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

Abstract

This weighty and important book charts the bespattered history of British imperial violence, from the colonial small wars of the Victorian era to the brutal counterinsurgencies in the age of decolonization. Elkins focuses on moments of dramatic bloodletting rather than on more quotidian forms of political and economic exploitation or the discursive “violence” of words. Her extensive secondary source reading and archival research—including consultation of 10,300 files of recently discovered documents at London’s secretive Hanslope facility—highlights flashpoints of brutality like the Amritsar Massacre and the “Black and Tan” terror in Ireland. She also treats other, lesser-known episodes, like the repression of the Zaghloul protests in Egypt (1919).According to Elkins, violence in the British Empire became worse over time; her narrative is replete with disturbing descriptions of detention, torture, and rape, as perpetrated with broken bottles, guns, sticks, and knives. It reached its crescendo with the British campaigns in postwar Malaya, and, above all, in Kenya, where Britain tortured Mau Mau suspects in one of world history’s “largest archipelagos of detention” (557). Along the way, Elkins deftly navigates a global web of inter-imperial connections, as colonial agents like Orde Wingate and Gerald Templar moved from one theater of violence to the next, honing and transmitting the lessons and tactics of repression. Rogue “men on the spot” often committed atrocities, but imperial violence resulted from more than a few “bad apples” (however much spokesmen like Winston Churchill and Enoch Powell tried, strategically, to scapegoat certain figures and thus prolong imperial rule).Central to Elkins’ argument is that colonial crimes resulted from larger cultural, political, and legal structures institutionalized by Whitehall, Downing Street, and colonial administrations that claimed despotic powers unthinkable at home. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the British Empire embodied the tensions of liberal imperialism, which rested on what Elkins terms a “legalized lawlessness.” Even as Britons celebrated the rule of law, democratic reform, and an apparently benign, though racially infused civilizing mission, the “moral effect” of bombs and barbed wire, and of castrations and chemical weapons, sustained British power. In the process, the colonial state provided systematic cover to its agents on the ground through martial law and emergency declarations, along with censorship and spineless commissions of inquiry aimed at deflection rather than uncovering gruesome realities. Elkins’ command of this legal history is impressive.Elkins suggests that Britons’ remarkable ignorance of such imperial atrocities has abetted their post-Brexit fantasies of a reborn “global Britain.” The violence, however, was self-defeating; atrocities only fortified anti-colonial resistance. Those who “experienced the empire as brown and black subjects”—George Padmore, C. L. R. James, and Mohandas K. Gandhi, to whom Elkins gives voice—“saw but shades of difference between fascism and imperialism” (297). For them, as for Elkins, the liberal dressing of “partnerships,” “progress,” and “development” failed to conceal an “all-too-familiar iron fist” behind a “velvet glove” (28).Elkins is right to differentiate imperial Britain from Nazi Germany, where aggression was naked and race was immutable. But Legacy of Violence offers a powerful corrective to apologetic versions of the past (which Elkins charts in a historiographical analysis of imperial history), while filling in gaps left by “Operation Legacy,” a state-sponsored program to destroy compromising official documents. Elkins’ 875 pages of meticulous research is a monumental indictment of empire. In its light, her recent expert testimony to the British High Court supporting reparations for Kenyan victims of torture is by no means surprising.The British Empire is no more; Britain lost superpower status following World War II and Bretton Woods. A sustained economic analysis of the declining pound sterling provides context for Britain’s shifting place in the world. Furthermore, intelligence failures and military blunders permitted colonial subjects to seize the rights and freedoms promised but never granted. Yet the age of empire remains: In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States (to whom Kipling addressed his “White Man’s Burden”) practiced a familiar repertoire of torture, secrecy, and “hearts and minds” rhetoric—a genealogy Elkins might have done more to explore.1 Meanwhile, Russia, with its terror bombing, imperial hubris, and sham referenda in Ukraine, pursues its own far cruder version of “legalized lawlessness.” A broader embrace of comparative and transnational history would thus offer more global insight into the legacies of imperial violence that shape the world today.