Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

by Caroline Elkins

In the eyes of many, Britain had been the purveyor of a benign imperialism that was the standard-bearer for all other empires.

Rhodes was also a great “race patriot” who had amassed a fortune, in his own words, “exploit[ing] the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies.”[5] Upon his death in 1902, he bequeathed £100,000 to Oriel College, though the bulk of his money went to the Rhodes Trust and its scholarships for students from the British colonies, the United States, and Germany. For more than a century, Rhodes’s statue has gazed at Oxford students—a select few of whom hold the mineral magnate’s prestigious fellowship—as they walk past Oriel’s north side. This, despite vehement calls for its removal.

“Behind Brexit stalks the ghost of imperial exception, the feeling that Great Britain can never be just another nation. There’s still a providential feeling about Shakespeare’s ‘sceptred isle’ as ‘this fortress built by Nature.’ ”[16]

The British Empire was born from conflict, and coming to terms with its history is no different.

Manifest Destiny Civilizing Mission One the settler colonial state Par Excellence, The other imperial capital, global Britain. Both have entered the 21st-century unsure of where they stand in the world, and what it is the Pines their peoples together. It’s no coincidence that fighting in schools and then parliaments over that way history portrays the origins and evolutions of American and British empire has become a cultural Touchstone and a political lightning rod.

The British Empire was born from conflict, and coming to terms with its history is no different.

USA and UK are empires with violence at the core of their history, identity, institutions and culture. Yet both seem To long for a better day in some nostalgic past when Empire was not only the defining feature of both societies, fully acceptable even unquestionably positive in Elan.