Legacy of Violence

A History of the British Empire

By: Caroline Elkins

Narrated by: Adam Barr

From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian: a searing study of the British Empire that probes the country's pervasive use of violence throughout the twentieth century and traces how these practices were exported, modified, and institutionalized in colonies around the globe

Sprawling across a quarter of the world's land mass and claiming nearly seven hundred million people, Britain's twentieth-century empire was the largest empire in human history. For many Britons, it epitomized their nation's cultural superiority. But what legacy did the island nation deliver to the world? Covering more than two hundred years of history, Caroline Elkins reveals an evolutionary and racialized doctrine that espoused an unrelenting deployment of violence to secure and preserve the nation's imperial interests. She outlines how ideological foundations of violence were rooted in the Victorian era calls for punishing recalcitrant "natives," and how over time, its forms became increasingly systematized. And she makes clear that when Britain could no longer maintain control over the violence it provoked and enacted, it retreated from empire, destroying and hiding incriminating evidence of its policies and practices.

Drawing on more than a decade of research on four continents, Legacy of Violence implicates all sides of Britain's political divide in the creation, execution, and cover-up of imperial violence. By demonstrating how and why violence was the most salient factor underwriting Britain's empire and the nation's imperial identity at home, Elkins upends long-held myths and sheds new light on empire's role in shaping the world today.

The Other side of the story

Professor Elkins has the receipts. A devastating and long overdue accounting of centuries of violence perpetrated in the name of empire. Brilliant.

The past is still living!

Unless we make conscious efforts to learn from our global and interlinked pasts, we will continue to blindly benefit both from its windfall and be handicapped by its curses. This book is a step in the right direction. It’s eye opening and our best interest to learn from the past as we try to move forward. The past is still living!

Appalling behaviors.

When will we learn.
When will we see each other as humans and nothing more.

Incredibly Informative and Thoughtful

This book is an outstanding reference of the systems and policies that underpin the British control of their colonies from the use of violent methods, control of media, use of all sort of manipulation and corruption. The direct connection to today’s foreign and domestic policy and practices are clearly laid out. Outstanding work.

Solid but repetitive

The research and construction is great, but I find that in the attempt to move back and forth in the timeline to tell the various stories of the empire, the author too often repeated elements, not trusting the reader to remember. Still, worth l listening to.