Book Review: Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

Most revisionist scholars would agree that the British Empire was far from a benign actor. It was an extraordinarily brutal and violent one. In her new monograph, Caroline Elkins proposes to deepen our understanding of why British imperialists not only embraced large-scale violent measures, but how they legitimated them over time. Elkins takes the existing revisionist view one step further with the provocative argument that violence was in fact at the very core of liberal imperialist ideology. Legacy of Violence narrows in on exceptional episodes from the mid-eighteenth century onward to show that crises of imperial legitimacy served to justify the increasing use of both physical and epistemological violence in imperial governance. Within the civilizing mission, violence had a particular “moral effect.” For Elkins, it is this combination of reform and repression inherent in liberalism that explains why the British Empire remained so resilient for centuries. The major contribution in Part I, “Imperial Nation,” is to the scholarly debate on Britain’s “first” and “second” empire. Scholars such as C.A. Bayly have argued that Britain’s “first” empire in the pre-nineteenth century Americas embraced the widespread use of violence through enslaved labour and dispossession, but that this violence diminished in the nineteenth century when liberalism emerged at home and the “second” empire took on more grandiose global aims. Elkins counters that the roots of British imperial violence in the twentieth century grew out of nearly two hundred years of ideas, debates, and practices circulating across the empire. Part I begins in 1756 with the well-known story of the Warren Hastings’s impeachment trial for his widespread corruption and misconduct in Bengal. The evolving debate about accountability and legitimacy emerging from this case marked the “beginnings of a consolidated liberal imperialism.” From then on, Britain’s “second” empire repeatedly confronted the question not of how to mitigate state violence, but of how to incorporate it into the rule of law and the principles of good governance.