the truth about the british empire

We abolished slavery. A blue cord held together the thin, yellowed pages, which smelled of decaying paper. Elkins knew her findings would be explosive. The Truth About the British Empire By The Conservative Woman The British Empire was the greatest imperial power that the world has ever seen. Working with five students at Harvard, she found thousands of records relevant to the case: more evidence about the nature and extent of detainee abuse, more details of what officials knew about it, new material about the brutal “dilution technique” used to break hardcore detainees. Meanwhile, the people of another former colony, Jamaica, yearn to be back under British rule. Don’t go out and be on the front page of the paper.”, She said yes. Some academics shared her enthusiasm. Elkins had come to prominence in 2005 with a book that exhumed one of the nastiest chapters of British imperial history: the suppression of Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion. The brutal, simple truth about the British Empire is that it no longer exists. But it laid the ground for a legal case that has transformed our view of Britain’s past, Thu 18 Aug 2016 01.00 EDT Elkins enrolled in Harvard’s history PhD programme knowing she wanted to study those camps. But the presiding judge, Richard McCombe, dismissed the government’s bid to dodge responsibility as “dishonourable”. Empire was a great thing! The claimants marching beside her were just like the people she had interviewed in Kenya. It set the stage for a rethinking of British imperial violence, he says, demanding that scholars reckon with colonial brutality in territories such as Cyprus, Malaya, and Aden (now part of Yemen). Last modified on Wed 4 Dec 2019 08.25 EST. Through vicious military conquest, it used enslavement, massacres, famines and partitions to create profit. She wanted to rectify injustice. We receive no independent funding and depend on our readers to help us, either with regular or one-off payments. The bloody legacy of the British Empire is not something to be proud of. The British destroyed documents in Kenya – scholars knew that. There weren’t enough surviving witnesses. “I’m from New Jersey,” she answered. Many more documents were coming out. She discovered that the British had torched documents before their 1963 withdrawal from Kenya. Elkins was in the top-floor study of her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when the call came. THE British Empire was the greatest imperial power that the world has ever seen. That was the request Caroline Elkins, a Harvard historian, received in 2008. The facility occupies a 1970s-era concrete building beside a pond in Kew, in south-west London. It would be almost impossible to state the opposite of the truth with more misleading sincerity. • This article first appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. She stumbled on to files about an all-female Mau Mau detention camp called Kamiti, kindling her curiosity. Uncovering the brutal truth about the British empire The Harvard historian Caroline Elkins stirred controversy with her work on the crushing of the Mau Mau uprising. He ruled that the claim could move forward. “I knew I was right.”. Its adherents mounted gruesome attacks on white settlers and fellow Kikuyu who collaborated with the British administration. By conveying the perspective of the Mau Mau themselves, Britain’s Gulag marked a “historical breakthrough”, says Wm Roger Louis, a historian of the British empire at the University of Texas at Austin. Compared with alternative imperial regimes, however, it had much to commend it. Now move on, next question please. They also rolled their eyes at the narrative Elkins told about her work. The scale of the cleansing had been enormous. But that thesis crumbled as Elkins dug into her research. Maina told Elkins she had been beaten unconscious by Kikuyu collaborating with the British. Over some 300 interviews, she heard testimony after testimony of torture. One morning this spring, I accompanied Elkins as she visited the National Archives to look at those files. Another important factor was the questionable desire of the British to create an Arab national homeland in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, and to gratify the imperial pretensions of their ally the Hashemite clan, who shrewdly convinced the British that their self-serving and marginal actions during the war had been important in fighting the Turks. But it hinged on the public ignorance of African history and the scholarly marginalisation of Africanist research, wrote Bruce J Berman, a historian of African political economy at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. At its heart is a series of documents that now sits in the National Archives as a result of Britain’s decision to make public the Hanslope files. The oppressive force in this case was neither a class nor a generation but the British empire itself: a regime founded on violence and hostile to dissent. In October 2012, Justice McCombe rejected those arguments, too. It may soon reach an even bigger audience. But an African history class put her on a different path. And that was before historians had a chance to thoroughly review the newly discovered files, known as the “Hanslope disclosure”. is seen by some historians as the event defining the transition between the "first" and "second" empires, in which Britain shifted its attention away from the Americas to Asia, the Pacific and later Africa Only if Owen Jones approves of it, Wronging a rite: The baby-talk baptism that replaces beauty with banality, A carol a day: Angels from the Realms of Glory. “There is ample evidence even in the few papers that I have seen suggesting that there may have been systematic torture of detainees,” he wrote in July 2011. Mau Mau was still a banned movement in Kenya, and would remain so until 2002. “There’s only so much ostracism one can plausibly claim if you won a Pulitzer and you became a full professor at Harvard – and this on the strength of the book that supposedly also made you outcast and vilified by all and sundry,” she says. ... was formed in England in 1891 with the explicit aim of expanding the British Empire across the entire globe. Not many punters, I suspect, would be opting for the Mongols, the Spanish, the Songhai, the Portuguese, the Mughals, the Belgians, the French, the Germans or the Zulus. The British Empire was the worst colonial empire ever in History. All Kenyan files were to be classified either “Watch” or “Legacy”. In 1967, they wrote to Britain’s Foreign Office asking for the return of the “stolen papers”. The issue of archival erasure figures prominently in Elkins’s next book, a history of violence at the end of the British empire whose case studies will include Kenya, Aden, Cyprus, Malaya, Palestine and Northern Ireland. Channel 4 and Newsnight should now come clean. To the historian and her allies, a single word summarises what happened in the High Court: vindication. She met people such as Salome Maina, who had been accused of supplying arms to the Mau Mau. In relation to colonised people, for example, it states that ‘we have tried to imagine what they would tell us if they were to come back from the dead’. “I was kind of like a dog with a bone,” she says. Scholars had mistreated Elkins in their attacks on Britain’s Gulag. But the ferocity of the response went beyond what she could have imagined. In order to denigrate all things British, bogus evidence is invented for pupils to use in forming an opinion of the British Empire. The lawyers were done fighting, but the academics were not. The disclosure sparked an uproar in the press and flabbergasted Elkins: “After all these years of being just roasted over the coals, they’ve been sitting on the evidence? Yes, imaginary evidence, ‘fake news’ in its purest form, to damn the Brits in general and the Empire in particular. Over the decades, archivists and Foreign Office officials puzzled over what to do with the Hanslope papers. She thinks that the fact that those records were manipulated puts a cloud over many studies that have been based on their contents. Help us sue the British government for torture. It was a moment when another historian, Niall Ferguson, had won acclaim for his sympathetic writing on British colonialism. The National Archives essentially said they should either be destroyed or returned to the countries from which they had been taken. “I was supposed to be working on this next book,” she says. If you appreciated this article, perhaps you might consider making a donation to The Conservative Woman. Britain “sincerely regrets that these abuses took place.” The settlement, in Anderson’s view, marked a “profound” rewriting of history. She also came to understand that colonial authorities had herded Kikuyu women and children into some 800 enclosed villages dispersed across the countryside. Kenyan officials had sniffed this trail soon after the country gained its independence. Elkins laid out what she makes of this development in a 2015 essay for the American Historical Review. The Harvard historian Caroline Elkins stirred controversy with her work on the crushing of the Mau Mau uprising. It also revealed a bigger secret. It is just so on-message these days to self-flagellate, don’t you know? Events moved quickly from there. Improbable because the case, then being assembled by human rights lawyers in London, would attempt to hold Britain accountable for atrocities perpetrated 50 years earlier, in pre-independence Kenya. In court, lawyers representing the British government tried to have the Mau Mau case tossed out. Yes, rule by the British had its very real downsides and being massacred by General Dyer was one of them. This was a motif of articles on Elkins in the popular press. During the Mau Mau war, journalists, missionaries and colonial whistleblowers had exposed abuses. “I think we have this narrative in Britain that we’re always the good guys.”, Journalist Sathnam Sanghera says the Amritsar massacre shows “that sometimes we were the bad guys, sometimes we were the racists and I think we need to come to terms with that”, newsnight | @Sathnam pic.twitter.com/i2xRsMy2Y2, — BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) April 12, 2019. Anderson’s review of the evidence shows how the purging process evolved from colony to colony and allowed substantial latitude to local officials. In the British and Kenyan archives, meanwhile, Elkins encountered another oddity. ... We want everyone to learn about the British empire and its history in the land we call home. Then came Bagram. He denied violence she hadn’t asked about. There was a time when the sun never set on the British Empire. Thank God for Britain – mostly, a shining light in the history of the world! It raised questions about why they hadn’t told the tale themselves. An initial sifting of the official records conveyed a sense that these had been sites of rehabilitation, not punishment, with civics and home-craft classes meant to instruct the detainees to be good citizens. “This is the moment where literally my footnotes are on trial.”. Historians, he adds, have always dealt with the absence of documents. The same document shenanigans that leave Elkins wide-eyed prompt several other historians to essentially shrug. Elkins framed the story as a personal journey of discovery. Elkins paraded with them outside the court. A careful combing-through of these documents might normally have taken three years. But the Empire actually started with British exploration of the eastern seaboard of the United States, back in the 17th century. That “spoke directly to claims that, if you took out the oral evidence” in Britain’s Gulag, “the whole thing fell apart”, Elkins says. The stonewalling continued as Kenyan officials made more inquiries in 1974 and 1981, when Kenya’s chief archivist dispatched officials to London to search for what he called the “migrated archives”. They’ve been far more sceptical than that, he says. Some thought she was British and refused to speak with her at first. These documents would probably have spared her years of research for Britain’s Gulag. “In this very long book, she really doesn’t bring out any more evidence than that for talking about the possibility of hundreds of thousands killed, and talking in terms almost of genocide as a policy,” says Philip Murphy, a University of London historian who directs the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and co-edits the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. This marred what was otherwise an “incredibly valuable” study, he says. It was the first time Britain had admitted carrying out torture anywhere in its former empire. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Foul-mouthed, fast-talking and hyperbolic, Elkins can sound more Central Jersey than Harvard Yard. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Each morning we send The ConWom Daily with links to our latest news. It was a tale of systematic violence and high-level cover-ups. The turning point came in 2010, when Anderson, now serving as an expert witness in the Mau Mau case, submitted a statement to the court that referred directly to the 1,500 files spirited out of Kenya. “I imagined it more of a haphazard kind of process.”, What’s more, “It’s not just happening in Kenya to this level, but all over the empire.” For British historians, this is “absolutely seismic,” she said. The evidence was insufficient. Our editors are unpaid and work entirely voluntarily as do the majority of our contributors but there are inevitable costs associated with running a website. All rights reserved. But among Kenyanists, Berman wrote, the reaction had generally been no more than: “It was as bad as or worse than I had imagined from more fragmentary accounts.”, He called Elkins “astonishingly disingenuous” for saying her project began as an attempt to show the success of Britain’s liberal reforms. “Basically, I read document after document after document that proved the book to be correct,” Elkins says. IMDb, the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. But if the response to her latest claims is any indication, her arguments will once again be controversial. These heavily patrolled villages – cordoned off by barbed wire, spiked trenches and watchtowers – amounted to another form of detention. So I can handle this – don’t worry.”. Amongst those offering a receptive ear to the anti-British self-flagellation message is BBC Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark. The files indicate that roughly 3.5 tons of Kenyan documents were bound for the incinerator. What’s more, history constantly changes, with new evidence and new paradigms. “That’s the way a bureaucracy works. The Watch files would be flown back to Britain or destroyed. Maybe it was the squirrel-like tendency of archivists. At a minimum, there should have been 240,000 files in the archives. Now the lawyer running the case wanted her to sign on as an expert witness. His decision, which noted the thousands of Hanslope files that had emerged, allowed the case to proceed to trial. Colonial authorities portrayed Mau Mau as a descent into savagery, turning its fighters into “the face of international terrorism in the 1950s”, as one scholar puts it. Foreign Office lawyers conceded that the elderly Kenyan claimants had suffered torture during the Mau Mau rebellion. In retrospect, he says, what is remarkable is not that the documents were kept secret for so many years. Elkins considers them to be the most important new material to emerge from the Hanslope disclosure. At least two scholars have noted that these new files corroborated important aspects of the oral testimony in Britain’s Gulag, such as the systematic beating and torture of detainees at specific detention camps. It was also, comparatively, the most benign. And the story Elkins would tell about those papers would once again plunge her into controversy. It was an armed rebellion launched by the Kikuyu, who had lost land during colonisation. “Probably most of the historical criticisms of the book still stand,” he says. These days in schools and universities young people are subjected to a non-stop diet of anti-British brainwashing about Empire. “Who is controlling the production of the history of Kenya? Likewise, the British-Indian state paid a sum of money every year to Britain for services like interest on public debt or salaries of expatriate military officers. To say that a discovery about document destruction will change the whole field is “simply not true”, he says. She met a former colonial official, Terence Gavaghan, who had been in charge of rehabilitation at a group of detention camps on Kenya’s Mwea Plain. The truth is that the Brits may have been top dogs when it came to the size, power and influence of their empire but we have definitely been well down the league table of those who have perpetrated massacres. Ogot dismissed Elkins as an uncritical imbiber of Mau Mau propaganda. Unlike most other websites, we receive no independent funding. This is a free service and we will never share your details. She drew on them in two more witness statements. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle ||[]).push({}); Chris McGovern is the Chairman of the Campaign for Real Education. Indeed most of areas of the world ruled by British empire … Elkins, questioning him in London, found him creepy and defensive. Journalist Afua Hirsch hosts a new series about the complex legacy of colonialism. Also another truth that goes with this is simply this:- The average Brit couldn’t give a shit about it anyway. But too much time had elapsed for a fair trial, they contended. Elkins’s work, he wrote, depended heavily on the “largely uncorroborated 50-year-old memories of a few elderly men and women interested in financial reparations”. Elkins had about nine months. That was white men from Oxbridge, not a young American girl from Harvard,” she says. Elkins’s fieldwork brought to the surface stories repressed by Kenya’s policy of official amnesia. “They were simply told that no such collection of Kenyan documents existed, and that the British had removed nothing that they were not entitled to take with them in December 1963,” Anderson writes. He needs to do some homework! The truth about the British empire – podcasts of the week Journalist Afua Hirsch hosts a new series about the complex legacy of colonialism. Incidents of violence against prisoners were described as isolated events. Abu Ghraib. Ogot also suggested that Elkins might have made up quotes and fallen for the bogus stories of financially motivated interviewees. Elkins’s research had made the suit possible. She calculated that the camps had held not 80,000 detainees, as official figures stated, but between 160,000 and 320,000. “The overarching takeaway is that the government itself was involved in a very highly choreographed, systematised process of destroying and removing documents so it could craft the official narrative that sits in these archives,” Elkins told me. Over. They argued that Britain could not be held responsible because liability for any colonial abuses had devolved to the Kenyan government upon independence. It was also an unconventional first book for a junior scholar. on Twitter A cache of papers had come to light that documented Britain’s torture and mistreatment of detainees during the Mau Mau rebellion. An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India (Hardcover) by Shashi Tharoor. In high school, she worked at a pizza shop that was run by what she calls “low-level mob”. We are a … And, as Elkins would eventually learn, Gavaghan had developed the technique and put it into practice. Each would receive about £3,800. Felicitous timing helped. By 2008, Elkins’s job was on the line. The Mughal Empire which Britain supplanted in the sub-continent was many, many times worse. By ruling in her favour, the court also implicitly judged her critics. We defeated the Nazis. Britain’s Gulag, titled Imperial Reckoning in the US, earned Elkins a great deal of attention and a Pulitzer prize. The idea was both legally improbable and professionally risky. Young, articulate and photogenic, she was fired up with outrage over her findings. This helped contain the hatred between Kikuyu who joined the Mau Mau revolt and those who fought alongside the British. That’s when the phone rang, pulling her back in. A certificate of destruction was to be issued for every document destroyed – in duplicate. Her book cut against an abiding belief that the British had managed and retreated from their empire with more dignity and humanity than other former colonial powers, such as the French or the Belgians. One record, a 1961 dispatch from the British colonial secretary to authorities in Kenya and elsewhere, states that no documents should be handed over to a successor regime that might, among other things, “embarrass” Her Majesty’s Government. They waged a forest war against 20,000 Mau Mau fighters, and, with African allies, also targeted a bigger civilian enemy: roughly 1.5 million Kikuyu thought to have proclaimed their allegiance to the Mau Mau campaign for land and freedom. “Keep my head down and be an academic. 07-02-2020 07:00 via theguardian.com. “If, at that late date,” he wrote, “she still believed in the official British line about its so-called civilising mission in the empire, then she was perhaps the only scholar or graduate student in the English-speaking world who did.”. drove the expansion of the British Empire in Asia What was the impact of the loss of the 13 colonies to the history of the British Empire? Plus: sad tales and silver linings in Susan Calman’s Mrs BrightsideWe Need to Talk About the British Empire It is an undeniable fact that millions from the British Empire and its dominions fought for what was perceived as the ‘mother country’ in the two world wars. Few imperial powers have been so willing to admit to their own sins. Even in his 70s, he was a formidable figure: well over six feet tall, with an Adonis-like physique and piercing blue eyes. Now 47, she grew up a lower-middle-class kid in New Jersey. It’s done. British Empire: Students should be taught colonialism ‘not all good’, say historians. Pascal James Imperato picked up the same theme in African Studies Review. You want to destroy the documents that can be incriminating.”, Murphy says Elkins “has a tendency to caricature other historians of empire as simply passive and unthinking consumers in the National Archives supermarket, who don’t think about the ideological way in which the archive is constructed”. Elkins was also accused of sensationalism, a charge that figured prominently in a fierce debate over her mortality figures. After the country gained independence in 1963, its first prime minister and president, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, declared repeatedly that Kenyans must “forgive and forget the past”. Still, he does not believe that the Hanslope files justify the notion that hundreds of thousands of people were killed in Kenya, or that those deaths were systematic. Just as the hearings were set to begin, a story broke in the British press that would affect the case, the debate about Britain’s Gulag, and the broader community of imperial historians. The truth about Gallipoli has, unlike its victims, been buried deep. Elkins thinks all of this amounts to a watershed moment in which historians must rethink their field. The Free Trade policy of the Empire ruined India’s artisans and enabled Britain to build a world-leading textile industry (Chapter 1). 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