Legacy of Violence
A History of the British Empire
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3.0 • 4 Ratings
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, HISTORY TODAY AND BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR
'Masterly... This book is dynamite' - ROBERT GILDEA, author of Empires of the Mind
**Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize**
**Winner of the NYU/Axinn Foundation Prize**
A searing, landmark study of the British Empire that lays bare its pervasive use of violence throughout the twentieth century.
Drawing on more than a decade of research on four continents, Caroline Elkins reveals the dark heart of Britain's Empire: a racialised, systemised doctrine of unrelenting violence, which it used to secure and maintain its interests across the globe.
When Britain could no longer maintain control over that violence, it simply retreated - and sought to destroy the evidence. Legacy of Violence is a monumental achievement that explodes long-held myths and deserves the attention of anyone who seeks to understand empire's role in shaping the world today.
'Not so much a history book as a book of historical significance' BBC History Magazine
'Riveting' New Statesman
'Crucial...as unflinching as it is gripping, as carefully researched as it is urgently necessary' Jill Lepore, author of These Truths
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.
