Legacy of Violence – A History of the British Empire

By Caroline Elkins

Published by Alfred A. Knopf – 2022

Reviewed by Steven Halpern

Since the Second World War, the United States has been the world’s super-power. This means that international currencies are dominated by the U.S. dollar. This means that nations throughout the world use much of their surplus capital to purchase United States treasury bonds. Those bonds help to finance the military in this country. The U.S. military exerted its destructive power in wars against Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Nations that do not go along with the dictates of capitalist interests of the United States discover that crippling sanctions are placed on their country. Well, this was not always the case.

Before the Second World War, Britain had colonies all over the world. These included Nigeria, Southern Africa, Kenya, the nations that are now Israel, Cyprus, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, as well as Malaya, Australia, Ireland, and Canada. Indirectly Britain controlled China, as well as nations throughout Latin America. The British pound was the dominant currency of the world.

Caroline Elkins documented the unimaginable horrors of British colonial administrators in her book Legacy of Violence. There was a reason why Britain gave free rein to those administrators. The colonies of the British empire subsidized the British economy, including the enormous wealth of the most affluent, as well as the royal family.

There was another aspect to this ruthless repression. British politicians and the press routinely argued that colonial administrators were selflessly aiding in the development of the colonies. This barrage of misinformation had an effect. Popular opinion in Britain supported this ruthless administration of the colonies.

George Orwell summarized why there was so much support for imperialism inside Britain. “Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation—an evil state of affairs…The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we would all have to work very hard and live on herrings and potatoes.”   

Then, when those colonies won independence, the British made a concerted effort to hide the fact that these horrors ever happened. 

Jane Muthuni Mara, an older Kikuyu woman who lived in Kenya testified how British soldiers held her down while she endured horrendous torture. This took place in a British court of law. Others who had been tortured by the British also testified in this court. 

After these testimonies, Guy Mansfield, the lawyer representing Britain stated, “The Government does not dispute that each of the claimants suffered torture and other ill treatment at the hands of the Colonial Administration.” With that statement, the century-old support of British Colonial Administrators went out the window. As a result of this long trial, the British government paid out twenty million pounds in compensation. Caroline Elkins reported that there might have been over one million Kenyans who were forced to live in British concentration camps.

The British international legacy of torture

In the United States, there has been a history of institutionalized discrimination based on race. Clearly there was also racist discrimination in the British colonies, but people seen as “white” also endured horrendous conditions. These included French speaking people in Canada, Irish Catholics, whites living in Southern Africa, as well as Jews living in Palestine. In fact, the United States became a nation because of a revolution against British colonialism.

The primary reason for the torture as well as the concentration camps was a response to the resistance of indigenous people to the colonization of their homeland. While this repression lasted for decades, ultimately most of the British colonies became independent and freed themselves from direct British rule. 

Terrorism

Today, governments around the world talk a lot about the word “terrorism.” Reading Caroline Elkins book, we get another perspective to this word. 

In the United States we are used to the idea that everyone has the right to protest policies of the government. This was not allowed in the British colonies. The main reason why Britain dominated nations in the world was to extract wealth. Protesting that relationship ultimately led to demands for independence. In other words, the British economy was totally dependent on the theft of wealth of their subjects. While there was some development in the colonies, that development was not about building an industrial base that would make the colonies independent. 

In her history of the Israeli independence movement in Palestine, Elkins reported on events that give us a completely different view of what happened. Jewish terrorist organizations demanded independence and the establishment of the state of Israel. They carried out a series of terrorist actions against the British. Those actions became so routine, the British became convinced that they could no longer sustain their colony in Palestine. Then, the Israeli armed forces continued their terroristic activities against Palestinians.

Palestinians also carried out strikes in the 1930s demanding improved conditions. The British mobilized to crush that strike. When the British finally left Palestine, they used their influence to create the same kind of divisions they promoted in the rest of the world.

In India they promoted divisions between Muslims and Hindis. In Canada they promoted divisions between people with British and French backgrounds. In Ireland they promoted divisions between Catholics and Protestants. In Malaya they promoted divisions between the indigenous population and people of a Chinese heritage. In Southern Africa they promoted divisions between Blacks and whites. 

Apparently, this is why Rashid Khalidi titled his book on the history of Palestinian resistance, “The One-hundred Year War on Palestine.” That war started with the British and has continued with support from both Britain and the United States. 

During the Second World War, the British argued that they were fighting against the tyranny of Nazi Germany. Today there are memorial columns in London that give thanks to the hundreds of thousands of soldiers, throughout the British Empire who fought in that war. 

In her book, Elkins documented how many colonial administrators identified with the ruthless repression of the Nazis. In fact, Britain established their concentration camps all over the world before the Nazis. Clearly no two historical events are exactly the same. However, when we look at the British concentration camps in their colonies, and the Nazi concentration camps, there were clear similarities.

The history of racist discrimination inside Britain

While the British colonial administrators were openly racist, the history of racist discrimination inside Britain is an interesting story.

During the Civil War in the United States, the British ruling powers wanted to support the confederacy that was run by slave owners. Karl Marx was one of the leaders of the British labor movement who argued effectively that the abolition of slavery in the United States would benefit the British working class. As a result, Britain didn’t give military support to the confederacy.

Both Frederick Douglass and Ida Wells traveled to Britain. They received support for the struggle against slavery and lynchings in the United States. George Padmore and C.L.R. James became leaders of the anti-colonial struggle inside Britain.  

In 1946 Britain passed a law allowing for colonial subjects to become British citizens. This was at a time of an upturn in the dominant capitalist economies. As a result, there was a shortage of workers, and several developed nations supported laws favoring immigration.

By the year 1981, that capitalist upturn was over, and citizens of the former British colonies no longer had the right to British citizenship. The British police force increased their harassment of the Black community. The struggle against racist discrimination within Britain continues to this day.     

After the Second World War Britain became a colony of the United States

In the history courses in the United States, there is a universal argument that the allied powers defeated Germany in the Second World War. However, when we look at the facts, another conclusion becomes clear.

John Maynard Keynes was an economist who argued that in order to avoid a depression like the one in the 1930s, there needed to be more government regulation. Then, even before the World War II was over, representatives of 44 nations met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. They agreed to establish the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. U.S. financial interests dominated those two institutions. As a result, there was agreement that the manufacturing and finance of the world would be dominated by the United States.

John Maynard Keynes had this to say about how Britain was becoming a vassal of capitalist interests in the United States. “A visitor from Mars might be well pardoned for thinking that we were the representatives of a vanquished people discussing the penalties of defeat.”

As a result, the United States demanded that the special economic relationship Britain had with the colonies end. The United States then had the power to exploit those colonies as Britain did in the past. However, instead of running the former colonies with colonial administrators, now there would be neo-colonial governments where indigenous government officials ran those nations.   

Today, we see clearly what the legacy of British violence has been in the world. In Nigeria in the 1800s, the British armed forces used the newly invented machine gun to militarily defeat the indigenous people. In the war against Vietnam, the United States Air Force used B52 bombers to literally saturate that nation with bombs that maimed and murdered everyone in its path.  

Before the 1970s the United States was the manufacturing center of the world. Then, finance capitalists stripped much of the manufacturing in this country and moved it to nations where wages were about two dollars per day. While manufacturing was moved to largely agricultural nations, that manufacturing was dedicated to the market of the developed world. 

Mike Davis wrote his book Late Victorian Holocausts where he reported that millions of people starved to death in China, India, and Brazil during the 1800s. This was primarily because of British indifference. While those famines were taking place, the affected nations were exporting food so British power brokers could maximize their profits. 

Today about seventy percent of the world’s population lives on ten dollars per day or less. About a billion people do not have direct access to food, water, or electricity. As a result of these conditions, the United Nations reports that about 30,000 children die every day due to preventable diseases. 

There is another way

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wrote his pamphlet Imperialism—The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1917. In that pamphlet Lenin argued that imperialism doesn’t happen because of mistakes by people who have power. No, imperialist nations dominate other nations because this is the inevitable course of the capitalist system. 

On January 1, 1952, the Cuban people decided that they would make a break from that system. Almost immediately after taking power, the Cuban government set a goal to eliminate illiteracy on the island. Today Cuba has more doctors, per capita than any other nation in the world. While the Cuban people do not have many of the conveniences of the developed nations, the Cuban government makes it their top priority to ensure that every Cuban has what they need. As a result, every year on May 1, about one million Cubans give their enthusiastic support to the government in the May Day demonstration.

The Cuban vision is different from the one people are raised with in Britain and the United States. There, the priority is to ensure that everyone has what they need. Here we are raised to work very hard so we can purchase some of the things we need and want. We don’t have lifetime rights to anything. 

The story of the Legacy of Violence, for me, is about a recognition that an injury to one is an injury to all. Clearly, we can continue to ignore the fact that 30,000 children die unnecessarily every day. However, if humanity will survive, I believe we need create a political movement that ensures that no child dies unnecessarily and an injury to one is an injury to all.