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A History of the British Empire
by Caroline Elkins
From 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.
"[A] sweeping historical study...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." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Elkins provides especially keen examinations of colonies where clashes were particularly forceful...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...Top-shelf history offering tremendous acknowledgement of past systemic abuses." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[Elkins'] detailed description of British policy and actions in Ireland, India, Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya, Nyasaland, Jamaica, and Palestine makes for unsettling, yet necessary reading...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." - Library Journal (starred review)
"'All empires are violent,' Caroline Elkins observes in this masterful, crucial study, but Britain's only became more violent over time, even as it touted its liberalism. Legacy of Violence is as unflinching as it is gripping, as carefully researched as it is urgently necessary." - Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
"Caroline Elkins has written the history of the British Empire that we desperately need today. Drawing on recently-disclosed documents, Legacy of Violence catalogues how, time after time, in place after place, British authorities brutally repressed dissent under the cover of laws justifying the use of force. Sweeping, forceful, and passionately argued, it is a definitive rejoinder to persistent myths of liberal benevolence. A monumental achievement." - Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World
This information about Legacy of Violence was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Caroline Elkins is professor of history and of African and African American studies at Harvard University and the founding director of Harvard's Center for African Studies. Her first book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. She is a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the New Republic. She has also appeared on numerous radio and television programs, including NPR's All Things Considered and BBC's The World. She lives in Watertown and Marion, Massachusetts.
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