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86
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
79/100Critics
81/100Scholars
99/100Author:
Caroline Elkins
Publisher:
Knopf
Date:
March 29, 2022
A Harvard history professor offers a sweeping study of the British Empire that probes the country's pervasive use of violence throughout the 20th-century, tracing how these practices were exported, modified and institutionalized in colonies around the globe.
What The Reviewers Say
Legacy of Violence is a formidable piece of research that sets itself the ambition of identifying the character of British power over the course of two centuries and four continents. Elkins, perhaps minded of her previous brush with controversy, sometimes approaches her task with the meticulous doggedness of a trial lawyer rather than a storyteller in search of an audience.
Legacy of Violence does not stint on detail: it is deeply researched, with 88 pages of footnotes and references to two dozen archives. Yet Elkins wears her considerable learning lightly, and is wise enough to allow her considerable anger to smoulder, rather than burn from the pages, making for a powerful, compelling read.
Legacy of Violence, like Elkins’s earlier book, shuttles between horrific details and historical and thematic contexts. And it, too, relies occasionally on questionable statistics.
Her detailed description of British policy and actions in Ireland, India, Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya, Nyasaland, Jamaica, and Palestine makes for unsettling, yet necessary reading.
