Caroline Elkins

Mentioned in Fintan O'Tolle's review of "Left is not Woke", by Susan Neiman in NYRB Nov 2, 2023 issue. "It has to be acknowledged that there are good historical reasons for skepticism about the Enlightenment’s claims to have articulated values for humanity as a whole. It’s not merely that the violence of slavery and colonialism exposed the hypocrisy of many of those who claimed to hold those values. It is that the very idea that one was enlightened justified the domination of those who were not. As Caroline Elkins has shown in Legacy of Violence (2022), her rigorous autopsy of the British Empire, the spread of the rule of law (a central Enlightenment project) was the great moral claim of nineteenth-century imperialism. But since the colonized peoples were not yet sufficiently developed to understand it, they could be subjected to what Elkins calls “legalized lawlessness.” This was the catch-22 for nonwhite peoples: until the indefinite point in the future when, under our firm tutelage, you have become sufficiently enlightened to grasp the universality of our principles, those universals exclude you.… (meer)

BRUTALITY, THE BRITISH WAY

Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson & Britain’s Gulag by Caroline Elkins

On 20 October 1952 a state of emergency was declared in Britain’s East African colony of Kenya. It lasted until 1960, and was the most brutal campaign in Britain’s attempt to hold on to its empire after the Second World War. The rebellion was crushed and it is significant that, while the rebels called themselves the Land and Freedom Army, they are remembered as the Mau Mau, the bastardised name given to them by the settlers.

Some 32 white civilians, 63 white military and 527 ‘loyalists’ were killed. In contrast, 11,503 Africans died according to the government (the real toll was probably closer to 30,000). The figure doesn’t include over 1,000 rebels who were hanged. Two new books look at the rebellion from very different angles. David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged examines the emergency through imperial court transcripts, concentrating on those the British executed. It grasps the major issues and generally condemns the imperialists through their own reports. However, it tends to accept reports on their own terms, including the notorious British government whitewash, the Corfield report. On the other hand Caroline Elkins’s Britain’s Gulag is largely based on interviews with African survivors, and provides an invaluable testament to the real horror of what occurred, though she has a less solid grasp of the background.

British conquest of the colony started in the 1890s. By 1908, Winston Churchill, not usually squeamish, commented, ‘It looks like butchery… Surely it cannot be necessary to go on killing these defenceless people on such an enormous scale.’ Having subdued Kenya, the British preferred to rule indirectly. Since the local people had no chiefs, the British appointed their own. Many of these became very wealthy by appropriating land in the ‘African reserves’.

Meanwhile the British took the best arable land – what became known as the White Highlands. The Kikuyu people were most affected by this as they had lived in the Highlands. Africans returning from the Second World War found that their situation had not improved, but was actually deteriorating. The Kenya government planned to encourage white ex-soldiers to immigrate by offering good farming land, while demobbed Africans could find neither land nor work.

It was not unusual for urban militants to be members of both trade unions and street gangs. Those who went on to establish the Mau Mau rebellion were both active trade unionists and members of one of the main gangs operating in the capital, Nairobi. From the late 1940s these radicals moved their activities into the Kenya African Union (KAU), a constitutional nationalist organisation. Operating covertly within KAU branches, they started administering oaths of resistance to colonialism. Loyalists and black police were killed. As the rebellion developed several white settlers were also slain.

The state of emergency was declared and Operation Jock Scott successfully detained all the African nationalist leadership, conservative and radical alike. It both beheaded the movement and caused the larger rebellion to start at least a year before the leadership had intended. Leadership of the Mau Mau had moved down a rung and the rebels were far from prepared, but they remained disciplined and set about establishing guerrilla forces.

Groups of up to 4,000 rebels set up bases in the deep forests around Mount Kenya. Ironically, organisation in the forest camps was based on the structures of the British army. They mounted increasingly audacious raids. The army and airforce were unable to dislodge them, particularly as they enjoyed popular support among the rural population.

To counter this the entire 1.5 million rural Kikuyu population were forcibly resettled into barbed-wire fenced villages, overseen by watch-towers. Continuing urban insurgency was smashed by the aptly named Operation Anvil in April 1954, which effectively arrested all Kikuyu in Nairobi. It also led to an upsurge in detention without trial.

The settlers could not conceive that Africans had legitimate grievances. They believed that the only thing that could make the previously passive workforce rise up was the taking of primitive oaths. A system of detention camps was established. Theoretically, detainees would move down a ‘pipeline’ from one camp to the next as they became cleansed of the Mau Mau disease. They would confess through a mixture of coercion and education. In practice this meant forced labour, torture and near starvation. At least 80,000 passed through the ‘pipeline’.

Outside Nairobi conflict had developed between the loyalist Home Guard and the Mau Mau. Class drove this civil war. Chiefs and loyalists owned the best land in the overcrowded reserves. Mau Mau support came from the poor, the landless and the ex-‘squatters’, being pushed out of the vast white farms. Detention, villagisation and Operation Anvil combined to break the back of the movement by 1956.

Despite this the Mau Mau should be claimed as an important anti-imperialist struggle. Britain won the war, but would be wary of risking the costs of another insurgency elsewhere.

Ken Olende, Socialist Review 295, April 2005
https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/history-imperialism-bruta...… (meer)

Legacy of Violence is somewhat mis-labelled as a history of the British Empire, but this should not detract from it’s overall usefulness in assessing the failures of the British Empire for both the British themselves and for their colonial subjects.

This book is mostly about its failures and that is why I say the book is mis-labelled. A complete history would assess its failures and its successes, so I would urge readers interested in the subject to find the successes in other volumes.

What brought me to this book now is the imminent coronation of King Charles, which may have already taken place by the time you read this review.

Is the British Monarchy still relevant, or an irritant from a former age of Imperial “greatness?”

If you only read this book your judgment would have to be that the Monarchy should be consigned to the dustbin of history, and it couldn’t happen soon enough.

Elkins' main thesis is that over the past few centuries the British Emperors (although they don’t call themselves that) refined the skills needed to control the vast numbers of its colonials in its territories using the technologies of war for policing measures, and when policing was simply ineffective, virtually inventing the art of terrorism.

That’s quite a claim, and damning if its true.

That the British used torture on its malcontents is now pretty well documented – most certainly by Elkins in her earlier volume on the Gulag Britain created in Kenya to manage kikuyu supporters of the Mau-mau revolt. Elkins follow the careers of British innovators and the innovations of police actions from the Raj in colonial India, to the Boer conflict in South Africa, the rise of Irish nationalism, the revolt of Jamaican slaves, the Palestine Mandate, to the submission of Malay following the occupation of the Japanese in WWII.

British terror tactics seemed to reach their apotheosis in the Malay with sophisticated intelligence, hit squads, deportations, mass resettlements, detention, concentration camps, starvation, and torture masquerading as a campaign of “winning the hearts of minds” of the local populace. In fact, the British were protecting their financial interests. After WWII, debt-laden Great Britain needed the taxes from Malay exports of tin and rubber while it found its footing again as a manufacturing and exporting colossus.

The focus on post-WWII also casts light on the famine British wartime colonial policy likely contributed to in East Pakistan where an estimated three million Bengalis died of hunger. Hardly a success of British rule.

The book is rife with irony, most certainly evident in the episode of the Arab Revolt and the ultimate partitioning of Palestine. At first, in attempting to subdue Arab malcontents after the Balfour Declaration promised a national homeland for Jews in the Middle East, the British armed Jewish settlers and trained them in the policing techniques learned elsewhere. At the close of WWII the British Cabinet suddenly realized the importance of Arab controlled oil reserves and Arab public opinion and tried to shut down Jewish immigration.

It resulted in the most violent Jewish terrorist group – Menachem Begin’s Irgun -- turning British methods against themselves.

The British saw themselves as the civilizing force, the liberal-minded empire even as it struck with night raids against Arab civilians in Palestine. The colonials were thought of as "toddler children." And they were committing atrocities even while signing both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the new United Nations, and the European Declaration of Human Rights, using semantics to justify themselves.

Oddly, for a book about such awfulness there is a fair bit of humour. There is the description of Captain Orde Wingate who “pontificated before his men stark naked while combing his pubic hair with a toothbrush, an apparently effective means of delousing;” he “wore an alarm clock on his wrist.” Wingate created the template for night/killer squads against Arabs/terrorists/Communists and is lionized in Israel today for essentially founding the famed Israeli Defense Force and its vaunted secret service agencies.

Then there are descriptions of Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevins who could clear a room with his flatulence, and spymaster Robin “Tin Eye” Stephens. And the labelling of Britain's interrogation centres, its Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centres, CSDIC, which you could pronounce as "Seize Dicks", and which interrogators frequently did...with some force.

Reading this book on British atrocities led me once again to wonder where governments find the legions of sadists at their beck and call. Stalin, Hitler, Mau all found loads of sadists to undertake the dirtiest jobs. So did the British. It’s not as though you put out a want ad for torturers. This is a field, I think, where some scholarship is needed.

One could say that the British methods were a good training for D-Day, and for the later Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West. But one could also draw a line from British methods in the Malay and French actions in Indo-China to the American invasion of South Vietnam. The Americans were simply worse than the British at convincing the homeland that the measures were justified.

What were Chinese “squatters” or “bandits” to the British in the Malay became communist insurgents to the Americans.

Of course, crowd control costs money. It cost the British big money. They had to weigh the value of maintaining their Imperial possessions after WWII.. It cost £40,000,000 annually to police Palestine.

Britain built its empire and extracted billions from the colonies. How valuable was all the violence to Britain at the end of the day?

Clearly, the rise of communications in the 20th century meant the beginning of the end for the British Empire. Global trade sped up, and the rise of multinational corporations replaced -– some might say learned from – the British Empire.

But let’s set aside for a moment all the nastiness. Today I live in Canada which, for the most part, is governed by the rule of law, the sanctity of property, and to some degree a responsive government. The framework for this society is — for better or worse — inherited from the British. I won’t say British Empire because the framework precedes the Empire, but the umbrella of empire certainly sheltered our society in its formative years.

We forget too that the British Empire was not the only one to fall. The Armistice of 1918 saw the demise of the Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires. WWII destroyed the German and Japanese empires. And the French and Spanish followed suit. None of these political units were benign.

Compare what we have to the levels of corruption in China, the lawlessness and extortion in modern Russia, even the weakness of the social fabric in Latin America and you’d have to admit that the Empire left us with something enduringly good.

Good perhaps, but at what cost?… (meer)

The author has thoroughly researched and constructed a very useful analysis of an especially 'warts & all' depiction of the British Empire comprising as it does of many of the worst excesses of a notably self-serving British colonialism, i.e. violent outrages, including massacres, torture, imprisonment without trial, kidnap, extortion etc. to ensure the 'natives' comply with any & all demands of the undeniably racially motivated, English-speaking rulers.
Ms Elkins is no admirer, friend, or even neutral Historian of the exploits of British & Britons overseas: although typically she provides a dispassionate account of the numerous wrongdoings of the British ruling class across the Empire she is in all respects condemnatory of them at every level.
The work provides the critically ferocious antidote to the many histories that attempt to suggest a more balanced approach to what may be deemed good & bad perspectives & outcomes of Imperialism: for Ms Elkins there is only bad, & very, very bad.
It is for the reader to decide if someone who resides & prospers in an entirely Imperial US of A where post-1776 genocide of American Natives & enslavement of Africans continued for as long as the British Empire is really being honest in her moral judgement of Great Britain?… (meer)