Dark truths about British imperialism

Despite the ambitious title, the author really begins her story only in the 19th century, with a series of colonial rebellions from Ireland to India

This year Queen Elizabeth II marks her unprecedented 70th anniversary on the throne, having succeeded unexpectedly when her father, King George VI, died on February 6, 1952, aged only 56. On the following day Winston Churchill, recently returned to Downing Street as prime minister, spoke on the BBC to an audience at home and throughout the world, ending with a grandiose flourish. The young monarch “will command the loyalty of her native land and of all other parts of the British Commonwealth and Empire. I, whose youth was passed in the august, unchallenged and tranquil glories of the Victorian era, may well feel a thrill in invoking once more the prayer and the anthem, ‘God Save the Queen!’”

“August” and “unchallenged” were debatable terms for Victoria’s reign, and “tranquil” still more so: There wasn’t one of those 63 years when British soldiers weren’t fighting, killing and dying somewhere on earth. For that matter there was nothing so tranquil at that very moment Churchill spoke: British forces were fighting rebels in Malaya, having not long before been in action in Palestine, as they were about to be in Kenya, among the often brutal and miserable conflicts that marked the decline and fall of the British Empire.

Which left a bitter aftertaste. A professor at Harvard, Caroline Elkins made her name in 2005 with her book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, describing the manner in which the Mau Mau insurgency had been suppressed with mass internment and many executions. That book won a Pulitzer Prize, but it was also criticized for exaggeration.

As so often, there was no need for such exaggeration: The truth was bad enough. Ms Elkins helped to show just that when she was a witness in a 2011 court case in London that obtained belated compensation for some of those who had been shamefully treated in Kenyan detention camps. Now she returns to a much larger canvas in her provocative new book, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire.

Despite the ambitious title, she really begins her story only in the 19th century, with a series of colonial rebellions from Ireland to India. In 1865, a rising in Jamaica was put down and Edward Eyre, the governor, boasted that “the retribution has been so prompt and so terrible that it is likely never to be forgotten.” Nor was it: A Jamaica Committee — including John Stuart Mill, John Bright, Darwin and Dickens — investigated and condemned that terrible retribution. But Ms Elkins finds such humane concern dubious: Her particular target is “liberal imperialism,” with its belief in the benevolent power of empire to improve subject peoples.

As the 20th century unfolded, Ms Elkins writes, “British security forces deployed ever-intensifying forms of systematic violence that made empire look like a recurring conquest state.”

One grim new factor was what its proponents called “air power.” From 1919 onward, aircraft of the newborn Royal Air Force were a far cheaper means of subjugation than armies. They bombed and machine-gunned defenceless people in Afghanistan, India, Iraq and Palestine, with no officer more enthusiastic for the task than “Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris,” as Mr Elkins anachronistically calls him (the sobriquet was conferred by the popular press two decades later when he directed Bomber Command in a far greater campaign of destruction against Germany).

After the Great War, the empire had reached its territorial zenith with the acquisition of the vast new territories of Iraq and Palestine. Having bombed Iraqi villages, Harris moved on to bombing Palestinian villages, and here a more fraught question emerges. “Pax Britannica in Palestine was creating conflict with the auspices of the rule of law,” Ms Elkins writes, but it’s not quite clear what she means by that. The British may be said to have “created conflict” by granting the Balfour Declaration in 1917, favouring the creation of a national home for the Jews, while insisting in contradictory words that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” That was the origin of today’s tragic and intractable conflict.

In November 1942, in words for some reason considered so amusing that Ronald Reagan borrowed and adapted them in his first inaugural, Churchill said that “I have not become the king’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” But he had, since that liquidation was the outcome of the war in which he led his country. It was immediately followed by the wretched last years of British Mandatory Palestine.

As it proved, Palestine was only the first of several dismal campaigns in Africa and Asia. All of those episodes were not merely or principally anticolonial: From Palestine on, they were almost all ethnic or communal conflicts as well. The “CTs,” Communist terrorists in Malaya, were from the Chinese minority, and the Mau Mau uprising was a rebellion of the Kikuyu minority.

For any American writing on this subject there lurks a further irony of history. Today several hundreds of millions or even billions of people in Asia and Africa regard the United States as the last great imperial power, and also view Israel as a colonial settler state. Does Ms Elkins agree? She is understandably derisive about neo-imperialist polemicists like Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, with their forlorn attempts to burnish the lustre of empire. But Professor Roberts has also written that “just as in science fiction people are able to live on through cryogenic freezing after their bodies die, so British postimperial greatness has been preserved and fostered through its incorporation into the American world-historical project.” If that is true, then this is a story without a happy — or as yet any — ending.

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