Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
In precise, well-researched detail, Elkins tracks the various technologies of coercion that the British colonial administrations honed and deployed in service of its empire, from the concentration camps during the Boer War, all the way to the “dilution technique” during the Mau Mau rebellion. She shows how administrators, police, and intelligence officers built their careers tweaking and improving these violent coercive techniques during repressive campaigns in South Africa, Ireland, India and Pakistan, Palestine, Kenya, and the many legal contortions that the British state went through to justify this “legalized lawlessness” in its pursuit of a noble “liberal imperialism”. Finally, she documents the British Operation Legacy, in which British officials, directed from the highest levels of government, destroyed thousands upon thousands of incriminating documents to prevent them from falling into the hands of their newly liberated colonies.
Despite this, she also tracks the mirroring technologies of resistance, in all their compromised glory: solidarity between the Irish and the Indian independence movements, assassinations and bombings by vying Arab and Jewish militant groups in Palestine, Black intellectuals from colonized territories exposing liberalism's own inherent contradictions, and the Mau Mau oath, which bound Kenyans together, on threat of death, in resistance.
I found the end note of the book to be powerful and timely:
Those holding the keys to power rarely end systemic discrimination, enforce civil rights, or ensure equal opportunities. When these gatekeepers do yield, they dole out reform measures haltingly to those perceived as still “not yet” ready to stand on their own, while deportations, crackdowns, and incarcerations continue to punish society's alleged pollutants who threaten the natural order of things. As history has borne out over and over, those who have lived the experiences of liberalism's “inhuman totality” must demand universal rights and unfettered inclusion, sometimes peacefully and other times forcefully. Even then, that totality's ability to rear its head again, reinvented under another banner of reform, is an enduring feature of liberal states, as are demands for democracy's ever-elusive promise pf universal dignity and equality.
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