A Harvard history professor offers a sweeping study of the British Empire that probes the country's pervasive use of violence throughout the 20th-century, tracing how these practices were exported, modified and institutionalized in colonies around the globe.
Legacy of Violence is a formidable piece of research that sets itself the ambition of identifying the character of British power over the course of two centuries and four continents. Elkins, perhaps minded of her previous brush with controversy, sometimes approaches her task with the meticulous doggedness of a trial lawyer rather than a storyteller in search of an audience ... The blood-red thread through all of that history, in Elkins’s persuasive reading, is a strain of moralising superiority that convinced successive generations of politicians ... She painstakingly traces how the personnel and methodologies of suppression and torture were passed between territories, at the same time that sentimental propaganda campaigns told a different story of those conquests ... In many ways, of course, this long history could not be more timely. Elkins offers an open and shut case for those who believe that Rhodes must fall. Her book should, you hope, also find its way into the hands of at least some of that 60% of the nation who, when polled in 2014, thought the British empire was, in general, 'something to be proud of'.
Legacy of Violence does not stint on detail: it is deeply researched, with 88 pages of footnotes and references to two dozen archives. Yet Elkins wears her considerable learning lightly, and is wise enough to allow her considerable anger to smoulder, rather than burn from the pages, making for a powerful, compelling read ... Elkins is scrupulous in making her comparisons. However violent British tactics were, they were not the same as the Nazi regime ... The book opens up ground for a wider debate on the factors that shaped the three centuries of British global empire ... Elkins is rightly keen to avoid debates over whether empire was 'good' or 'bad', in the manner of Yeatman and Sellars’s classic parody 1066 and All That[.]
Legacy of Violence, like Elkins’s earlier book, shuttles between horrific details and historical and thematic contexts. And it, too, relies occasionally on questionable statistics ... Yet some of what she recounts is devastating, including the story of how British dark arts were distilled in interwar Palestine, propelling the grisliness of liberal imperialism to another level ... Elkins’s account...is convinced of liberal imperialism’s ability to absorb and neutralize criticism ... When her theory corners her into an account of the final unravelling of empire couched largely in terms of high-policy calculations about when to forgo power and instead pursue influence, it’s as if the ghosts of imperial history that she set out to vanquish had returned to inhabit her book ... her quest for a unifying theory sends her gliding over significant distinctions in the governance of wildly different colonial territories ... I was surprised to see such a shrewd scholar repeatedly minimize the impact of anti-colonial thinkers and actors ... she has added important dimension to our still partial understanding of the British Empire’s sadism and hypocrisy ... Yet oversimplified theories are themselves prone to bury other histories.
