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.
