Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire
by Caroline Elkins
Knopf
896 pp., $37.50

Beating the dead horse of Western imperialism—by now it is a fossil, rather than a corpse—has long been a lively sport. Legacy of Violence is an important entry in this sport, distinguishing itself with a few nasty twists, although in many ways it is a theme with variations on its author’s earlier work—applied to the whole history of the British Empire. But this is not quite a case of what the immortal philosopher Yogi Berra described as “déjà vu all over again.” It is something worse.

Elkins made a name for herself in 2006 with her Pulitzer prize-winning Imperial Reckoning, an exposé of real and alleged British crimes in breaking the Kikuyu (“Mau Mau”) rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s. Critiques of the book and the work of other scholars dealing with Mau Mau—notably, Daniel Branch’s Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya—suggest that Imperial Reckoning may indeed have deserved a nomination for a Pulitzer—but in fiction. The book made some extraordinary claims, notably that the process of beating Mau Mau was a case of “incipient genocide” and may have cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Curiously, no one noticed that at the time (although the deaths of 29 Mau Mau detainees caused an international scandal in 1959), and census results are incompatible with such an notion. Playing down Mau Mau’s crimes, Elkins basically ignored the question of what would have happened had Mau Mau won, asserting that it was the British who were responsible for all the violence, which would have ended had they just pulled out of Kenya!

As Branch showed, Mau Mau was not a true nationalist movement, nor was the war a duel involving the British and a few “collaborators” against the Kikuyu—much less other Kenyan Africans—but mainly a civil war among the Kikuyu themselves. (Others made these points before, but Branch nailed it down tightly.) There was a good deal of brutality on the anti-Mau Mau side—up to and including outright massacres—although the worst of these were direct responses to the massacres committed by Mau Mau. The British also played down the real grievances of the Kikuyus but did undertake belated reforms in response.

Perhaps the last word on Mau Mau was written by a Mau Mau leader, Waruhiu Itote (“General China”), who ruefully commented in his memoirs that, had he foreseen, despite the defeat of the “Land and Freedom Army” (Mau Mau’s official name), that Kenya would gain independence peacefully in 1963, he would not have taken up the fight.

In her new book, Elkins projects her skewed view of 1950s Kenya onto the entire history of the British Empire—minus any contributions or benefits the empire conferred on its subjects—but with some revealing ideological themes added. The impression left is that not much could be worse than the British Empire, except possibly the alleged continuation of “imperial pride built not only on shameless racial assumptions but also on the backs of countless enslaved and colonized peoples.” The notion that, over a period several centuries, in many different countries (how much could India and Kenya have in common?) some awful things, usually early on, might have occurred, along with many good or even great things, and that both exploitation and mutually profitable relationships existed, is a complexity too distasteful, apparently, for Elkins to admit.

There is even a hint of inverted racism here (Elkins is white) in some odd asides, as in her seemingly unnecessary remark that the Labour Prime Minister Clement “Attlee and his men represented a predominantly white nation” and the curious practice of capitalizing “Black” but not “white” in describing people’s race.

The real surprise in this book is not the often exaggerated or downright absurd statements about racism but rather Elkins’ discovery that the true evil was “liberal imperialism,” the pretense of a “civilizing mission” and a reformed imperial rule. And for Elkins, liberal imperialism is a fundamentally unchanging set of ideas and practices that still exist in such things as criticism of immigration to Britain, Brexit, any suggestion that the empire was not evil, or any expression of British national pride. According to Elkins, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was a “living avatar of the Empire.”

It should be noted, however, that the theme of liberal imperialism as an unchanging posture is severely qualified in one respect. Elkins assures us that it became “increasingly violent” over time. That proposition, however, is, to put it mildly, more than doubtful and for several reasons, seems to hang on blaming all violence by rebels—e.g. the Communist guerillas in Malaya and the rivals for the succession to British rule—on the British.

There is an undercurrent—perhaps more than an undercurrent—of contempt for the British people in general, which particularly surfaces toward the end of Elkins’ book, notably in her tortuous attempts to show that the British at home derived much of their cultural identity, and still do, from the empire and racial domination. But in contrast to this conjecture, many enthusiasts for imperialism have complained—and rightly, if more serious scholars like Bernard Porter are anywhere near correct—that most of the British paid little attention to the empire and lost much will to hang on to it earlier than many now care to recall. According to Porter, opinion polls in 1939 showed that 77 percent of the British favored giving India independence within a few years.

For someone obsessed with exploitation, Elkins strangely avoids serious discussion of the economic aspects of her subject matter, although she apparently assumes the validity of some variation on the Hobson-Lenin version of imperialism, modified to stress that the British working class and British in general derived major economic benefits from the empire. She cites a remark by George Orwell to justify this assertion: “Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comp­arative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation.” But even Orwell was sometimes wrong, and as post-imperial studies by David Fieldhouse, Lance Davis, and Robert Huttenback have shown, the role of the empire in Britain’s economy and the profits derived from it were never more than moderate, and what benefits there were went to parts of the upper and middle classes. Notoriously, most British trade and investment went entirely outside the British Empire, and most of that within the empire went to the “white Dominions,” like Canada and Australia, not the “dependent Empire.”

En route to the present, the reader is treated by Elkins to many other errors, misrepresentations, and strategic omissions. A notable example is her very brief description of the British response to the Indian Rebellion of 1857. In explaining this, she mentions “lurid and often embellished tales of Indian acts against Europeans, particularly the rape of white women and girls.” It is true that the British were particularly worked up over rape, but it seems that in reality, the Indian rebels rarely, if ever, actually raped the British women who fell into their hands. They just killed them.

Another misrepresentation is that almost all British officials in the empire are portrayed as criminals, or at least accomplices after the fact. Critics of errors and crimes in the empire, from Edmond Burke to Winston Churchill, are described as insincere opportunists. The influential 19^th-century historian of the British Empire, Sir John Seeley, is presented as an ardent imperialist. In fact, he argued for a “greater Britain” built around Canada, Australia, and similar places. He had little interest in or desire to expand the dependent empire, and, while defending British rule in India, remarked that if Indians ever developed a true sense of nationhood, the British would have to leave.

For Elkins, only the very furthest left wing of the Labour party was genuinely anti-imperialist. Even the Labour government after 1945 allegedly followed an “imperial resurgence strategy,” which is hard to discern in its actual actions, because during the implementation of this so-called strategy, India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) all became independent. Malaya would have done so fairly soon after, as well, had the initial British plan to form a “Malayan Union” succeeded, but it was foiled by Malay resistance to the idea of treating non-Malays as equal citizens. If all that was the product of a resurgent imperialistic strategy, one wonders what a strategy of retreat would have been like.

Indeed, Elkins plays down any reforms within the British Empire. Unless I missed it, there is no mention of the Morley-Minto reforms in India in the early 20^th century or the promise of an eventual Dominion status for India, which occurred in 1947. The Government of India Act of 1935, which established elected governments in parts of India, is barely referenced. When it is mentioned, it is chronologically misplaced in the very strange chapter on World War II instead of in its proper context—a trick not unknown among shady historians and a good indicator of some basic weakness in argument.