Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins

Abstract

Reviewed by: Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins Angus Mitchell Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. By Caroline Elkins. London: The Bodley Head, 2022. The display of the Imperial State Crown adorning the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II was a potent reminder that Britain still inhabits a past and present linked by symbols of empire. During the days between her death and state funeral, global news reports recycled a clip of film showing the late queen making a statement on her twenty-first birthday from a garden in Cape Town promising that she would devote her life to “the service of our great imperial family.” Back in 1947, this comment was received with a sense of innocent pride, but the notion of Britain’s “great imperial family” has not aged well. In this latest study to strip away the lustre of empire, Caroline Elkins asks why this is. Legacy of Violence adds to a succession of recent academic interventions revealing the systematised use of force and associated weapons systems required to curate and manage dirty and messy inheritances. Other authoritative works on this shelf include Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire (2019), Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History (2019), Priya Satia, Time’s Monster (2020), and Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums (2020). Each of these interventions has exposed the deceptive premise of empire as an engine of liberal progress and universal benevolence. Instead, Britain’s imperial prowess is shown to have deployed and finessed the technologies of war, secrecy and violence aided by the archive, photography and museums to extend and legitimise belief in liberal imperialism. Beyond the enduring military conflicts, the maintenance of empire became a project of information management, surveillance, cognitive dissonance and Orwellian doublethink. Secret state agencies created an alternative moral universe functioning outside law and democracy. As professor of history and of African and African American studies at Harvard University, Caroline Elkins established her reputation for her work on Kenya’s Mau Mau insurgency and her patient examination of Britain’s secret Hanslope Park archives, where many unknown unknowns were stored until they came to light in 2011. Her methodology scrutinises the intersections of history, law, secrecy and transparency and the role of the archive in managing perceptions. A key component of imperial authority was to deny the right to know the truth and to unashamedly manipulate what was known through select release of documentation. The opening section of Legacy of Violence deals with the period from eighteenth-century India to the outbreak of war in 1939, showing the mutually constitutive relationship between imperialism and liberalism and how empire became the faith of the nation. The middle section examines “Empire at War” and the world order that emerged from the empire’s Churchillian years and the increased role of policing tactics, covert military action and information management. Increasingly, the use of “special powers” and emergency regulations were adopted to defend the realm. The final part—Trysts with Destiny—scrutinises the post war / Cold War period and the economic dependence of Britain on the U.S., Europe and “the colonies” to restore national solvency. Elkins brings harrowing insights into the interconnecting and escalating violence flows circulating through a series of imperial trouble spots and the policing tactics used by the personnel who moved from one imperial outpost to another. Threats from communist, nationalist and anti-colonial insurgencies in Palestine, Malaya, Cyprus and Kenya were ruthlessly suppressed through torture and mass incarceration. Evidence of such tactics became potentially incriminating and a challenge to maintaining the moral high ground. Central to her analysis is the idea of legalised lawlessness and how the law was instrumentalised as both policy and in practice to justify systematised violence. In the words of the political philosopher, James Fitzjames Stephen, “law is nothing but regulated force.” Elkins shows how the British belief system, apparently based on the rule of law, human rights and an open society, has constructed a framework of norms that enables the liberal world system to continue to this day to ravage, pollute, slaughter, extract, divide and devastate in the name of progress and development. The legacies of empire are still evident in the...