Legacy of Violence
A History of the British Empire
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3.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian: a searing study of the British Empire that probes the country's pervasive use of violence throughout the twentieth century and traces how these practices were exported, modified, and institutionalized in colonies around the globe
Sprawling across a quarter of the world's land mass and claiming nearly seven hundred million people, Britain's twentieth-century empire was the largest empire in human history. For many Britons, it epitomized their nation's cultural superiority. But what legacy did the island nation deliver to the world? Covering 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 the nation's imperial interests. She outlines how ideological foundations of violence were rooted in the Victorian era calls for punishing recalcitrant "natives," and how over time, its forms became increasingly systematized. And she makes clear that when Britain could no longer maintain control over the violence it provoked and enacted, it retreated from 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 Britain's political divide in the creation, execution, and cover-up of imperial violence. By demonstrating how and why violence was the most salient factor underwriting Britain's empire and the nation's imperial identity at home, Elkins upends long-held myths and sheds new light on empire's role in shaping the world today.
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.
