The British Empire Was Much Worse Than You Realize<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The world\u2019s biggest colonial power prided itself on being a liberal democracy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Was this part of the problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Liberal imperialism, Caroline Elkins argues, gained resilience from its ability to absorb and neutralize objections<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 1. By Sunil Khilnani<\/p>\n\n\n\n March 28, 2022<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the height of the British Empire, just after the First World War, an island smaller than Kansas controlled roughly a quarter of the world\u2019s population and landmass. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To the architects of this colossus, the largest empire in history, each conquest was a moral achievement. Imperial tutelage, often imparted through the barrel of an Enfield, was delivering benighted peoples from the errors of their ways\u2014child marriage, widow immolation, headhunting. Among the edifiers was a Devonshire-born rector\u2019s son named Henry Hugh Tudor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hughie, as he was known to Winston Churchill and his other chums, pops up so reliably in colonial outposts with outsized body counts that his story can seem a \u201cWhere\u2019s Waldo?\u201d of empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A letter from Tudor to Churchill that I recently came across crystallizes all the insouciance, cynicism, greed, callousness, and errant judgment of empire. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n He opens by telling Churchill that he\u2019s just commanded his troops to slaughter Adwan Bedouins who had been marching on Amman to protest high taxes levied on them by their notoriously extravagant emir. This tribe was \u201cinvariably friendly to Great Britain,\u201d Tudor writes, a touch ruefully. But, he adds, \u201cpolitics are not my affair.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In the twentieth century\u2019s hierarchy of state-sponsored violence, Hitler\u2019s Germany, Stalin\u2019s Russia, and Hirohito\u2019s Japan typically take top spots. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The actions of a few European empires have invited harsh scrutiny, too\u2014Belgium\u2019s conduct in Congo, France\u2019s in Algeria, and Portugal\u2019s in Angola and Mozambique. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Britain is rarely seen as among the worst offenders, given a reputation for decency that the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins has spent more than two decades trying to undermine.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLegacy of Violence\u201d (Knopf), her astringent new history of the British Empire<\/strong>, brings detailed context to individual stories like Tudor\u2019s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Visiting archives in a dozen countries over four continents, examining hundreds of oral histories, and drawing on the work of social historians and political theorists, Elkins traces the Empire\u2019s arc across centuries and theatres of crisis<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As the sole imperial power that remained a liberal democracy throughout the twentieth century, Britain claimed to be distinct from Europe\u2019s colonial powers in its commitment to bringing rule of law, enlightened principles, and social progress to its colonies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Elkins contends that Britain\u2019s use of systematic violence was no better than that of its rivals. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The British were simply more skilled at hiding it.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n More than half a century after the British Empire entered its endgame, historians are nowhere near a full assessment of the carnage shrouded by its preacherly cant, and, later, by administrators\u2019 bonfires of documents as they prepared for the last boat out. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The richest sense we have of the damage inflicted on colonies tends to come in regional silos. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Elkins doggedly links them, moving from South Africa to India, Ireland to Palestine, and on to Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus<\/u>, and Aden, revealing a pattern visible only in the long view.<\/u> <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As military and police personnel crisscrossed the Empire, spreading techniques of repression far and wide, the higher-ups rarely checked such violence<\/u>. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, over and again, they gave it the full force of law\u2014sustaining more brutality still.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In her account, the British paramilitary cadre, many of them trained by Tudor\u2019s Toughs, became the basis of an increasingly violent ruling culture that sought to reassert control in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the Empire needed colonial resources to rebuild a depleted economy and to bulk up a waning geopolitical status.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Add to its longevity an unrivalled global footprint, and the British Empire\u2019s baneful legacy may well have been deeper and more diffuse than that of any other modern state. Was British liberal imperialism, given the extent of the damage it inflicted over generations, a more malevolent influence on world history than even Nazi Fascism? It\u2019s a question that Elkins\u2019s new book implicitly poses. And her first book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning \u201cImperial Reckoning\u201d (2005), is a lesson in not discounting her pointed inferences too swiftly.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n