August 1, 2021
Founding director of Harvard's Center for African Studies and a Pulitzer Prize winner for Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, Elkins presents Britain's 20th-century empire--the largest in history--as grounded in violence stemming from Victorian-era urgency to maintain control by punishing those among the colonized who seemed defiant or willfully rebellious. By the mid-20th-century, as their control began slipping, the British simply left, covering up their tracks.
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Starred review from November 8, 2021
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. Agent: Jill Kneerim, Kneerim & Williams
Starred review from February 4, 2022
Even with the British government's extensive efforts to destroy evidence, a wealth of documents still exists that implicate its imperial agents, bottom to top, in steadily escalating acts of violence as they fought desperately to preserve the country's hold over its imperial possessions in the 19th and 20th centuries. Drawing on this evidence, Elkins (history and African American studies, Harvard Univ.) detailed Britain's inhumane treatment of the Mau Mau in Kenya in her earlier book, Imperial Reckoning. Now she expands her focus to the British Empire as a whole, showing how deftly and consistently liberal imperialism erased evidence of its violence toward its own colonial subjects, legitimating these acts as "necessary" and however long in force, still temporary, and as having a "moral" effect on "uncivilized" peoples, who were, the Irish excepted, all people of color and thus congenitally unfit to make their own determinations on matters of rule. Her detailed description of British policy and actions in Ireland, India, Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya, Nyasaland, Jamaica, and Palestine makes for unsettling, yet necessary reading. VERDICT Thoroughly researched and presented in scrupulous detail, this tale of "legalized violence," founded on a racism not even thinly disguised, is a must-read for serious students of history.--David Keymer
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Starred review from March 1, 2022
A scathing indictment of the long and brutal history of British imperialism. Historian Elkins, founding director of Harvard's Center for African Studies and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (2005), frames her narrative with two events that actually took the British Empire to task for its violent imperial policy over centuries. The first was the 1788 impeachment trial of governor-general of India, Warren Hastings, during which Parliament demanded accountability for his repressive tactics, shocking the nation. The second is the 2011 case of the survivors of the Mau Mau rebellion. Throughout this tour de force of historical excavation, Elkins confronts the decidedly Western ideas of the social contract, government responsibility, and the importance of personal property alongside the enduring belief that White men alone could institute these marvelous liberal gifts. "When 19th century liberalism confronted distant places and 'backward people' bound by strange religions, hierarchies, and sentimental and dependent relationships, its universalistic claims withered," writes the author. "Britains viewed their imperial center...as culturally distinct from their empire....Skin color became the mark of difference. Whites were at one end of civilization's spectrum, Blacks at the other. All of shades of humanity fell somewhere in between." Paternalistic attitudes continued to evolve across the empire, and Elkins provides especially keen examinations of colonies where clashes were particularly forceful and "legalized lawlessness" was widespread--among other regions, India, South Africa, Palestine, Ireland, Malay, and Kenya. Offering numerous correctives to Whitewashed history, the author mounts potent attacks against the egregious actions of vaunted figures like Winston Churchill; Henry Gurney, commissioner of Malay; and Terence Gavaghan, a colonial officer in Kenya. Over the course of the 20th century, Britain was forced to cede many of its sovereign claims to empire, at enormous human cost. Elkins masterfully encapsulates hundreds of years of history, amply showing how "Britain was to the modern world what the Romans and Greeks were to the ancient one." Top-shelf history offering tremendous acknowledgement of past systemic abuses.
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