Book Review: Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, by Caroline Elkins
"It is a fact that of the roughly two hundred countries in the world today, Britain has invaded or conquered 178 of them. There is no other country that comes close to that level of belligerence, not the Americans, not the French, not even the Romans." – Boris Johnson
“[A]lmost 90 per cent of the world's countries have been invaded by Britain.” – Ryan Kiesl, The Daily Mail, November 4, 2012
In 2006 Caroline Elkins published a ground-breaking study of the British colonization of Kenya, and she incorporates that work and her own participation in subsequent political debates and legal proceedings in this new, epic survey of the empire as a whole. There were other empires, but Britain’s was the biggest and should be centered for any consideration of the history of world capitalism.
The long and short of it is that unspeakable violence and unending atrocities undergirded Great Britain’s imperial role. The word ‘literal’ tends to be misused for the sake of hyperbole, but on the strength of Elkins’s work, it is possible to confirm that there was literally no horrific physical abuse that British authorities did not practice routinely, as a matter of policy, in dozens of foreign locales.
As the Kenyan Wambagu wa Nyingi put it:
"If I could speak to the Queen I would say that Britain did many good things in Kenya but that they also did bad things. The settlers took our land, they killed our people and they burnt down our houses. In the years before independence people were beaten, their land was stolen, women were raped, men were castrated and their children were killed. I do not hold her personally responsible but I would like the wrongs which were done to me and other Kenyans to be recognized by the British government so that I can die in peace."
The Queen aside, the moral culpability of Winston Churchill and successive Labour governments is not in question. It is hard to discredit homicidal anti-colonial “terrorism,” at least on moral grounds, in light of the systematic abuses committed by the colonizers. As Noam Chomsky once said, “Terrorism is what other people do.”
For instance, viewing British depredations against Zionist settlers in Palestine (no less than against Arabs, when politics so dictated), it is not hard to see why Israel’s Jewish voters eventually elevated terrorist leaders Menachem Begin and Itzhak Shamir to be heads of state. Anti-colonial militants similarly took their pounds of flesh out of high British echelons in Kenya, India, Malaya, and Ireland.
An old lefty once said that vulgar Marxism explains a lot, and there is plenty of fuel here to support the primacy of crass economic motives in Britain’s desperate attempts to hold onto its colonies. Britain’s overseas holdings enlarged the nation from a lesser, cold and rainy northern island to a vast enterprise encompassing seven hundred million souls.
The economic motives included the ability in the colonies to expropriate native land, draft the population into forced labor for public and private ends, and maintain trade advantages for the sake of the rest of the empire. From a financial standpoint, the accumulation of trade surpluses to support Britain’s own currency was considered a vital national interest. Oil reserves in the Middle East had both an economic and strategic significance.
Of course, this was all a cruel mockery of the values of free enterprise invoked to support Britain’s control. The anti-communist mission was often cited, but it seems to become more real in the post-World War II period, by which time Britain’s well-being depended on the support of the U.S., which was of course consumed by the Cold War. By then the Soviet Union had survived a near-death experience at the hands of Nazi Germany and emerged to nuclear super-power status. A similar dynamic played out in Vietnam: U.S. support of the French in the 1950s had as much to do with supporting anti-communism in Western Europe as in Asia.
The basic divide among the imperial holdings was the distinction between ‘dominions,’ including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, and colonies. The former enjoyed a greater degree of self-government, the latter enjoyed none at all. The racial distinction is obvious, and Elkins’s account is well-informed by notions of racial capitalism from Cedric Robinson, among others.
There is an exciting chapter on the development of Pan-Africanism, for the English-speaking world, the center of international anti-imperialist thought. A catalyzing event was Italy’s brutalization of Ethiopia, in response to which the League of Nations did nothing.
A central figure was George Padmore. I had heard of Padmore but thought of him as a lesser leader of the Communist Party. But he eventually broke with the CP and became a central international figure. Elkins convinces me he is one of the most neglected figures in socialist history. (Another might be Hubert Harrison, the subject of years of research by my friend Jeff Perry.) I was tickled by Padmore’s description of the League of Nations as a “thieves’ kitchen.” The League was an imperialist club, much more obvious than the United Nations. The latter eventually became a stage for anti-colonial discourse.
Another fascinating sidelight worth a separate book is the cross-fertilization of anti-colonial discussion among the disparate victims of Empire, from Ireland to India to Malaya. On the British side, there was a parallel deployment of counter-insurgent honchos from one scene of rebellion to another. Some of these characters would end up being assassinated by insurgents. No less than Lord Mountbatten and Lord Moyne, related to the royal family and close friend of Winston Churchill, respectively, were killed by rebels in Ireland and Israel, respectively.
The scope of Britain’s empire debunked, for me, the idea of the British role in the second world war as a little brother of the U.S. The British Empire was much bigger than the U.K. itself. There is a useful parallel to the U.S. civil war, in the sense that Britain’s conscription of colonial labor helped the allies to prevail over the Axis, and this contribution supported subsequent colonial movements’ demands for independence.
The post-colonial evolution is also interesting, for the extent to which the players changed but the game remained the same. Jomo Kenyatta, head of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, seems to be a good example. Over time, there looks to be less doubt about the independence of Malaya, Singapore, Israel, and India, but experts may differ.
Usually, imperialism is thought of as an extension of capitalism, but this story suggests that imperialism might be thought of as prior to capitalism, or at least, concurrent with it. To be sure, colonization, racism, and slavery both preceded and became embedded in what came to be understood as capitalism proper. The formal abolition of slavery, both in Britain’s colonies and in the U.S. south, transitioned to labor regimes with analogous degrees of exploitation and immiseration.
Perhaps the most interesting part is the final chapter, where Elkins knits together her preceding history, the Anglo-American alliance, contemporary anti-racist struggles in the U.S. and U.K., and Brexit. It’s also worth another book altogether. On the latter, as the quote up top suggests, Brexit is not an isolationist gambit. Rather, it is a gesture towards Britain’s imperial past. The delusion, rapidly fading I would think, is that, unfettered by European Union constraints, the U.K. could somehow pursue a reconstitution of the empire. Not bloody likely.