Legacy of Violence
A landmark history of the British Empire - and the violence that built it.
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, a revelatory, fearless history of the British Empire that lays bare its pervasive use of violence throughout the twentieth century.
In this groundbreaking work, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Caroline Elkins uncovers the systematic brutality at the heart of the British Empire. Drawing on more than a decade of research across four continents and newly declassified archives, she exposes the global network of detention camps, torture, and cover-ups that underpinned the imperial project - from Kenya to Malaya and beyond.
Far from isolated incidents, Elkins reveals a pattern of violence, used to secure and maintain Britain’s interests across the globe. Legacy of Violence is meticulously researched, passionately argued, and deeply relevant to today’s debates about empire, accountability and historical memory.
A NEW YORK TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, HISTORY TODAY AND BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR
‘Masterly… This book is dynamite’ Robert Gildea
‘Not so much a history book as a book of historical significance’ BBC History Magazine
‘Crucial… as unflinching as it is gripping’ Jill Lepore
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A brutal reality underpinned the British Empire's ideology of civic uplift, according to this sweeping historical study. Harvard historian Elkins (Imperial Reckoning) surveys 20th-century milestones in Britain's bloody efforts to suppress unrest in its colonies and mandates, including the Boer War, Ireland's War of Independence, the 1919 Amritsar Massacre in India, revolts in Palestine by Arabs and Jews, the post-WWII clash with Communist guerrillas in Malaya, and the suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. It's a somber record: time and again imperial authorities imposed the "legalized lawlessness" of martial law and states of emergency and carried out imprisonments without trial, censorship, beatings, torture, demolitions of houses and villages, air raids, assassinations, and starvation of civilians in concentration camps. Elkins argues that the carnage was an inescapable part of Britain's self-serving, hypocritical creed of "liberal imperialism," which claimed to be nobly shepherding backward races toward civilization and self-rule—through an iron-fisted despotism. Elkins's intricate but immersive account is a feat of scholarship that elucidates the bureaucratic and legal machinery of oppression, dissects the intellectual justifications for it, and explores in gripping, sometimes grisly detail the suffering that resulted. The result is a forceful challenge to recent historiographical and political defenses of British exceptionalism that punctures myths of paternalism and progress. Photos.
