Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

by Caroline Elkins

Nineteenth-century philosophers drew on earlier foundational works including those of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, whose ideas would impact domestic and imperial ideas of the state,

Hobbes produced his canonical book Leviathan in 1651. Writing during the English Civil War, he pointed to man’s predisposition to live by the “laws of nature” with its savagery and argued for replacing such anarchy with highly centralized state authority.

For Hobbes a “social contract,” whereby free and rational individuals would give up self-interested rights and submit to an absolute sovereign, was the basis for a civil society. He believed no reasonable person would prefer the “State of Nature” over mediating violence through the state.

Whereas Leviathan argued for absolute government, Locke rejected undivided and unlimited sovereign power. In

Two Treatises of Government, he offered a less nihilistic notion of “nast...

“Conjugal society,” or nuclear families, could create political societies when their male leaders came together and agreed to hand over their power to an executive who kept the peace and exacted punishments. Creating and consenting to a political society and government, men created a new compact, or social contract, with its benefits of laws, judges to adjudicate these laws, and an executive power to enforce the laws.

United into “commonwealths,” men thus preserved their liberty, lives, property, and general well-being, and laws tamed violence by displacing it from the right of the individual, or natural man, to the right of the state.

When nineteenth-century liberalism confronted distant places and “backward” people bound by strange religions, hierarchies, and sentimental and dependent relationships, its universalistic claims withered.

Skin color became the mark of difference. Whites were at one end of civilization’s spectrum, Blacks at the other. All other shades of humanity fell somewhere between, and skin pigment was the visible brand of cultural difference. Race set the terms of rationality and irrationality, civilized and uncivilized.

These “Greater Britain” territories, while they inflicted violent damage on local populations, are not the focus of our story. Rather,

the second empire, with colonial governing structures linked directly to London, will be, including Ireland and the two Afrikaner republics of South Africa. In both of these instances, physical skin color was not the marker of local populations’ differences; instead, it was a constructed skin color.

In effect, Britain “racialized” the Irish and Afrikaners, equating their cultures to those of brown and Black subjects, sometimes using dehumanizing language to describe their physical appearances and living conditions, and believing that, just like the Xhosa of South Africa or the Chinese in Malaya, t...

In the mid-nineteenth century, liberal imperialism found further expression in scientific racism’s evolutionary model. Developmentalism cleaved to racial hierarchies that likened colonial subjects to children who needed paternalistic guidance to reach full maturity.

The “civilizing mission,” as it was known, would take decades if not centuries to carry out this noble enterprise.

It was, to borrow Rudyard Kipling’s famous phrase, the “White Man’s Burden.”

Britain’s civilizing mission was reformist in its claims, it was brutal nonetheless. Violence was not just the British Empire’s midwife, it was endemic to the structures and systems of British rule. It was not just an occasional means to liberal imperialism’s end; it was a means and an end for as long as the British Empire remained alive.

Without it, Britain could not have maintained its sovereign claims to its colonies.

Much as Hobbes had suggested, the sociologist Max Weber explained in “Politics as a Vocation” that a monopoly over the means of legitimate violence is a necessary condition for a state’s existence—a monopoly divested to polic...

In Britain’s case, despotism gave way to newfound processes, none more sacrosanct than the rule of law. By the nineteenth century, legal codes and procedures replaced arbitrary justice and publicly inflicted pain,

defined sanctioned violence, and became the state’s crucial legitimating instrument.

political philosophers like Mill and James Fitzjames Stephen insisted that “good government” would reform backward populations.

law is, in fact, the sum and substance of what we have to teach them. It is, so to speak, the gospel of the English, and it is a compulsory gospel which admits of no dissent and of no disobedience.”

This tautological process of law creation—of incrementally legalizing, bureaucratizing, and legitimating exceptional state-directed violence when ordinary laws proved insufficient for maintaining order and control—is something I term “legalized lawlessness.”

In a perversion of Proverbs 13:24, “Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him,” colonial officials and security forces wanted their infantilized subjects to see and feel their own suffering.[37] They wanted them to know it was deliberate and purposeful. Britain had a term for this: the “moral effect” of violence.

With the onset of the industrial revolution, demands for raw materials and for cheap labor to extract them were voracious.

This unremitting extraction of economic and social value from nonwhite workers is something political scientist Cedric J. Robinson called “racial capitalism.”

colonial economies and disciplinary labor violence are always there in the background and will enter center stage of our story when ordinary colonial laws and policing could not control labor unrest in the empire.

By moving ourselves away from arguments only about capitalism’s unremitting brutality, we see that violence was inherent to liberalism. It resided in liberalism’s reformism, its claims to modernity, its promises of freedom, and its notion of the law—exactly the opposite places where one normally associates violence.

After the Great War, League of Nations members divided up the former German and Ottoman empires. The Treaty of Versailles called the war’s territorial spoils “mandates” that were “inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world,”

The Second World War signaled the mandate system’s demise, though the Versailles Treaty’s emphasis on “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves” survived.

Retooled as the British Commonwealth of Nations, white dominions like Canada and Australia, together with colonies ready to stand on their own, formed a political and cultural community that owed allegiance to the queen. The Commonwealth would be the

triumphant coda to the greatest empire in world history.

In the twentieth century, Germany, Spain, Portugal,

Italy, and Belgium all ruled over colonized populations, though when held up against these other European nations, France has always been Britain’s bête noire.

In South West Africa, Germany’s military descended into “dysfunctional extremes of violence,” nearly wiping out the Herero and Nama peoples, as the historian Isabel V. Hull tells us. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s constitution isolated the army from external oversight and critique, and its militarism snowballed in Germany’s empire and informed fascism’s advance.[63] Arendt called this the “boomerang effect,” and it was not isolated to Hitler’s rise. She looked at Europe’s race thinking and “wild murdering” and “terrible massacres” in the colonies and

“When the European mob discovered what a ‘lovely virtue’ a white skin could be in Africa, when the English conqueror in India became an administrator,” Arendt wrote, “convinced of his own innate capacity to rule and dominate, when the dragon-slayers turned into either ‘white men’ of ‘higher breeds’ or into bureaucrats and spies…the stage seemed to be set for all possible horrors. Lying under anybody’s nose were many of the elements which gathered together could create a totalitarian

government on the basis o...

The British Empire and totalitarian regimes were not the same thing, even if some eyewitnesses reported striking

similarities.[65] In fact, Britain’s empire looked most like France’s.

The French Empire was incorporated into the nation’s political structure, as dark-skinned delegates from the colonies took seats in the French parliament and Algeria became a department of France.

In Britain’s case, colonial subjects wouldn’t have representation in London, except the Irish for a time. No matter how rational and civilized subjects became, they would never be British.

Violence was endemic in both empires, yet it was Britain’s that became metonymic with imperial exception. This was no accident. “The legend of the British Empire,” Arendt tells us, “has little to do with the realities of British imperialism….No political structure could have been more evocative of legendary tales and justifications than the British Empire.”

With this book, I am telling a history of the British Empire.

history of how and why exceptional

state-directed violence unfolded across the second empire and in what ways its systems were conceived, enacted, experienced, understood, and exonerated both in the colonies and in Britain. Two trials bookend this story: the eighteenth-century impeachment trial of Warren Hastings that put corruption and accountability in India to the test in Britain’s Parliament, and the recent Mau Mau case in London’s Royal Courts of Justice. During the intervening two hundred years, recurring questions about imperial violence and accountability dogged successive British governments.

For hundreds of millions who lived in Britain’s imperial expanse, the empire’s velvet glove concealed an all-too familiar iron fist.

In little over a hundred years, Britain’s imperial bricolage moved from eighteenth-century claims in Bengal to nearly a quarter of the globe, or roughly 14 million square miles. By the end of her reign, Queen Victoria would preside over 450 million subjects around the world.

“Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end,” John Stuart Mill, son of the legendary father, wrote in 1859.[43] In two canonical texts, On Liberty (1859) and Considerations on Representative Government (1861), he juxtaposed civilization and barbarism to create new ideological idioms advocating for a narrative of human development that was intimately bound with Britain’s civilizing mission.[44]

Mill endowed the non-Europeans of the empire with childlike qualities and juxtaposed them with progressive images of the British. Like children, non-Western populations were not yet ready for liberty, which “is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties….We may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage.”[45]

Mill advocated for a “paternal despotism” to tutor the empire’s children. “A civilized government, to be really advantageous to [subject populations], will require to be in a considerable degree despotic,” he wrote, “and to be one over which they do not themselves exercise control, and which imposes a great amount of forcible restraint upon their actions.”[46]