalism set off a conflagration which soon swept through much of island, prompting a ruthless campaign of repression. With the indigenous police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary, undermined by assassinations and community pressure, the British brought in wartime veterans – soon to become infamous as the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries – who brought an unprecedented brutality to their task. Though this failed to prevent Irish independence, Elkins sees in their activities the seedbed of the imperial response to independence movements elsewhere. In the wake of Irish independence, the veterans of imperial enforcement were redeployed to positions in other parts of the empire, where they employed many of the same tactics in their efforts to maintain fraying British rule.

One such place to where many of the Irish war veterans were sent was Palestine. There the British inherited a newly-created "mandate" to govern the former Ottoman territory, which their politicians had promised to more parties than they could deliver. This proved only one place, however, where the increasingly straitened empire was attempting to impose its rule. In response the British doubled down on their use of the military as an imperial constabulary, with the recently formed Royal Air Force advancing liberal imperial goals from the air with bombs and machine guns. These could pacify populations, but any degree of control required some level of participation from indigenous communities, which was achieved after the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in Palestine with the aid of Jewish supernumeraries and a faction of the old Arab leadership, both of which aided British forces not out of any commitment to the liberal imperial vision but as a means of cementing their own power in the Mandate.

The tenuous control the British maintained over their empire was shattered by the Second World War. The all-encompassing demands of the conflict gave a short-term license to any means necessary to maintain British dominance over an empire the resources of which were needed desperately to defeat the Axis powers. Yet the war undermined fatally the British presence in many places, as Japanese conquest disrupted Britain’s control over their possessions in Southeast Asia. More generally, the rhetoric of freedom demanded by their American allies further eroded Britain’s hold, as increasingly it was clear that Britain’s ability to project their power was contingent on the support of an ally who did not share the vision of a British-dominated liberal imperialism. Even before the war ended, violence in Palestine foreshadowed the fate of the postwar empire, as restive populations increasingly pressed for freedom.

These demands clashed with British plans for postwar recovery. With their country devastated and their economy indebted to the United States, the newly-elected Labour government pinned their hopes for restoring prosperity on imperial exploitation. Instead, the empire became a fiscal sinkhole as ever-more personnel and military resources were poured into it simply to maintain some semblance of control. As the aspirations of imperial imperialists eroded under the onslaught of religiously- and sectarian-driven violence, the British doubled down on their use of force. Police in Palestine were overwhelmed by a determined campaign of Jewish terrorism, against which even a constrained response met with international condemnation. The British enjoyed a freer hand in Malaya, where many Mandate veterans were transferred after the mandate was surrendered. Their success against the communist insurgency in that valuable colony ensured that many of the personnel were transferred later to suppress the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. Thus was the throughline of violent practice established: Ireland to Palestine, Palestine to Malaya, Malaya to Kenya, in each of which the increasingly hardened veterans resorted to tactics of intimidation, coercion, and torture to extend the life of their ailing empire.

By the 1950s, these efforts faced growing criticism from many in the public and in Parliament. In response, officials at home and abroad increasingly sought to cover up their activities. The daily practice of violence was denied, with the irrefutable reports of abuses treated as outliers unrepresentative of the whole. To complete such efforts, hundreds of thousands of files were burned or otherwise disposed of by departing authorities. This helped the British perpetuate for themselves the belief that theirs was a benevolent empire long after it was rejected by its supposed beneficiaries. Elkins’s book delivers a fatal blow to such fantasies. It is a passionate work, filled with contempt for imperial doublespeak and sympathy for the empire’s victims. Its scope is impressive, and while digressive at points it never feels wasteful. If anything, the book proves a little too short, as by addressing only fitfully the legacy of such violence for both the newly independent nations and their former imperial overlord, Elkins leaves underexamined the point raised by her title. As she suggests, the violence did not end once the British lowered their flags, but often was continued by Britain’s successors. It is an inheritance that requires further exploration than she provides, both to complete her accounting of the legacy of Britain’s empire and for the coda it would offer of the success of the liberal imperialist vision it supposedly advanced.

[Cold · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elkins makes one argument over and over and over again. The civilising mission, under the heading of the Liberal Empire, systematically used violence to maintain control of occupied. She succeeds and is utterly relentless in making this point. But ultimately, I think it was quite a narrow project to embark on, a point I'll get back to.

The book contains many, many details on how British officials abused local populations in the name of restoring order. There's an interesting theme related to how crowd control techniques spread. She identifies a number that were used in the Boer war and then later in India and then Kenya. She even describes how successor states re-used the same techniques after the British had left.

There's also a very powerful theme about how the British tried to destroy the record of their abuses. This was clearest with the Mao-Mao in which her oral history formed the basis of a contemporary court case. The court case led her and a team of 5 Harvard students to analyse a "treasure trove" of previously hidden archives. Ultimately, the litigants succeed in the court case and win £20 million from the British state. There is also a nice theme on legalised lawlessness in which the British State legalised acts that were previously outlawed. She suggests this shows the failure of the Liberal Empire.

In all of the above, Elkin succeeds and it is good history in the narrow sense. But there is very little tension in the book. It is 900 pages of damning evidence advancing one argument without reflecting on the limits of that argument or whether the events illustrate something broader than just what one state did over the course of 300 years.

For example, I want some context on this brutality. How does it compare to other empires? Not because this would excuse anything, but because asking that question can help us understand what happens when you accrue so much power centrally, when you project violent force into distant lands and so on. But no, Elkins states in the introduction:

Turning to history’s balance sheet to determine which European
empire was more or less brutal than others can be an invidious exercise.
Historians usher objective data to make their case: body counts, number
of soldiers on the ground, official reports. But all evidence is subjective,
particularly that which is mediated through state bureaucracies

But later she tries to argue compares Mau Mau violence to British and concludes it was lesser, whatever that means. So comparing violence and brutality is fine when it suits her argument.

For example, that post-colonial states used colonial crowd control techniques is a pretty complicated fact to digest. But Elkin observes this and drops it without asking why. She doesn't ask why it was so significant that Britain (and France) held out on international conventions and tried to legislate lawlessness. Is it not because the liberal project is precisely about respect for law? In that way were they not upholding liberalism in this instance?

In general, what were the different intellectual currents that provided tension in the debates over empire. Yes, there was liberalism, yes it wasn't successful. But what was it in tension with? How did this force play out over time?

Similarly, the conclusion talks about Brexit and Gove's views on empire and school curriculums and it is all so simple. The british have no shame about empire, they destroy the archives that would shed light on it etc etc. But having lived in England, I just don't see that its true? First, the fact that Gove sees a problem in how Empire is taught suggests the Government doesn't have such a firm grip on how history is taught. For example, I don't recall being taught anything about the glories of Empire. The people in my social circle would be embarrassed to come out as pro-Empire... where did this self critical impulse come from? Was this same consciousness around during Empire? I don't know, I just felt it was a very shallow 900 pages.

[laurel [the suspected bibliophile] · Rating 5 out of 5]

The British Government: We shall make every Endeavour to provide for a transparent and ethical government.

Also the British Government, when handling their imperial records:



Later, the British Government: We can find no One Single Person or any Persons, actually, to hold responsible for these supposed atrocities and alleged ethical violations, but rather it was One or Two Bad Apples acting due to Understaffing and Isolation from Higher Orders.

Elkins, bringing the receipts: Act-ually...


This is a comprehensive look at empire, particularly the British Empire, and their long history of violence, genocide and human rights violations in the name of "bringing savage peoples to civilization and culture."

You kinda have to wonder who the "savages" are in all of this...(obviously this is sarcasm).

Anywho, if anyone is wondering why people hate and hated QEII so much, it's because much of the very worst of the atrocities committed under the British flag (here's looking at you, British officials in Kenya), were done in her name.

And if you're on the fence and still think that the net good outweighs the net bad, I invite you to read this book (also, #spoileralert: the US doesn't fare well in this narrative of imperialism, either).

[David Eppenstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a WOW! book for me. I have stated in several prior book reviews that British history is a favorite of mine. In my, admittedly narrow, opinion only the Catholic Church can rival the British for a history that chronicles the development of every flaw, frailty, vice, and depravity know to humankind. Reading this kind of history from the safety of centuries renders it darkly humorous and entertaining. Of course as the history approaches the present that history becomes less and less humorous and more and more disturbing. In my reading I have become somewhat familiar with the British Empire's conduct in Ireland, India, and South Africa and to say that it is egregious would be an understatement. I knew their past colonial conduct was bad but after WWI and then WWII I expected that this Empire had become more introspective and had changed its ways. After reading this book I have come to the conclusion that empire and imperialism are euphemisms for territorial and economic greed, tyranny, and arrogance not to mention white privilege and racism. The history revealed in this book is not only disturbing it reaches into the living memory of this reader and justifies comparison to Nazi Germany. While the British didn't sink to the extremes of the depravity of the Nazis the geographic scope and duration of their colonial abuses more than compensate for the Nazi depths. Why the United Kingdom isn't an international pariah can only be explained by understanding the difficulties of international politics in our world today.

If you decide to read this book then be prepared for a challenging read as it is not a book for the casual reader. The author had something important to say and she took 680 pages of text to say it. That 680 pages also includes a 30 page introduction which, to me, is usually a red flag. If what the author has to say isn't adequately apparent in 650 pages then something must be wrong and I was prepared to find out what that might have been.

In the initial 100+ pages of this book the author concentrated on explaining and detailing the intellectual and legalistic gymnastics indulged by the British bureaucrats that had to decide how to govern and manage an empire as huge and diverse as theirs. I was more than slightly annoyed with the extent of this treatment and thought the author was giving this subject far too much attention. After finishing this subject the meat of this history begins and the more I read of this history the less annoyed I became with the author's introductory discussion as I now understood what her intent was. It seems that these bureaucrats knew exactly how to govern and manage their empire; they would do exactly what they had been doing since their empire began colonizing the lands of other peoples. All of the bureaucratic discussion and debate wasn't about governing and management; it was about how to protect the empire and themselves from criticism and civil and criminal accountability for the actions they almost certainly knew would take place in the colonies. What they came up with was something called "liberal imperialism" and what resulted from this is what the author calls "legalized violence" or “legalized lawlessness”. Liberal Imperialism was their real world term for what Kipling described as "The White Man's Burden". The British Empire wasn't plundering and tyrannizing undeveloped countries; the Empire was helping them evolve into acceptable members of the international community of which the British Empire held itself as the most prominent model and exemplar.

Unfortunately, none of these countries, let alone their people, ever asked for this "help" from the British. What seemed to really irritate the natives was that the "help" from the British was more about the British helping themselves to whatever resources the colony had to offer. Further, the British monopolized the colony's economy making the native people captive customers for British consumer goods manufactured from natural resources stolen by the British from these same colonies. It was only a matter of time before the natives became restless and balked at the conduct of their British "benefactors". Whenever the least bit of objection or resistance became apparent the British colonial government came down hard, fast, and violently. The ruthlessness and harshness of British colonial response to protests goes to an extreme that is beyond belief coming from a government that holds itself as a paragon of a civilized rule of law society. Further, this history spans over a century until the Empire is finally ended in the wave of independence movements in the 1960's. What is further distressing is that the protests and violent responses are repeated in every colony with the British simply repeating the same violent responses with the same results. Was this arrogance or stupidity or both? The only thing that seemed to concern the colonial administrations was the passing of laws and regulations that made whatever a native did in protest was a crime and whatever the British did in response was legally permissible. The rule of law simply did not exist in British colonies. In my opinion the shame of this history more than outweighs whatever good the British believe their culture has added to the advancement of Western civilization. This is not a book the reader is likely to enjoy but it is one that should be read and learned from.

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among the greatest myths of Britain’s empire, and of many 20th century empires, is the claim to benevolence – we see it in Britain’s claims to better and improve peoples, or in the USA’s claims that is colonies were about liberating people from the Spanish yoke. In Britain’s case we see it in the language of decolonisation, where Britain ‘granted’ its colonies their independence: no word of the long struggles, of the hundreds or thousands killed, imprisoned, tortured, detained in concentration camps, and more…. No, Britain in all its benevolence gave to peoples their independence. We see the persistence of these myths in the widespread view that Britain should be proud of its Empire, in the fantasies of Empire 2.0 that accompanied the Brexit campaign, and in immigration policies of the UK and the continuation by another name of the ‘hostile environment’ as a means to enforce forms of Imperial whiteness on the descendants of Empire.

Part of the genius of Britain’s imperialism was the ideology of ‘liberal imperialism’ traced to the early, but developed during the latter, part of the 19th century, where empire was seen as civilising, as developing, as modernising, and while much of the basis of this lay in approach to colonies of settlement (Canada, Australasia, Southern Africa) the ideas soon spread to other colonies – strategic but especially extractive. A crucial aspect, as Caroline Elkins shows in this compelling exploration of liberal imperialism, the end of empire, and Britain’s policies towards its 20th century colonies, was the notion of corrective violence, of violence as a moral force to make its recipients better people (as an aside, a similar ideal underpinned corporal punishment in schools, along with violence as preventative). Elkins weaves together three strands in her case, showing that the violence of empire and its continuing effect lies in the interweaving of liberal imperialism, corrective violence, and the movement of key officials – state, military, and policing – through various colonies at key stages of changes in Britain’s 20th century empire.

So, in the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, she shows key figures in the war against Irish independence, notably those in the paramilitary units including the ‘Black and Tans’ moving from Ireland to Palestine, bringing their experience of collective punishment, internment, and forced relocation to suppression of the Arab Revolt of the 1930s, where they were joined by air force leaders who had developed their expertise in aerial warfare against civilian targets in Mesopotamia. Paradoxically, these British forces trained Jewish militias in their efforts to suppress the Arab Revolt who then went on to form the paramilitary units fighting the British after 1945 while also laying down the tactics of exclusion, ethnic cleansing, and collective punishment, transferred from the Hagenah, to now form the core of the Israeli occupation. Elkins also shows that during the 1950s another group of key figures were shifted between imperial posts to suppress anti-colonial struggles in Malaya, Kenya, India, Cyprus, and elsewhere using the same tactics of collective punishment, detention, torture, and other forms of violence. She is also clear that this is not the pathology of the ‘bad apple’ but a systematic defence of Empire in an effort by Conservative and Labour governments in Britain to retain its great power status in the wake of WW2 by economic extraction from colonies.

The power of the analysis lies in the way she traces these key individuals through the essential roles and posts they held in colonies, the knowledge and learning they brought with them and them, and they ways those practices became embedded in colonial and imperial practice, becoming the norm of empire, and in some cases post-imperial practice. Rather than a comprehensive sweep of all of empire, Elkins traces key moment and key players weaving together the metropolitan state – including Cabinet and key civil servants – and colonial practice, focusing on Ireland, Palestine before 1939, through detention and torture centres in the UK and elsewhere during WW2, to Palestine, Malaya, India, Cyprus, and Kenya between 1945 and 1965. Even so, she shows the spread of these tripartite approaches throughout the empire – into British Guiana, Aden, and ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.

She then brings the case together in a discussion of a 2011 civil case brought by five elderly Kenyans against the British relating to the Kenyan independence struggle (the so-called Mau-Mau Rebellion), where despite the government’s best efforts including document destruction during withdrawal and ‘losing’ thousands of files in warehouses scattered across the Home Counties, the British finally admitted the systematic brutality, torture, rape, and murder of detainees and widespread collective punishment….

This is outstanding historical scholarship, of the kind that reduces the ‘balance sheet’ approach to Empire that we see from conservative and reactionary commentators such as Andrew Roberts, Nigel Biggar, and Niall Fergusson or politicians such as Michael Gove to the vacuous justification of a systemic legacy of violence that it is. What’s more, Elkins’ active involvement in legal action as an expert witness (as we saw in the Kenyan case she discusses) shows the public value of rigorous historical scholarship. This is a weighty tome – both in its contents (much is not easy to read) and physically (at 800 pages plus notes and sources) but well worth it for a clear and rigorous insight to the practices of liberal imperialism through the 20th century: highly recommended.

[Romulus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dwa i pół miesiąca zajęło mi przeczytanie tej książki. Czekałem na jej wydanie i nie zamierzałem czekać aż dotrę do niej w kolejce lektur. Ale kiedy zacząłem ją czytać przekonałem się, że to pozycja wymagająca skupienia i uwagi. Jej obszerność jest jednym z dowodów (aczkolwiek około stu pięćdziesięciu stron to przypisy).

Autorka drobiazgowo przedstawia tę prawdziwą i ukrywaną twarz Imperium Brytyjskiego. Nie jest to drobiazgowy zapis wszystkich jego zbrodni - to przede wszystkim opis całej imperialnej polityki, której częścią były te zbrodnie. Od Irlandii po Afrykę i Indie oraz azjatyckie przyległości.

Lektura tej książki może być ciężkostrawna dla wielu zapatrzonych w dziedzictwo imperium. A którzy do tej pory zbywali cenę jaką za to imperium płacono. Niall Ferguson, który w swojej książce o imperium brytyjskim pisał o pozytywach i zaletach wszystkie te kwestie zbywał. Choć ich nie pomijał. Zatem jeśli ktoś chce mieć ogląd całości to powinien przeczytać również tę książkę. Aby przekonać się jaka była cena tej chwały. Zresztą, czasami wystarczy zerknąć w relacje konfliktów na świecie. Izrael Palestyna, Indie Pakistan, Irlandia, Afryka. Wszystko to spadek po imperium i jego polityce: bezmyślnej, aroganckiej, rasistowskiej i pełnej przemocy. Długo by wymieniać.

Czasami jest w niej także o sprawiedliwości: spóźnionej, ale potrzebnej nawet mimo upływu lat. Ale w gruncie rzeczy za imperium mogą dziś płakać tylko ignoranci. Tych jest, niestety, od groma.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book presents a robust and thoroughly documented, fact-based description and analysis of the historical actions of the British Empire. It illuminates the extensive and unrelenting use of violence as a tool for establishing dominance over its colonies. The realization of the deliberate destruction of both people and resources, meticulously documented despite attempts by British authorities to destroy evidence, prompts reflection on the scale of cruelty towards individuals with different skin colors.

Upon reading this book, I gained a clearer understanding of why Hitler admired the British Empire, given its organization of genocides under the guise of a so-called civilizing mission. This mission was domestically justified by a false notion of a hierarchy of races. The Nazis also held the British use of propaganda in high regard, particularly its emphasis on the civilizing nature of the Empire and its power in shaping historical narratives and public perception.

The effectiveness of propaganda is underscored in perpetuating a positive view of the British Empire, despite its violent history. Biased propagandists like Niall Ferguson are implicated in this process, contributing to a cultural narrative that, to this day, supports a favorable perspective on the empire. This cultural narrative, rooted in a culture of white supremacy, has had a lasting impact, influencing not only historical understanding but also contemporary events such as Brexit.

The nostalgic yearning for Britain as a superpower, fueled by a romanticized view of the empire, is presented as a factor contributing to the majority support for Brexit. This connection between historical narratives, public perception, and political decisions underscores the enduring influence of imperial legacies on modern socio-political landscapes. This is why such rigorous works are crucial; they help deconstruct mythologies based on collective lies.

[charlotte, · Rating 4 out of 5]

a brutal but necessary book, and one that ought to be required reading in schools. thoroughly researched and very detailed, i don't think i've read a history book of this period that so closely looks at the violence from the point of view of the violence, and specifically how imperial violence became legitimised. i don't think i will ever not be haunted by the (anonymous) testimony of a settler in kenya regarding delivering an alleged mau mau suspect to the colonial authorities "Things got a little out of hand. By the time I cut off his balls he had no ears, and his eyeball [...] was hanging out of its socket.". it also traces how imperial violence learned and transferred its learnings between occupied territories, from ireland to palestine, palestine to malaya, malaya to kenya, kenya to cyprus, and so on.

what perhaps stopped me giving this a full 5 stars is its insistence on being scrupulously even-handed in its treatment of events. it doesn't shy from calling what the british did atrocities, though it presents their testimony (& therefore, gives space to their reasoning) a lot more than native peoples - this might simply be a case of what's been written down and what's been collected and recorded in intervening years, and you can hardly deny that it shows exactly how all of this happened. where that even-handedness falls a bit short is in cases where it offsets that imperial violence with "but the resisting populations did x, y, and z too". case in point: chin peng, and the mau mau uprising. so too does this happen when discussing zionism in palestine (which, given the focus is on the british empire, takes us up to 1947-48 and their abandonment of the mandate), when it describes 1948 first as a "war of independence" and latterly "for the Arabs, it was the start of the Nakba". the arab revolt is the arab revolt, but zionist terrorism is anti-imperialist resistance (technically correct in the most exact sense, but carrying with it implications). and then no further mentions. i get it, the british have left, so too does the narrative but the whole preceding section seems about to tie into the zionists learning what they then implemented in the nakba from the british and then it doesn't follow through (& puts on equal footing the lie of "independence" with catastrophe). i don't know if this section quite makes sense and i understand the desire to be objective in a book that undoubtedly you're expecting to be criticised by imperial suck-ups, but there were times when that seemed to make it tiptoe around stronger condemnation.

that being said, this book is a must read. a brilliant overview of the violence of empire that is so often denied by british politicians (& the populace in part, though, as this book shows, it all ties together to produce the current hostile environment). reading this book alone should give more than enough weight to the case for reparations. in fact, you'll be left with the certainty there are no reparations that can possibly be enough for all the bloodshed and horror.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really good examination of the crimes and ideological contradictions of Britain's empire over it's final century. One of the best parts of this work is the way that it charts the way forms of imperial knowledge production translated from one colony to another. We see how repressive techniques honed in Ireland transfered to Palestine where they were then further developed and transfered again to Malaya during the people's war for liberation. As someone who has studied the US repressive apparatus, it was fascinating to see the nascent development of techniques of violence and intelligence that would later be adopted wholesale by the US in Vietnam, i.e. how Britain's CSDIC torture and interrogation program would be turned into the Phoenix Program.

Loses one star because ultimately the worldview of the text, while very critical of liberal imperialism, does not break from it. Socialist alternatives built in colonial nations are dismissed as purely nationalist and doomed to be trapped by the same "legacy of violence" as the Empire, or in the instances where they succeeded, such as in Vietnam, China, or otherwise, are seen as outside interference or ignored altogether.

Overall a good scathing critique of British chauvinist views of the Empire.

[Tariq Mahmood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Legacy of Violence" by Caroline Elkins provides a captivating exploration of how the British Empire wielded laws to exploit both its colonies and its own citizens. Elkins meticulously uncovers how legal frameworks were used as tools of control, revealing a pattern of systemic oppression.

The book unveils how the British government manipulated laws to perpetuate their dominance. It illustrates how these legal structures entrenched racial hierarchies and economic disparities among colonial subjects, while simultaneously suppressing dissent among marginalized populations within Britain. Through insightful historical examples, Elkins vividly depicts how exploitative tactics continue to impact global politics and societies today.

The "go-slow" tendency in colonies, a form of resistance involving deliberate work slowdowns, can be seen as a type of rebellion against oppressive conditions. While the British colonial masters played a role in creating these conditions, resistance was shaped by various factors, including local grievances and broader systemic inequalities. The "go-slow" tactic reflects the complex interplay between exploitation, discontent, and the assertion of rights within the colonial context.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

The main thing with the British is how they’ve gotten away with it, all of it. The worst they’ve ever gotten in return for all the dirt they’ve done was some aerial bombing — by the one enemy they actually looked good next to, classic sociopath’s luck — and then spending a few decades looking a bit like a (prosperous, safe) joke-country. Defenders of the British empire like Niall Ferguson can not only acquire the kind of respectability it’d be impossible to acquire defending any other empire, but they can also pretend they’re somehow intellectual underdogs. They all act like “we already went through this,” “this” being any kind of meaningful reckoning with what empire meant, and you know that “this,” in substance, meant little Niall and undergrad Andy and hungover 10 AM history seminar (no 9s or 8s for Oxbridge boys I bet) Boris had to hear a couple of fellow students wax indignant once or twice. Man… what the Germans or the Russians wouldn’t give to have THAT have been, continue to be, their comeuppance!

Caroline Elkins pisses those people off like nobody’s business. While she builds on the work of and acknowledges many previous generations of anti-imperialists, she seems poised to be the one to lay the foundation for something like a real intellectual reckoning with what the British Empire meant. If, down the line, we flinch from Empire the way we flinch from Nazism or “actually existing Communism” — not intellectually get that it was bad, but flinch, have it built into our historical reflexes — Caroline Elkins, and this book, will probably have a lot to do with that.

The subtitle here is “A History of the British Empire.” That is a large subject. This is a large book. Elkins, a professor at Harvard (and, I’m told, a Watertown resident! Caroline! Get at me! Let’s have beers and play keno at Mount Auburn Grill! Bring the wife and kids I learned about from the acknowledgments!), makes a number of choices here calculated to land this book with maximum impact. She tells the history of the empire through its dual experiments in violence: learning to use violence to maximum effect to maintain a world-spanning and profitable empire, and finding ways to legitimize that violence within a philosophy of liberal imperialism.

Most of what Elkins writes about the nineteenth century lays groundwork. Liberal imperialism as a philosophy comes not handed down from a Marx figure, but as a kludge, assembled from the results of battles in parliament and the papers over what Britain’s empire meant in the nineteenth century. Edmund Burke may have led the charge against abuses by the East India Company, but his anti-imperialism wasn’t so stiff that his criticisms could not be absorbed into later iterations of imperial technique, especially once John Company had outlived its usefulness. Crises like the Great Mutiny of 1857 and the Boer Wars at the turn of the 20th century refined both the techniques and the ideologies of Empire — and later for how Elkins relates the two — into a reasonably coherent body that Elkins spends the bulk of the book examining- the British Empire of the twentieth century.

Focusing as much as Elkins does on the twentieth century, and especially on post-WWII British imperialism, is a peculiar but considered choice. The owl of Minerva takes wing at dusk, one of the old Germans the British did their best to not think about informs us, and British imperialism took on its most articulate and fully fleshed out form as it was indisputably in decline, at the very least decline relative to other, younger global powers. More than that, focusing on twentieth century imperial conflicts forces the reader to stop thinking of the British empire as some weird old anachronism, something involving powdered wigs and wooden ships. Many of the worst crimes of the British Empire took place contemporaneously to the great ideologically-motivated crimes we are all taught to loathe, to organize our social orders around avoiding repeating. Some of them took place after a British judge sat on the bench at Nuremberg.

India, Ireland, Palestine, Kenya, Malaya… tied together more than being victimized by the same empire, but often by the same personnel. Black and Tans picked up stakes to suppress the Arab uprising against the British Mandate in Palestine, and often the Zionist revolt a decade and change later in the same place. Palestine veterans, in turn, made their way to Malaya to fight the Emergency and to Kenya to suppress the Mau Mau (the latter being the subject of Elkins’ first book). Plenty of them wound up back in Ireland to deal with The Troubles once they kicked off in the late sixties. Everywhere, these personnel, and the London-based imperial bureaucrats who deployed them, cross-pollinated techniques of repression: emergency suspension of civil liberties, economic denial often past the point of starvation, forced relocation, encouragement of ethnic and sectarian division, torture, kill squads. Everywhere, the same, shifting but essentially coherent, body of ideological techniques as well: the liberal civilizing mission and demonization of anti-imperial fighters, control of information in and out of the war zone, careful attention paid to public relations, appeals to sentimental victimhood (dead settlers, traumatized and betrayed veterans of hard wars) and erasure of the many, many more victims they themselves created. Often enough, the literal erasure, through bonfires of records when the Tommies bugged out from Nairobi, Kuala Lumpur, Delhi, Tel Aviv, of the records of what they had done.

Elkins tells it all, chapter and verse, not glosses like with the Mutiny and other nineteenth century episodes but gritty, granular examinations of the dirty wars of the fading twentieth century Empire. Just as Whigs and Tories bickered over management of the Empire at its heyday (even producing opposite condemnations, not that they ever picked up enough traction to really stop the train) but united in dedication to it, so too did Churchill’s Conservatives and Bevin’s Labour remain equally committed, for much longer than we normally associate with either party, to liberal imperialism. After all, they had to somehow recover their economic position after two devastating world wars. One of the reasons they held onto Malaya as hard as they did was that the colony’s tin and rubber production brought in dollars, the international currency that replaced the pound sterling.

But it’s not all dollars and cents (or pounds and pence or whatever made up Harry Potter ass words they use over there). And it’s not all ideology and nostalgia. One of Elkins’s strengths is the way she not only refuses to engage in boring “intentionalism vs structuralism” style debates- she treats them as though they weren’t even there, which, honestly, is one of the better ways of getting across the fundamental truth that interest and ideology mutually constitute each other. Add a third element in there, too- technique.

Let’s put cards on the table- for all the dirt they did, the British Empire didn’t do literal, Treblinka-style death camps. They routed almost the whole Kikuyu population and numerous other Kenyans besides into concentration camps, and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands (it’s hard to say with all those torched records) died there, many of them tortured to death. But they weren’t sent there specifically to die (complete with special industrial mass murder machines), as part of a specific plan to eliminate the Kikuyu from the earth.

Well… the thing with the Holocaust is it actually got a few useful things into the thick heads of the whites. It’s a good thing we memetically associate many bad things — book burnings, open embrace of war and evil, fascism, etc. — with outsized horror and avoid them, to the degree that the lesson has really stuck. So you can see why we don’t want to “relativize” these things. And I don’t think we have to relativize the Holocaust in order to get the point across that there were, are, a lot of ways to be horrific, to be mass murderers on a historical scale, to commit crimes, as the Church fathers used to say, “that cry to heaven for vengeance” (well, the Church fathers including gay stuff in that category, which doesn’t make any sense, but it’s a good turn of phrase).

But what we probably should do is recouple existential horror to a wider range of crimes. After all, as historians have been carefully pointing out, much of the Holocaust itself didn’t take place in the six death camps, but in fields and alleys all across the German war zone- the “Holocaust by bullet” in places like Babi Yar, starvation and disease in the ghettos. These things look less like some expression of unique bureaucratic-Teutonic evil and a lot more like what other empires do. It looks a lot like what the Soviet Union did around the same time, what the US did to Native Americans, and, more to the point, what the British did — what the British were doing, what they would do again — to colonial subjects.

The point isn’t that Nazis were or weren’t worse or better than British imperialists. That’s a stupid and childish way to look at it. The Nazis had a situation, the British had a situation. They had ideologies and interests that constituted each other. I would say the Nazi ideology was, in most sense, dumber than the British one, but this book also shows up just how dumb these supposedly clever British imperialists could be. In the Nazi situation, both an interest in trying to carve a continental empire out of Europe, and ideologies that both preceded that project (but were partially generated from many of the same factors that led Germans to think their empire was workable- like a certain lack of opportunities in other parts of the world to work their will) and were radicalized by it, created the horror of the Holocaust. Other situations — mostly a situation of massive but fading and endangered international strength, and much more pliable ideologies than the Nazis usually had — generated the British horrors.

I say all this as someone who is not a pacifist, who is willing to fight, to countenance and, if needs be, do hard and dark things, for freedom and for the ability of the people to thrive. But the thing with all of these crimes is how arbitrary, how pointless they were to any end other than allowing some privileged gang to thrive. Sometimes it was big gangs — the great big gang of Anglo settler culture, they just needed their “elbow room” no matter how many people had to be killed or enslaved to do it — sometimes it was little gangs, some racial or political elite. But it was never really for freedom, except in the sense that some people got the “freedom” to do what they want at the expense of vast numbers of others. The biggest mass killings you got for that happened with decolonization- Haiti, Algeria, the actual revolutionary stages in places like France, Russia, and China before their mass killings turned into ways to consolidate the power of an elite.

Maybe you’re the sort of person who flinches from a bomb in a cafe or a guillotined aristocrat in a way you don’t from starving Bengalis or a round dozen, at least, nations of this Earth plunged into endless ethnic strife by imperial endgames. Sometimes that does seem like a pretty basic divide- those who can really make themselves feel sorry for Marie Antoinette in the tumbril, but can pass over however many French kids died of diptheria and hunger to buy her jewels (to say nothing of how many were enslaved in the Indies for the same end) with an “oh, dear,” and those who have the opposite reaction. And there’s those who feel bad about both, about neither, etc., I get that. But pathos-directionality divergence does seem pretty fundamental, almost pre-political. There’s patterns — we’ve made Sad Aristocrats the basic element of real pathos from Burke’s day to Sophia Coppola’s, you need to flash kids with bloated starvation bellies to wring a dime out of most Anglos for Sad Poors and even then we can change the channel — but it does seem some people are just more receptive to one or another type of pathos than others. It’s worrisome.

Well! We’ve gone far afield. Oh well. “Legacy of Violence” is an excellent book. It is not a perfect book. The writing is sometimes a little rushed-seeming. There’s stuff to nitpick, and one thing Tories can do is pick the shit out of nits. The effort involved to make us understand the Empire in the horror that it deserves, she has to a lot of lumping. This shows up most notably in the category of Liberal Imperialism, which she clearly is trying to punt into the category of Bad Ideologies To Be Scared Of, like Fascism and, for most people, Communism. I question whether we’re not operating in enemy terrain, here- that accepting their category schema doesn’t necessarily mean accepting their categories, and trying to modify the schema is doomed to failure. But then I think… well, nothing else has worked. And Elkins is trying, and there’s at least some evidence that hammering the point home, with a lack of interest in niceties that’s less pointed and more just sheer eagerness for getting an actual point across, is exactly what we need. *****

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A detailed look at British imperialism and how it used systemic violence to maintain control in its colonies all over the world. A brutal story that was hard to read at times, but the author certainly proves her thesis. This was not an easy book to read based on the content and the more academic writing, but it was an important book to read and I learned a lot.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely first rate book. It is one of those books that not only deserves all the superlatives heaped on it but cries out for more. Ms Elkins has already done wonderful work with her previous books exposing the brutality of Empire in Kenya and played a roll in gaining justice for the Mau Mau victims of past British policy while revealing the part successive UK governments played in sanitising archives by the wholesale destruction of problematic colonial records and finally forcing the UK the government of admit that there was a warehouse full of 'forgotten' archives full of information on aspects of Britain's colonial past that was always denied. No one can read about, study or comment about Britain's imperial past without reading this book.

The ugly truth is there for all to see, at last many would say, but really it is amazing that the whitewash on the reality of what empire was lasted so long. Ms. Elkins is particularly good at dissecting how the myth of Britain's 'good' empire was created and lasted. But it is to easy to put the blame on politicians. People were blind to the ugly reality because they didn't want to know. Because they never asked themselves what it would be liked to be conquered, denied rights, and lorded over by a foreign power and individuals who made clear that they despised you and considered you a lesser form of life and if you did object to being a conquered subject you were criminalised and, in the extreme, treated as a traitor. We never had any difficulty condemning this situation when others practised it, particularly if they were Germans. When Churchill's statue was daubed with the epithet 'racist' what was surprising was how few Britain's realised that Churchill never made a secret of how much he hated and despised people like Indians, he never thought freedom was for everyone, only white Britons, his language about these things was never temperate or discreet.

Empires are built and maintained by the powerful over those they render powerless. Racism is at its core because if you rule a quarter of the world you must be better than others. The lies about the reality of empire has poisoned political decision making in the UK and USA (and in other countries) continuously whether in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq.

Read this book and weep, but I am afraid those who should weep longest will never read this book.

[Arvind Balasundaram · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this copiously researched and much overdue work, Harvard historian and Pulitzer Prize winner, Caroline Elkins provides a riveting account of the real legacy of British imperialism. Hiding behind a cloak of reforming colonial natives, Elkins makes a compelling case of how the British pursued an agenda of punitive violence across all its colonies including India, Ireland, South Africa, Palestine, Kenya and many others. A large part of the evidence behind torture, intelligence gathering, beatings, rapes, etc. was carefully destroyed before the transition of power.

This book exposes many sub-narratives that one usually never reads about in history classes. In this way, the work belongs on a bookshelf beside Charles C. Mann’s 1491 - New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, or Howard French’s Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World. But its conclusions are clear, and direct: the liberal imperialism behind which the British Empire hid was a farce. The establishment of law in order to mediate peace and civilize society was a credo that, in reality, promoted unspeakable violence to subjugate its colonized peoples. The author provides numerous examples to support her premise, and she succeeds wildly.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stuffed with lucid and eye opening facts, the main point of indexing such a well researched trove of knowledge seems to be an extreme bent towards calling out the British as abusers et AL of the planets human masses and resources. Sadly the author uses this knowledge to paint a misconstrued story in this modern reinterpretation of the past. It's a tired story, with no real context, past or present, other than to insist there's a better way. Isn't there always?

[Joanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

As important as the subject is, it deserves a more readable treatment. If I were Elkins, I might have split this up into multiple volumes devoted to different regions.

[anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

savage, if i had to describe it in one word. but then it is a book about the british empire.

elkins chronicles the history of the empire through the lens of its violence, in excruciating detail. she describes the various forms of torture the police and the military would use, searing the images into her readers' minds. some of the things she lists, a regular person doesn't even know are possible to do to another human being (i know i didn't).

she focuses a lot on the people doing the violence, traces their biographies from one colony to another. and really this is the book's best part: this sick voyage of the "legalised lawlessness"; how the british developed tactics to neutralise the native population in one colony and exported it to the next, and the next. she shows us the way the violence went from ireland to palestine, from palestine to malaya, from malaya to kenya, from kenya to cyrprus... and the transfer didn't even stop there, the textbooks were adopted by the us in vietnam.

the research is astounding; technically we all know the empire was barbaric, but it's one thing to know it in abstract, and another altogether to be confronted with descriptions of interment camps. at the same time, there's almost too much detail. the book could really benefit from some editing, we really don't need every anecdotal story to paint the picture. and weirdly, it sometimes feels like the focus is more on the employers of the empire, their biographies, their actions, than it is on their victims and the violence they had to endure. not to say i wish there were more graphic description of torture, obviously, but at least more space afforded to the victims. the book is also highly repetitive, elkins spells out her point time and time again, as if she's afraid we forgot over the last fifty pages. again, some editing would be nice. (the language is also not the easiest to parse through at times.)

also i find it interesting how in her pursue to be objective, she almost manages to paint any national movement in the occupied territories with the same brush (well, slightly smaller brush?) as the empire. not to mention she seems to think socialism is a dirty word, and somehow despite spending so many pages over india, fails to mention gandhi's overt misogyny and paedophilia?

in the end i can't help but feel like there's more violence than legacy in this book. sure, she shows us legacy in the sense of a sequence of events and in the sense of one officer (or even nation) learning from their predecessor, but elkins doesn't really seem interested in the Why of it all. even when she poses questions, she just glazes over them and moves on. i realise what i would like this book to focus more heavily on, would almost turn it into a sociological study instead of a history book, but still.

[P · Rating 1 out of 5]

Chronicling the evils of the British is a rough task, by sheer volume alone.

I was looking forward to reading this summary of the "legacy of violence."

With respect to facts and details, the book is very good.

Where is suffers is that it is terminally boring, written in an extremely bland style. It really is more like a textbook. There was no hint of enjoyment when I read it. It quickly became a chore.

Other complaints:
- as usual, someone expounds upon India, Partition, etcetera, but hardly any mention of the Sikhs, who played a massive role in every thing and all things India (non-Sikh and non-Gurkha Indians are legendary cowards).
- once again, Mo Gandhi's pathetic, racist, pedophilic, and political evils are almost completely ignored
- a solid 50% of this book is just end notes, etcetera

2/10.

[Robert · Rating 1 out of 5]

The structure of this book baffled me. Or more precisely, the complete absence of any structure baffled me. There doesn't seem to be any narrative or cohesion in the book, instead paragraphs jump from one topic to another seemingly at random. It's as if after every page the author spun a wheel and picked whatever topic it landed on. I cannot for the life of me see any rhyme or reason behind it. I repeatedly had to reread the same page because I couldn't figure out it was trying to say.

I got through three chapters (which doesn't sound like much, but believe me it took a lot from me) and I couldn't tell you what they were about. The book is like the worst kind of academic lecture: dull, obtuse and repeatedly telling you what to think, rather than trying to build a convincing argument.

[Greynomad · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is just incredible how the Brit's continued to just stay in trouble regardless of their approach to the various countries within the empire.

It is a stark example of the US's approach in its dealings with other countries after WWII.

It will all go down as another white man's folly in not understanding the native's

[Ashley Daviau · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very long but very interesting read!

[Natú · Rating 5 out of 5]

A massive undertaking of scholarly work whose magisterial scope is both it's greatest strength and biggest weakness. Weakness, because the at times meandering pace and broad scope occasionally lose the reader's interest or move to a new realm of inquiry just as one feels they have settled in to the topic at hand. However, the greatest boon this scope offers is Elkins' major contribution to the popular literature on British empire: the elucidation of the interconnectedness of strategies of oppression and maintenance of imperial rule wherever jurisdiction fell under the British crown.

The primary strategy that Elkins identifies is "legalized lawlessness," an admittedly clunky name which nevertheless neatly encompasses the broad range of tactical implementation throughout the 20th century in particular. The extent to which British officials and officers were shipped from one colony to another to mop up insurgencies and discontent is remarkable, and illuminate ongoing solidaristic links, Ireland and Palestine especially. The book offers a version of British history that feels very much like a wave of colonial discontent held back by a massive dam, and just as soon as one leak in the dam is plugged, another one springs open, until the decrepit state of the thing, it's patchwork quality, and the changing environment around it, lead to it's inevitable bursting. Elkins does a great service in trailblazing new historical scholarship undermining the hegemonic narrative of British empire and making it available to a popular audience.

[Jacob Stelling · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a long but important read, documenting a history of the British Empire through its use of violence and exposing the facade of ‘liberal imperialism’ for what it really was – racial nationalism and exploitation.

The empire remains a contentious subject in modern Britain, as was touched upon in the epilogue, and I think works like this are important to challenge the prevailing narrative that the empire was something to be proud of.

[note: should probs be a 5 star review but this was too dense a work of modern history for me as a medievalist to fully get to grips with!]

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading the well written reviews below, all I’ll say is the book was graphic in parts, gave me a few good references for future books to read & added more puzzle pieces to my understanding which just makes me want to read & learn more .
I’m gonna read Imperial Reckoning next. Checking the book out of the library. I read this book on my Kindle & it would freeze up or not load a few times. I don’t know why, maybe I highlighted too much , I dunno, but it was frustrating. I enjoyed it nonetheless & learned a lot.

An observation, regarding Gaza , Israel & the common comparison to the Nazis. After reading this, I would add they learned a lot from the British also during the mandate , so don’t put all the blame on the Nazis. No the British didn’t Holocaust the Jews, but the people of India would like a word. The people of Africa & Chinese also.
Also, currently in the USA, camouflaged, mask wearing groups of men are roaming cities & suburbs disappearing people with brown skin & putting them in camps

[Madi Mae · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long asf bc the British empire was huge. But good book just would not recommend for a casual read