Caroline Elkins (2022) outlines the legacy of violence of the British empire
Around 2010, I began to read about the history of the British empire. I wanted to know more about the first settler colonialist landowner in Long Branch in Toronto. I lived in Long Branch from 1997 until 2018. In 2010 I learned that a local school, about a three-minute walk from our house, was about to be sold. The school grounds was the site where a British colonel had built a log cabin in 1797. The cabin was torn down in 1955.
Because I had experience in community self-organizing, and because I was able to get some crucial strategic advice from several sources, I was able to help to ensure the school stayed in public hands. You can read all about this story at this website by searching for Parkview School, Colonel Samuel Smith, and community self-organizing.
In my reading about the British empire, I came across research by Caroline Elkins which served to place my understanding of the history of the British empire into a context that made sense to me.
The purpose of the current post is to share the text of a book review at Kirkus Books of a recent book by Caroline Elkins. You can access the text at the link in the previous sentence. To ensure greater ease for online reading, I originally added paragraph breaks to the text which follows. Later, however, I decided it worked better with the original paragraph structure that’s in place in the Kirkus Books review.
An e-book version of this book is available at the Toronto Public Library website. [1]
The Kirkus Review article reads:
LEGACY OF VIOLENCE: A HISTORY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE
by Caroline Elkins
A scathing indictment of the long and brutal history of British imperialism.
Historian Elkins, founding director of Harvard’s Center for African Studies and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (2005), frames her narrative with two events that actually took the British Empire to task for its violent imperial policy over centuries. The first was the 1788 impeachment trial of governor-general of India, Warren Hastings, during which Parliament demanded accountability for his repressive tactics, shocking the nation. The second is the 2011 case of the survivors of the Mau Mau rebellion. Throughout this tour de force of historical excavation, Elkins confronts the decidedly Western ideas of the social contract, government responsibility, and the importance of personal property alongside the enduring belief that White men alone could institute these marvelous liberal gifts. “When 19th century liberalism confronted distant places and ‘backward people’ bound by strange religions, hierarchies, and sentimental and dependent relationships, its universalistic claims withered,” writes the author. “[Britons] viewed their imperial center…as culturally distinct from their empire….Skin color became the mark of difference. Whites were at one end of civilization’s spectrum, Blacks at the other. All of shades of humanity fell somewhere in between.” Paternalistic attitudes continued to evolve across the empire, and Elkins provides especially keen examinations of colonies where clashes were particularly forceful and “legalized lawlessness” was widespread—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 like Winston Churchill; Henry Gurney, commissioner of Malay; and Terence Gavaghan, a colonial officer in Kenya. Over the course of the 20th century, Britain was forced to cede many of its sovereign claims to empire, at enormous human cost. Elkins masterfully encapsulates hundreds of years of history, amply showing how “Britain was to the modern world what the Romans and Greeks were to the ancient one.”
Top-shelf history offering tremendous acknowledgement of past systemic abuses.
Note 1
ALSO BY CAROLINE ELKINS
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (2005)
Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies (2005)
Time for Reparations: A Global Perspective (2021)
A blurb for the latter study reads:
In this sweeping international perspective on reparations, Time for Reparations makes the case that past state injustice – be it slavery or colonization, forced sterilization or widespread atrocities – has enduring consequences that generate ongoing harm, which needs to be addressed as a matter of justice and equity.
Time for Reparations provides a wealth of detailed and diverse examples of state injustice, from enslavement of African Americans in the United States and Roma in Romania to colonial exploitation and brutality in Guatemala, Algeria, Indonesia, Jamaica, and Guadeloupe. From many vantage points, contributing authors discuss different reparative strategies and the impact they would have on the lives of survivor or descent communities.
One of the strengths of this book is its interdisciplinary perspective – contributors are historians, anthropologists, human rights lawyers, sociologists, and political scientists. Many of the authors are both scholars and advocates, actively involved in one capacity or another in the struggles for reparations they describe. The book therefore has a broad and inclusive scope, aided by an accessible and cogent writing style. It appeals to scholars, students, advocates and others concerned about addressing some of the most profound and enduring injustices of our time.
An excerpt from Legacy of Violence (2022) – Chapter 2, “Wars Small and Great” reads:
I wrote this book because my previous work, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, raised unanswered questions about violence in the British Empire. It documented the systematic violence that took place in Kenya’s detention camps during the Mau Mau Emergency (1952-60). Imperial Reckoning ‘s research was arduous because countless documents were missing from the official archives in London and Nairobi. I spent years sifting through remaining fragments of evidence and also amassed other historical sources from private document collections, newspaper archives, and hundreds of interviews that I undertook with former colonial officials and survivors of the detention system. During the course of this research, I recognized that for many British officials and security force members Kenya was not their first colonial war, and for others it would not be their last. Some suggested that Kenya’s settler community and its virulent racism rendered the colony unique. But perhaps Kenya wasn’t so exceptional? I felt I had stepped into a historical moment that was part of a bigger connective story about imperial violence after the Second World War that began in Palestine and moved to Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden. It was this story that I set out to investigate over a decade ago.
A second excerpt reads:
By the fall of 1900, the British, under Roberts’s command, had taken nominal control of the Boer Republic. Now the war moved into its final phase as Afrikaners adopted a highly effective guerrilla strategy. To close the war, Kitchener took full charge of the army as commander in chief and launched an all-out assault on an entire ethnic population: or as Kipling termed it, a “dress parade for Armageddon.”[21] The British Army introduced a new blockhouse strategy that, combined with barbed-wire fences, divided the massive interior into smaller areas. Kitchener then deployed a scorched earth policy and systematically burned crops and dumped salt to prevent future cultivation. Sweeper columns mopped up any residual Afrikaner forces. Kitchener eventually deported thirty thousand prisoners of war to remote comers of the empire.[22] British troops also razed homesteads, poisoned wells, and corralled into concentration camps Afrikaner women and children as well as African laborers.
Kitchener was drawing on imperial precedents: this was not the first time the British Empire had sought to solve a crisis through mass encampment. Since 1857 officials in India had experimented with a series of confinement measures that were as much about reform as they were about security and punishment. The Indian Mutiny had spawned the mass incarceration of twenty thousand rebellious subjects whom British officials exiled to the Andaman Islands. There, sparse tented conditions and forced labor were to impart a sense of Victorian-era rehabilitation. Indeed, temporarily separating “degenerate” and “dangerous” segments of the population from the body politic was a hallmark of nineteenth century Britain. The Poor Law of 1834 and the Habitual Criminals Act of 1869 created social categories of Britons who, like the empire’s subjects, were part of liberalism’s underbelly. It wasn’t just a matter of incarcerating these threats to society; it was also to be an exercise in reforming them through hard physical labor, thus rendering them more rational and civilized. The Raj imported these ideas through legal mechanisms – it translated Britain’s Habitual Criminals Act into India’s Criminal Tribes Act – as well as through camp systems that reflected the metaphorical language of contagion.
A third excerpt reads:
Concepts about mass confinement and reform of refugees in India, along with Victorian-inspired ideals regarding rations and labor, traveled to South Africa during the war. With Kitchener’s scorched earth tactics, however, the so-called refugee sites swelled with civilians. Noncombatants comprised the crucial passive wing that offered supplies and informal intelligence to the commandos, and Kitchener was determined to control the Afrikaner and Black “undesirable” populations and, with it, deny the guerrillas their much-needed supply lines. Yet the commander in chief’s tactics went beyond dismantling guerrilla resources. He designed concentration camps, about one hundred in all, as punitive hostage sites. Women and children of active guerrillas endured harsher treatment with smaller rations as Kitchener sought to “work on the feelings of the men.” Moreover, he targeted the Afrikaner women who were “more bitter than the men”; according to him, the one way to “bring them to their senses” was to weaken them in the camps.[25] The war transformed these women and their children into “legitimate targets of violence,” as the historian Aidan Forth suggestsJ26] As far as Milner and Kitchener were concerned, the Afrikaners in the camps were “verminous,” no doubt emaciated from meager rations and poor sanitation’s effects. Kitchener’s forces had to either capture the “infested” Afrikaner population or kill them.[27]
British forces herded into the camps more than one hundred thousand Afrikaners who died at alarming rates. Malnutrition, starvation, and outbreaks of endemic diseases wiped out approximately thirty thousand, the disproportionate number of whom were children.[28] Whether the civilian deaths were a deliberate or an unintended consequence of Kitchener’s war plans, the establishment of the British concentration camps in South Africa represented the first time a single ethnic group had been targeted en masse for detention or deportation. Reports of camp conditions and death tolls began filtering to Britain in the spring of 1901. The public’s response ranged from indifference to outrage.
A third excerpt reads:
Concepts about mass confinement and reform of refugees in India, along with Victorian-inspired ideals regarding rations and labor, traveled to South Africa during the war. With Kitchener’s scorched earth tactics, however, the so-called refugee sites swelled with civilians. Noncombatants comprised the crucial passive wing that offered supplies and informal intelligence to the commandos, and Kitchener was determined to control the Afrikaner and Black “undesirable” populations and, with it, deny the guerrillas their much-needed supply lines. Yet the commander in chief’s tactics went beyond dismantling guerrilla resources. He designed concentration camps, about one hundred in all, as punitive hostage sites. Women and children of active guerrillas endured harsher treatment with smaller rations as Kitchener sought to “work on the feelings of the men.” Moreover, he targeted the Afrikaner women who were “more bitter than the men”; according to him, the one way to “bring them to their senses” was to weaken them in the camps.[25] The war transformed these women and their children into “legitimate targets of violence,” as the historian Aidan Forth suggestsJ26] As far as Milner and Kitchener were concerned, the Afrikaners in the camps were “verminous,” no doubt emaciated from meager rations and poor sanitation’s effects. Kitchener’s forces had to either capture the “infested” Afrikaner population or kill them.[27]
British forces herded into the camps more than one hundred thousand Afrikaners who died at alarming rates. Malnutrition, starvation, and outbreaks of endemic diseases wiped out approximately thirty thousand, the disproportionate number of whom were children.[28] Whether the civilian deaths were a deliberate or an unintended consequence of Kitchener’s war plans, the establishment of the British concentration camps in South Africa represented the first time a single ethnic group had been targeted en masse for detention or deportation. Reports of camp conditions and death tolls began filtering to Britain in the spring of 1901. The public’s response ranged from indifference to outrage.
Kitchener, Ontario
A June 16, 2020 CTV article is entitled: “‘We cannot erase history’: Where Kitchener and its councillors stand on renaming the city.”
An excerpt reads:
“It’s not surprising that recent world events have us contemplating the origins of our City’s name,” city officials said in a statement to CTV News Kitchener. “We acknowledge that the legacy of our namesake, Horatio Herbert Kitchener, a decorated British Earl who established concentration camps during the Boer War, is not one to be celebrated.”