Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire | Caroline Elkins & William Dalrymple

Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire | Caroline Elkins in conversation with William Dalrymple
Sprawling across a quarter of the world’s land mass and claiming nearly seven hundred million people, Britain’s empire was the largest in human history. In her illuminating and authoritative book Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, Caroline Elkins reveals an evolutionary and racialised doctrine that espoused an unrelenting deployment of violence to secure and preserve British imperial interests. Elkins outlines how ideological foundations of violence were rooted in Victorian calls for punishing indigenous peoples who resisted subjugation, and how over time, this treatment became increasingly systematized. In conversation with author, historian, and festival co-director William Dalrymple, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Elkins explodes long-held myths and sheds disturbing new light on the empire’s role in shaping the world today.
Caroline Elkins is a professor at Harvard University and the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. Her recent book, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, was short-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize.
William Dalrymple is the author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, Duff Cooper Prize-winning The Last Mughal, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. His book, The Anarchy, was shortlisted for the Duke of Wellington medal, the Tata Book of the Year, and the Historical Writers Association Award, and won the 2020 Arthur Ross Medal from the US Council on Foreign Relations. Dalrymple has been awarded five honorary doctorates, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting lectureships at Princeton, Brown, and Oxford, where he is currently an Honorary Bodleian fellow and Visiting Fellow at All Souls. He was presented with the President’s Medal by the British Academy and was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers for 2020 by Prospect Magazine. He is a founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival.
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[@one2moja1]

As a Kenyan, these answers many questions I've had for years. For example, how was colonization justified, because it seems like an absurd premise to decide to go to another people's land and civilize them by force.

[@HughCurranAedh]

I have read Elkins book and often quote passages to people who believe the fiction re: Bri as the benevolent empire. Being from Ireland I heard many oral stories from parents and grandparents of the destructiveness & the hijacking of language and culture as well as the dispossession of 90% of the land during GB's 250 year occupation of Ireland.

[@PropagandaAnonymous]

Caroline Elkins' book sounds interesting, But Was Bernard Montgomery Irish? He was born in Britain. His father was born in India. And his father's family were a proud Ulster-Scot clan, which were the Settler class the British recruited to colonize Ireland in the 1600s. It's a tendency of some American and British writers to conflate Irish Catholics with those who identified with being British. I wonder if Montgomery identified as Irish or British?

[@HughCurranAedh]

The Irish people Elkins mentions are ANGLO-IRISH, not Irish with no commitment to Ireladn but all their patriotism was devoted to Britain, not to Ireland. Many British lived in Ireland and were born there since the 17th century when Cromwell invaded the country in the 1650s and expropriated most of the land and dispossessed the Indigenous, William of Orange expropriated the rest in the 1690s. All the land was given over to the British forces who settled on Irish land, most as landlords or estate agents. They sent their children to British schools in Ireland, and each family had at least one son who were expected to served in the British military. Many of them disdained the Irish, who were viewed as servants only, not equals. Most of their income came from the poorer Irish farmers who worked their estates.