Podcast Episode 4: Caroline Elkins

Transcript

Upon Further Review: Frontline Conversations with Dean Bobo
Episode 4 with Caroline Elkins

Division of Social Science
Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Harvard University

(Recorded 06/16/2022)

[00:00:00.00] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:00:06.45] LARRY BOBO: Welcome, everyone, to another edition of Upon Further Review, Front Line Conversations with Dean Bobo. I am Larry Bobo, Dean of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.

[00:00:17.67] My guest today is Caroline Elkins, and we will be talking about her major new book, Legacy of Violence, A History of the British Empire, published this year by Knopf. Professor Elkins, welcome. You are, of course, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Imperial Reckoning, The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya.

[00:00:41.34] Let me start off before we turn to the substance of either of these works to something a little more personal. You’ve been here in the Harvard community for a long stretch now, though you’re slowly moving from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to the Business School. So how long have you been here, and what is afoot?

[00:00:59.73] CAROLINE ELKINS: Well, thank you, Dean Bobo. And first of all, thank you for having me today. And I’ve been hanging around Harvard for almost 30 years now, believe it or not. I arrived as a graduate student back in– I believe it was ’93. And first of all, you get rid of me too easily in the FAS. I’m forever in the FAS.

[00:01:15.84] LARRY BOBO: I hope so.

[00:01:16.47] CAROLINE ELKINS: Absolutely. But I think there are many wonderful things about having been at Harvard for this long. I mean, it truly is– all joking aside– an incredible privilege, and the ability to dip into other parts of the University in ways in which we are just part of this incredibly broad and wide ranging intellectual and practitioner community.

[00:01:39.78] And what I have found at HBS is it’s another– I love to push myself outside of my comfort zone. I mean, what the heck is an African historian doing over the business school, you know? I have to say I did start my career early on. I was an analyst at Lehman Brothers many moons ago to pay off a whole lot of debt that I had coming out of college, so maybe it’s tapping back to some of those roots.

[00:01:59.28] But look, I also think I’m very committed and have been since the very start of my career to reaching wider audiences and to kind of put my money where my mouth is. If one isn’t happy with what they see various leaders doing, communities doing, well, heck, go and make a change.

[00:02:16.62] So I think I was very privileged when at that point Dean Nohria asked me to come over. And since, then I have found it’s really quite something to be imagining– how do we take the humanities, if you will, and social sciences and bring them into a general management curriculum?

[00:02:32.70] As they say, they’re training future leaders of tomorrow over there. And how do we get them to think about the past and how it influences the present? And which, in many ways, is what we’re talking about today.

[00:02:42.18] LARRY BOBO: Absolutely. And I know that kind of ambition has inspired you for many, many years as a scholar as well as kind of in your personal life and engagement. Let me turn us into legacy of violence. This is an enormously ambitious work, a work of remarkable detail, and in point of fact, physical heft.

[00:03:04.23] CAROLINE ELKINS: It’ll keep your door open if all else fails.

[00:03:06.93] LARRY BOBO: Believe me, I think it’s going to have wide circulation and impact. It’s so capacious that it’s hard to find a single easy place to dig in and begin.

[00:03:17.82] It is a historical tracing and analysis of the longue durée and evolution of the ideology, practice, personalities, and effects of the building and transformation of British empire. It’s a history filled with implications for understanding events of not merely the past but around us today because the British Empire did so much to shape the geopolitical world that we still inhabit today.

[00:03:46.81] Now, before reaching into specific aspects of your argument, maybe you can make concrete for me, a mere sociologist who dabbles with some terror in history, if you will sketch out the scope and reach of the British empire at its height as well as the span of time that really is the core subject of the book because you really cover a capacious terrain both in terms of time and physical geography.

[00:04:15.30] CAROLINE ELKINS: Yeah. It’s an important question to set the table with, Dean Bobo, because at the height of its power, if you will, the British empire was the largest empire that history has ever seen. Its height is in the 20th century. It really kicks off in terms of vast expansion under Queen Victoria in the 19th century. And at its most massive, it was approximately a quarter of the world’s land mass and about 700 million colonial subjects. I mean, simply extraordinary.

[00:04:45.06] LARRY BOBO: Yeah, just truly epic scale. And as I said, world shaping even into the present day. You initially separate the British empire into two phases or stages, if you will, kind of a phase one of British empire, which was kind of Western facing. And the book really concentrates much more on phase two, which is kind of East and Southern facing. So what’s the substance of that distinction?

[00:05:15.94] CAROLINE ELKINS: Yeah. I think oftentimes, scholars will think about the first empire as being the empire of settlement. If we think about now the United States, the 13 American colonies, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the latter three, of course, which make up– we may get to it later– what is sort of the core of the initial part of the Commonwealth.

[00:05:38.74] And with the loss of the American colonies, there was very much a sort of turn to the East and an imagining of a new empire that certainly was rooted in the Indian subcontinent. At that point, we had the East India Company that is really staking Britain’s claim in this area.

[00:05:59.35] And then as the 19th century proceeds along, we see a vast expansion– as I just mentioned a little earlier– under Queen Victoria of when we have wide swaths of Africa, parts of the Pacific, and elsewhere, such that we land, as we were saying, with the largest empire that history has ever known.

[00:06:19.03] LARRY BOBO: One way of understanding the British imperial period and reign– and in some respects still, I think, alive in contemporary certainly academic discourse and maybe popular understanding as well– is the sense of Great Britain as a kind of benign imperial power that ultimately, despite obvious aspects of oppression and harm being inflicted, nonetheless improved lives around the globe for many.

[00:06:56.78] Now, you engage this notion both in terms of potential scholarly debate as well as that more lay or common sense understanding of British empire. So what are the terms of that debate, and who are your interlocutors here?

[00:07:12.94] CAROLINE ELKINS: Yeah. I mean, this is a big question, right? And you really put your finger on, I think, what is– nothing like getting a bunch of academics to argue over a couple of points, particularly around British empire, to really see the sparks fly. And on this one, there are some really deep seated debates.

[00:07:28.81] And what I find so interesting about them– these aren’t just, if you will, academic debates. These are playing out in the streets, in parliament, elsewhere not just in Britain, but also across the former Empire. And I think if we step back to your question about how is it that this idea that Britain somehow got empire right?

[00:07:48.61] Everybody else, the wretched French were always the [NON-ENGLISH] of the British and the Portuguese and of course the Russians and the Soviets. Look, I think there are several reasons for this, right? First of which is there is a very concerted attempt by successive British governments to maintain an official narrative.

[00:08:10.97] And I think that has proven as a kind of red herring for quite some time to broader public understandings of, if you will– and I use this in kind of scare quotes for the listeners as we often do as academics– that somehow or another, as I said, that Britain got empire right and that it wasn’t just the official line from the British government, but that historians were in on the action that at the time, particularly in the Second World War– the book talks about this a great deal, how Oxford and Cambridge dons and the rest were literally writing materials and history specifically for the Ministry of Information.

[00:08:56.29] Then, of course, what happens is once these narratives are fed– and some of my job and kind of investigating this book is to say, OK. What was the official line? And then to dig through the archives and oral sources and the rush to say, OK, so what actually happened? If you will, again, sort of the truth of the matter.

[00:09:16.39] And then of course, the British government intentionally destroys, burns tons and tons of files before they decolonize in each of these various locations. Getting back to your original question about benign imperialism, we’re contending with a strong narrative around the civilizing mission that this was in an element of reform unlike any other empire.

[00:09:39.20] And then at the same time, the British government making a very concerted effort– as most governments do. I’m not just singling out the British, but this is what I study, and they’re particularly good at it. I have to say, you have to admire them for what they were able to pull off.

[00:09:52.85] An official narrative bolstered by work done by those at Oxbridge and elsewhere, and then, of course a burning of the files at the end of empire that got rid of much of the evidence. And so when you take all those three things together– and I’m sure we’ll talk about benign imperialism and liberal imperialism– it’s a very elastic concept and one that lends itself quite well to maintaining a kind of benign imperial mythology.

[00:10:14.87] LARRY BOBO: Now, you enter this with the ambition of crafting a pretty powerful counter-narrative– I mean, in some respects, a strong antithesis to the notion of getting empire right as a benign colonizer, an empire builder. And in a sense, the core argument here is that beneath the veneer and the rhetoric and, if you will, the propaganda of benign rule all over much of the globe, there was actually a troubling set of policies and practices and behaviors.

[00:11:03.89] And at the heart of those practices and behaviors were a willingness to engage in really whatever level and extent of violence was necessary to maintain British power and control and to extract various resources from colonial populations and regions. What led you to put this proposition on the table?

[00:11:33.70] And before you speak to it, I’ll read one passage from early in the book where you say, “Violence was not just the British Empire’s midwife, it was endemic to the structures and systems of British rule. It was not just an occasional means to liberal imperialism end, it was a means and an end for as long as the British empire remained alive. Without it, Britain could not have maintained its sovereign claims to the colonies.”

[00:12:02.92] CAROLINE ELKINS: Wow, I wrote that?

[00:12:04.69] LARRY BOBO: Indeed you did.

[00:12:05.53] [LAUGHTER]

[00:12:08.02] CAROLINE ELKINS: You put out a series of really crucial questions, Larry. I want to step back for a minute and sort of weave this in a little bit to your question about benign empire. Much of this book is really wrestling with how and why this level of violence took place. And I say quite clearly in the book, I’m not so interested in, was this empire good or bad thing? Where does that get us from an analytical standpoint?

[00:12:33.77] But I’m really curious about– and it takes me 800 plus pages to get to the point– but how and why does this happen? As you just read that quote, why is it that we see violence as not being just the midwife of this project? And it brings us back to the question of what did Britain– and I use this, again, in the broadest brush strokes, and we’ll get into those who were critiquing all this at the time. What do they think they were doing?

[00:13:04.42] The very facile answer is to say, this was all exploitative. They went out there. This was about economic– whatever the case may be, political needs. The notion about liberal reform was all window dressing and rhetoric. And I would have written a very short book.

[00:13:23.02] But I ask the reader to step back with me and think about, how is it that you get to what people believed in? What do they think they were doing at the time? And this idea of liberal imperialism, this idea, as I say, that coercion and reform were two sides of the same coin.

[00:13:41.09] And if we step back and think about– I mean, what was such a conundrum at the time in the 19th century when liberal notions were being spread haltingly slow, but in Britain, right? Increased franchise, et cetera, et cetera, democracy, and the rest. But they get to foreign shores where they encounter Brown and Black subjects. And as I say in the book, empire was liberalism’s fever dream. They had no idea what to do about this.

[00:14:04.00] And great thinkers like John Stuart Mill and others are really casting this at the time, of course, which makes sense given the rise of scientific racism and a developmentalist model– that you in Africa, you in South Asia will one day be just like us, but not yet. Now of course, not yet never happens.

[00:14:24.73] LARRY BOBO: You need our tutelage and guidance.

[00:14:26.02] CAROLINE ELKINS: You need our tutelage and guidance. But the reason I’m raising all this is that in some ways– and I raised some of the biblical notions. I mean, when we think about spare the rod, spoil the child and the ways in which Christianity are tied into this, that Native, if you will, in quotes, subjects had to– not just that the violence was needed to suppress rebellion and the rest, but that they had to feel and see their own suffering

[00:14:51.65] And there was a term for this. The British called it the moral effect of violence, quote, unquote. You can’t make this stuff up. And so I think that we need to be thinking about violence. Not only putting it center stage, but to really get at, what was it that individuals thought they were doing? What’s the ideology?

[00:15:08.78] And it gets back to the classic conundrum between structure and ideology. And what I try to say is, we actually have to sort of put all that under one tent to get to–

[00:15:18.02] LARRY BOBO: Let me peel apart two pieces of that then. One is to get you to go ahead and flesh out a term you’ve used a couple of times now– namely, liberal imperialism. What does that connote? What are you really meaning by liberal imperialism? And I think of that as connected to two other things I really wanted to talk about.

[00:15:40.84] One was a project within the academy writ large advancing a notion of racial capitalism, that the global economic system wouldn’t have emerged as it did without racism. And that was a central engine in many ways of how our economic systems have developed over time. And a second piece of it is just notions of racism and white supremacy and how they fold into what comes to be the practice of liberal imperialism.

[00:16:13.60] CAROLINE ELKINS: Yeah. So three very small topics. What does liberal imperialism entail? Interrogate racial capitalism, and while you’re at it, let’s go into racism and white supremacy. I think on liberal imperialism– let’s start from square one. All empires are violent, period.

[00:16:31.05] So the question becomes even going back to what you were initially asking me about this myth of benign imperialism. Britain saw itself is doing something distinct and different. They were exceptional, and what made them exceptional was this idea, as I said, of liberal imperialism. There are other notions– civilizing mission, whatever the case may be.

[00:16:52.86] LARRY BOBO: And the importance of rule of law and reason.

[00:16:55.83] CAROLINE ELKINS: Precisely. All of these come under it. And the idea that imperialism was not just about the selfish needs of the nation state of Britain, but that there was something liberal, reformist, transformative about this. Now, it would take centuries, certainly decades, if not longer, for this noble enterprise, as Kipling called, it the white man’s burden, to unfold.

[00:17:23.10] Now of course, I’m very clear in the book that the liberal imperialism is kind of a big tent, that underneath it I can sort of have both people on the left of the Labor Party and Tories. I’m sort of using this as sort of a much broader term. And it has a very specific connotation in the 19th century.

[00:17:43.38] And what I say very clearly in the book is some may look at this book and say, look. You’re using this anachronistically, Elkins. And what I’m saying is actually, no, that there’s a carrying forward of this belief. And when we think about it, it gets back to this idea that you can have both reform and coercion together.

[00:18:01.06] And what I ask the reader to do– which is very hard. When we think about it, it’s hard for all of us to hold dualisms and this idea of reform and coercion. It was very difficult for these big thinkers in the 19th century. John Stuart Mill wrestled– he was pained by this.

[00:18:19.50] And actually, it’s the humanists, people like Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, right? We are both. And in some ways, and later on with Orwell, they’re talking about the current moment, but they’re also talking about empire and liberal imperialism. So that’s first.

[00:18:35.64] I think your second question about racial capitalism to me is– all these are important questions. But it really touches on something I think that’s in our debates today, which is that racial capitalism can explain everything. Going back, as your listeners probably know, to Robinson and this idea that it’s Brown and Black labor that is being exploited for the benefit white capitalists and people in power.

[00:19:03.90] I’ll say from the very beginning that I fully agree with that insofar as we think about a material view on empire in this particular case. However, what I’m also suggesting in this book is that if we think about everything about the unremitting forces of capitalism and racial capitalism, then we miss a big part of the story.

[00:19:27.92] And a big part of the story is around, as we were just mentioning, liberal imperialism or liberalism in more general. This book is very much a critique about liberalism, what happens when you bring liberalism to distant shores, and it intersects with race. So therefore, liberalism– and that not yet? Guess what? That not yet still hasn’t come to most Brown and Black people in the world today.

[00:19:51.37] My point is with racial capitalism that if we want to think about how and why violence unfolds in the empire, it’s unfolding in places that you don’t normally think to look for it. Promises of freedom, ideas of democracy, assurances of rule of law– that’s where we’re seeing the violence, not just in terms of labor and plantations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:20:12.97] And that gets back to your larger question about racism and white supremacy. When I got done with this book– the perfidious of liberalism, the ways in which behind this kind of mask of promises for freedom and democracy race can comfortably rest, and it continues to do so and certainly did so throughout the British empire.

[00:20:32.53] LARRY BOBO: Yep. And so this brings me to the last of the more conceptual threads I want to lay out at the top here, and that’s about your reference to state lawlessness and violence. So we’ve already talked a little bit about how important it was to British self-understanding to be spreading a greater sense of enlightenment, if you will, of civilizational development, and to operate under the rule of law and reason.

[00:21:06.19] But that whole apparatus could be turned toward developing a rationale for the brutal and increasingly expansive use of state coercive power, and that is a tale that is– kind of tragically, you recount innumerable instances of over the course of the book.

[00:21:30.10] So maybe you can talk for a little bit about state lawlessness and violence and the processes of how those rationales get constructed and maybe even speak to– and this is what you said about the mindset– why people go through the process of developing the justification for these acts when they seem so contradictory, the moral effect of imposing violence on others.

[00:21:59.89] CAROLINE ELKINS: Yeah. I think this is a really important way to wrap this sort of big picture up, Larry, because– you touched on it before. If we think about anything in the British empire and what they thought they were doing, establishing good governance, that would serve as the basis. And these are my words. They wouldn’t use it quite this way. The basis for the birth of the modern world.

[00:22:23.80] The most fundamental aspect of good governance– moving it away from despotism, which was so attacked by the British, and justifications for going in and taking over these large swaths of land was establishing– and it’s a very clear term– rule of law. And at the end of the day, this book really becomes a book– I mean, it has many different threads in it, but it looks at this, and it almost becomes an actor unto itself, this question about legal structure.

[00:22:54.97] And you asked this question. Why go through all this process just for justification? You don’t need to have any laws on the book. Just do what you’re going to do. But they can hold these contradictions in the same ideological space. They did not see this as being contradictory.

[00:23:11.21] So for example, when we think about rule of law, at the end of the day, the question becomes, how can you render legal what was otherwise illegal behavior in order to maintain authority and control? And this becomes a continuous conundrum for Britain and the empire.

[00:23:33.05] They start off in the 19th century– even earlier– but particularly then, 18th, 19th– the port is deploying martial law. But more martial law, there are pains back in Britain because martial law– it reminds them a little bit of some of the French codes, that this is actually lawless, and the English common law shouldn’t require this– a suspension, if you will, of powers.

[00:23:57.59] And eventually, they work their way through this. And what happens on the ground is that actually it’s come to be found that martial law actually doesn’t do enough. They need more power. And they determine that what we would know is a statutory martial law or a state of emergency provides the largest bandwidth of permissibility. When I say bandwidth, I’m talking like 159 plus pages of legal codes that allow for detention without trial, deportation, 12 strokes of the cane, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:24:34.59] And this is constantly evolving such that they really begin to hone in on it by in the 1930s and the Arab revolt in Peloton. But make no mistake, post-World War II happens, and they have bigger problems because now you’ve got new updated humanitarian laws and new human rights conventions. You’ve got to work your way around this, and they do that through derogation clauses and the rest.

[00:24:57.00] But in some ways, this story is very much a story about, how do you derogate the law? How do you make claims to good governments when you yourself practice what I call in the book legalized lawlessness, the process of introducing laws to render legal that which was previously illegal so that your soldiers and your colonial officials and the rest are protected from legal action?

[00:25:17.72] LARRY BOBO: Absolutely.

[00:25:18.93] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:25:45.06] So let’s start to turn then to some of those more specific cases and the line of development here. This sort of state-sanctioned legalized lawlessness, how does this view of things take shape, and what role does a figure like Warren Hastings play in its development? I think this takes us back to India, which is a good start point.

[00:26:09.26] CAROLINE ELKINS: Oh, yeah. It is a good start point. The book is– as much as it gets into all the kind of meaty analytical points that we’re talking about, it’s also meant to be a good narrative history.

[00:26:19.11] LARRY BOBO: Oh, it’s a spectacular narrative history.

[00:26:20.90] CAROLINE ELKINS: Well, I wasn’t fishing for compliments, but now that you gave it to me, I’ll take it. But the book is bookended between two trials, the very famous Warren Hastings trial impeachment trial that takes place as a result of his misdeeds in India as part of the East India Company and then a much later one begins filed in 2009, which was the Mau Mau High Court case, which I was involved in, which was based off of some of my the work of my first book.

[00:26:48.63] And the point that the book makes– and sort of drawing on our discussion before about legalized lawlessness– at no time in between is Empire and the Dock in any meaningful way outside of these two cases in Britain.

[00:27:00.69] LARRY BOBO: Maybe I hadn’t even processed that as I was reading through it, that Empire was really not under scrutiny here.

[00:27:08.37] CAROLINE ELKINS: Not in that kind of legal–

[00:27:09.75] LARRY BOBO: It was particular actions that were under scrunity.

[00:27:12.18] CAROLINE ELKINS: So unfortunately you suggest me I put you to sleep a few times with all those pages.

[00:27:15.88] LARRY BOBO: No, maybe it just–

[00:27:17.31] [LAUGHTER]

[00:27:18.03] It may be my dullness of intellect that I hadn’t framed it that way as I read it.

[00:27:22.54] CAROLINE ELKINS: Not at all. My hope, Larry, is that there’s a lot going on in this book. There are lots of threads. And I think that for a reader, whatever his, her, their interests are, they’re going to kind of follow that. And I think around the court cases– look, there are smaller cases, obviously, in the colonies, and the rest of those can serve as a distraction.

[00:27:41.22] But it’s remarkable that Britain can keep its empire out of the dock. And we can talk some more about that in a moment, but Hastings’ trial is a massive– I mean, it’s one of those things that narrative historians love writing, an epic clash between Warren Hastings and Edmund Burke, who is sort of serving as the, if you will, prosecutor.

[00:28:03.36] It’s the debate about the meaning of empire. There was not a discussion or any sense that Britain shouldn’t have empire. The question is, what was their, if you will, paternalistic role? What was their role of do no harm, of carrying out the– however you want to put this.

[00:28:24.96] And what so incensed sense people like Hastings– and later even people like John Stuart Mill, who advocates a kind of despotism in the colonies– but that they should absolutely follow the law of good governance and rule of law. And what upset him so much and what Hastings was on trial for was corruption, was the use of wanton violence, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:28:46.68] He, of course, is not impeached. But it’s an empire defining moment. And really, whilst we do have significant– none of it just rolled over and bought this narrative wholesale in Britain. There were many voices of dissent. However, it really isn’t until 200 plus years later that empire is back in the courtroom again in any kind of meaningful way, and I think that’s not insignificant to our story.

[00:29:13.54] LARRY BOBO: Oh, absolutely. Well, let me– we’ll no doubt return to India soon enough. But let me take a step then to another colonial moment, if you will, and talk about Ireland. And thinking of the Irish is, in some way, an early experiment in how to do empire building and the colonial project and the way in which something like the so-called Black and Tans are exemplars of the state lawlessness and violence that are a recurrent motif in the book.

[00:29:52.95] CAROLINE ELKINS: Mm-hmm. No, absolutely. So yeah, it’s the second half of our hour here, so onto Ireland.

[00:30:01.28] LARRY BOBO: Onto Ireland.

[00:30:01.73] CAROLINE ELKINS: This book is a little bit like a Where’s Waldo or Where’s Elkins in the empire–

[00:30:05.53] LARRY BOBO: Exactly.

[00:30:06.10] CAROLINE ELKINS: –really, and it’s almost what broke me in this book, Larry, because you know being a scholar, you’ve got to become an expert on something, even if you’re going to write 15 pages about it. And you know what, in the process of that, it made me realize how– which, of course, many scholars have written about this, but really made me realize the significance of Ireland and Palestine. We can talk about that a little bit.

[00:30:30.40] LARRY BOBO: Oh, I was trying to save that to drop that later, but OK.

[00:30:33.67] CAROLINE ELKINS: You know, what the heck, we’ll bring in Palestine. But to stick on Ireland, the significance of how– I would invite our listeners to think about empire and the movement of violence and personnel, and the legal codes and ideas like a spider’s web and the spinning of that silk. And it’s only when you step back and see it in its entirety that you can really take it in.

[00:30:57.97] And each of those threads– if you think again sticking with this narrative theme, each of those threads is either a person or a colony or a place, and they stitched together Ireland to Palestine, Palestine to Cyprus, et cetera. Ireland becomes exceedingly important to our history. It had been. I mean, it was either a formal or informal colony of Britain for centuries. I talk a lot about it in the book, about the racialization as we know that term.

[00:31:22.84] LARRY BOBO: Yes, absolutely.

[00:31:23.50] CAROLINE ELKINS: But I was really irritated. One of my– you shouldn’t read your own reviews. That’s number one.

[00:31:28.36] LARRY BOBO: Don’t do it.

[00:31:28.48] CAROLINE ELKINS: But number two, you know what they’re saying, oh, she doesn’t talk about– she smooths over the question about the Irish and the Afrikaners. And actually, I’m looking out saying, oh, gosh, that was some of the hardest stuff to wrestle with because look, the sense that– the dehumanization of the Irish along with the Afrikaners in South Africa, with the Irish that they are lesser, that they also need the civilizing mission, if you will.

[00:31:53.80] So and Ireland has this quasi-colonial status as both a colony and of Britain or of the United Kingdom. And it was one of the first to really along with India, to really, if you will, for lack of a better term, is fight back. And the draconian nature of British rule that culminates in the early 1920s around the Irish War of Independence, and listeners may remember names, like Michael Collins, the head of the IRA, some people who are what you call a legend and mythical.

[00:32:24.03] And part of that, they created two separate units within the police forces, one, the notorious Black and Tans and known for their extraordinarily coercive and abusive behavior, and another cadre called the Auxiliaries, and that was a personal creation of Winston Churchill. And the two of them coalesced together into what were known as security forces, which was a combination of military and police and special forces like this, and special ops to attempt to crush the Irish War of Independence and ultimately, where as we know about the story, reasonably unsuccessful.

[00:33:04.32] This was a first real– after the South African War, serious guerilla warfare urban, and the IRA was quite successful. And of course, we end up with independent Ireland and then, of course, Northern Ireland staying with the United Kingdom. But the importance of this, too, is that when the story of Ireland ends in the early 1920s, it’s a time when protest and violence is on a crescendo in Palestine.

[00:33:35.12] And so what do they do after this? And I should say in the press, there’s all kinds of attacks and questioning and criticisms of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries. They’re not getting away scot-free. They are– and people, some commentators are aghast that after all of this is done, Churchill and company are going to send Sir Henry Tudor and all of his merry band of Black and Tans to Palestine.

[00:34:02.06] LARRY BOBO: To Palestine, yes.

[00:34:03.77] CAROLINE ELKINS: And there were many of them. They all show up. They show up on a– and I got this in the book, hot, dusty day. I mean, the weather on their wounds, and they’re Black and Tans and are throwing up all over Jaffa as they get off the boat. And they created a mess of things in Palestine, into what was already an untenable situation due to the Balfour agreement in 1917.

[00:34:21.41] And they come in with incredible scope and permissibility based upon the notion we just talked about, legalized lawlessness, to undertake incredible amounts of what is, otherwise, arbitrary and illegal violence.

[00:34:35.18] LARRY BOBO: And it’s really quite extensive what they end up doing in Palestine in terms of being authorized to destroy people’s homes, to imprison them, to beat them, and in some cases, engage in torture and even executions as I understand the record that you’ve laid out here. And I don’t know if that’s the apotheosis of the state-sanctioned lawlessness, but it’s a pretty horrific model, in a way, for what becomes the imposition of empire and imperial control.

[00:35:10.16] CAROLINE ELKINS: Absolutely, Larry. And I think that– make no mistake, I mean, some of this reading is– as you know, I mean, it’s not easy going. I don’t shy away from the nature of the actual violence itself. And I feel very strongly about not doing that, not doing it in a, kind of, exploitative way. But you have to–

[00:35:26.72] LARRY BOBO: Right. There’s no way is it the writing salacious or violence porn, but it’s an honest depiction, not merely of what happened to who but– and here’s part of the beauty of the book, the understanding of many of the actors who are on the ground doing it.

[00:35:46.88] CAROLINE ELKINS: Absolutely. And I thank you for saying that, Larry, because I feel very strongly, too, that it diminishes the lived experiences of those who suffer through this kind of violence to either make it pornographic, as you say, or to avoid it altogether. And so it’s a very fine line.

[00:36:04.32] And you know– and I think to your question about Palestine and what’s going on there in this kind of apotheosis of violence, I would certainly say, for me at least, one of the greatest– we have these “Aha” moments as scholars, was the degree to which the late 1930s, which there was something called the Arab revolt in Palestine between 1936 and 1939, is absolutely fundamental for us if we want to understand post-World War II and even more recent violence that unfold around liberal regimes.

[00:36:39.26] And it’s an area of study that certainly was quite new to me. I had to shift gears. I spent a lot of time in Israel, Palestine, and various archives in the UK. And I’ll give you an example. There’s an actor and that opens up one of the chapters on or the chapter on the Arab revolt named Jamal al-Husayni. And Jamal al-Husayni is the relative of the Grand Mufti of Palestine. The al-Husayni family is a very big family there.

[00:37:07.79] And he’s known though for being a very measured and well-respected Jamal al-Husayni, international statesman. And I came across a document, a letter in the archive actually in London, where he’s writing to the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations because Palestine is actually a mandate under the League of Nations. So the League of Nations should have some oversight here.

[00:37:31.28] And in fact, what we know is that the League of Nations really is facilitating this kind of international imperialism. And he writes this incredibly moving letter, detailing in horrific detail the nature of the torture that this is like the medieval times, and saying, please, if you have nothing to hide, then I would imagine you would welcome–

[00:37:53.30] LARRY BOBO: An inquiry.

[00:37:54.08] CAROLINE ELKINS: –an independent investigation. Now of course, what ends up happening is that letter goes into the inbox. Germany invades Poland in ’39, et cetera, et cetera. We know the story. And it’s not investigated. But for the purposes of an historian and even for people like you and me as an academic or readers who just are interested in important history, people like al-Husayni leave these footprints for us, and you chase them down.

[00:38:23.32] And it was that letter that made me really chase Palestine down in a way that I hadn’t. And it is yeah, houses ground down, horrific tortures. I mean, it really– there was not much left of the Arab population in Palestine by that time. And it was a convergence. People who had been in Bengal came in, General Montgomery, Monty, who everybody knows. People were also looking to prove their personal and professional stripes in Palestine before that war on the horizon explodes.

[00:38:50.17] LARRY BOBO: And Palestine was regarded as having a great symbolic importance as to the future of the British empire. I mean, that was part of the reason for this enormous and deeply violent effort to maintain sovereignty there.

[00:39:05.32] CAROLINE ELKINS: Absolutely. First of all, there are so many– and now we’re venturing into difficult territory in our area because I mean, just when we think about the debates over Israel and Palestine and with very passionate and informed arguments on either side, what this book is doing or saying, I’m going to put those aside. And I want to look at what the British did.

[00:39:29.39] LARRY BOBO: Yes.

[00:39:29.92] CAROLINE ELKINS: I want to, and so we can understand, when we look at it through that lens, how different populations can each have legitimate claims, how each of the population can say they suffered under colonial rule, how we can see how to be frank. This territory probably didn’t stand much of a chance in terms of untangling the mess that was done.

[00:39:56.11] And I think when we think about this region in terms of British interests and certainly, when we get into the post-World War II period– and make no mistake. We mentioned Churchill. But let’s be clear. It wasn’t just the Tories of the Conservative Party.

[00:40:11.24] LARRY BOBO: No, no, no.

[00:40:11.78] CAROLINE ELKINS: You felt this way, right?

[00:40:12.14] LARRY BOBO: Not at all.

[00:40:12.47] CAROLINE ELKINS: And so after World War II into your question about Palestine, Atlit government comes in, Churchill was voted out of office, and his foreign Secretary is Ernest Bevin. And he decides that the way forward for empire– they know they’re going to lose India. But they’re going to let this go because the way forward is the Middle East. And the crown of that is Palestine.

[00:40:33.25] LARRY BOBO: So how do we get then from Palestine and this looming postwar period to Malaya?

[00:40:44.80] [LAUGHTER]

[00:40:45.79]

[00:40:46.78] CAROLINE ELKINS: How long was this– how long does this program run?

[00:40:49.42] LARRY BOBO: How long do we have? I mean, I thought about going down a different road entirely, which is really to focus on the connections among these imperial projects so that it’s for someone who’s approaching but not a total blank slate on these issues like myself, the idea that the set of actors who were engaged in responding to the revolts in Ireland established a model, a set of ideas in a framework that then gets exported to the Middle East and run by many of the same people. I mean, it’s an extraordinary sense of history that goes on here.

[00:41:32.50] CAROLINE ELKINS: Absolutely. And look, I’m just joking with you because you asked. And look, as the author, I should be required to be able to tell you this and in a pretty short and succinct way, same thing with your listeners. And here look, Palestine, we talked about the Arab revolt pre-World War II. After World War II, we had the Zionist uprising in which basically, as many listeners may know, that’s the period of time when it’s led and largely by Menachem Begin and others.

[00:41:57.78] I do not condone terrorism. But he was a genius, an absolute genius. And it becomes an embarrassment for the British. It’s one of the times– their biggest loss in– one of the biggest losses in the empire, where they’re basically just beaten at their own game. And they exit in 1947 and ’48. And at the same time, almost contemporaneously, an emergency arises in Malaya.

[00:42:27.61] And for all of these practitioners, security forces, spies, you name it, who have just been embarrassed, humiliated, whose confreres have been beaten in horrible ways, murdered by the Haganah and others, they’re now going to get on boats and planes and bring all these practices, all these tactics, all of these laws as well as their humiliation to Malaya.

[00:42:57.31] And they’re going to execute now these policies in ways that they feel as though they could not undertake in Palestine. And one of the arguments that is often made, at least at the time, was that they could not unleash, if you will, in the ways that they had elsewhere because the American lobby around Zionism. There are all kinds of reasons that are brought up. I think some of this is nonsense.

[00:43:16.97] I mean, it’s in part. They were just outmaneuvered in Palestine by the Zionists. But the important part to your question is that we also can’t– this isn’t– people have emotion. People feel lost, as we know. They feel pain. They feel suffering. They feel shame. And you had the shamed British security forces who had all this power at their disposal. And then they’re put in the Malaya. And what could go wrong? And they bring all these tactics.

[00:43:44.27] And this is where we really see the beginnings of some of the full-blown massive militarization projects where they take several thousand Chinese suspects, villagers, suspected of Chinese Communist sympathy and put them into concentrated villages. They begin, at a much larger scale, detention without trial. And this is really– and, of course, this is post-war, so there’s also the lexicon of coercion and reform.

[00:44:13.43] Also, if you will, it demonstrates how gnostic it is. It’s no longer the moral effect. It’s now called rehabilitation. And these wars are not wars. They are hearts and minds campaigns.

[00:44:24.65] LARRY BOBO: Uh-huh. Wow. There’s so much more to do here, but let me leap ahead to maybe two sets of other considerations here. One is to let you make the connection now to Kenya and the Mau Mau rebellion era.

[00:44:45.50] CAROLINE ELKINS: Absolutely. In some ways, I’ve been scratching this intellectual itch about Kenya for over 15 years, and it gets back to a question that I had unanswered from my first book. And the first book was called Imperial Reckoning. It was looking at Kenya during what was called the Mau Mau emergency and really the use of widespread detention without trial and villagization and all kinds of abuse and torture and the like of these detention camps.

[00:45:13.75] And the way in which this is often explained by those who want to defend notions of benign imperialism is, oh, Kenya was an exception. And what I saw at the time was that even in the documents in Kenya, you saw some of these people floating into Kenya from Malaya and some of them from Kenya going on to Cyprus. And I thought, gosh, this can’t be an exception. And so anyway, 15 years later, I’m here to tell you it wasn’t.

[00:45:37.05] LARRY BOBO: It most definitely not.

[00:45:38.29] CAROLINE ELKINS: Most definitely not. And I think the– one of the things that I wrestle with in this book and that is how do we see the question about race and violence and imperialism intersecting within the context of Kenya because there’s no question. This is an extraordinarily extreme case. It’s not an exception. But it is, I would put it on the continuum, on the extreme.

[00:46:01.99] And certainly, we have notions of Black savagery and the like circulating amongst the European population. And there was a massive level of dehumanization of the African colonial subjects in Kenya. But look, this was happening in Malaya. This was happening in Palestine. And I think some of this as well is that the British also just get better at this. They get better at their way of suppressing.

[00:46:33.82] They get better at extending things. They get better at their own legal coverage. And what they also get better at– and we’re getting back to Kenya, is the degree to which they are able to evade demands for independent investigations. There’s nothing like an institution that sticks to internal investigations. And so they’re able to get away with this.

[00:46:54.92] And you have many, and we haven’t touched on it as much. We have everywhere from members of the Independent Labor Party to very strong labor activists, like Barbara Castle who’s an MP. And she actually goes to Empire and witnesses some of the stuff, writes about it–

[00:47:09.88] LARRY BOBO: Writes some reports, yes.

[00:47:10.78] CAROLINE ELKINS: –writes reports, demands. We have missionaries. We have pacifists. We have– and what is really getting back to if one just wants to admire deceit, if you will. I mean, how good the British government is getting out from under any of these demands until in the case of Kenya in 1959. And let’s make no mistake. They detained nearly the entire Kikuyu population of over a million people and subjected them to extraordinary acts of torture and violence.

[00:47:38.65] And this really though– the whole thing erupts in 1959 when they are unable to explain away the death of 11 detainees at Hola Detention Camp. At first, they say it was because they drank contaminated water. In fact, the investigatory report by the doctor doing the post-mortem is slipped to Barbara Castle, and it’s shown that they have died from extreme blunt force trauma and hemorrhaging from the brain. And so that becomes a cause celebre on the floor of Parliament.

[00:48:11.17] And of course, what they do in many of these places, when they get caught red-handed, they quickly move to decolonization, and they’re out. And then they burn the files. And so in pure reckoning, it was about 10 years of putting that back together again. But I think it’s important to understand is your question was about where does Kenya fit within this. Yes, it’s an extreme. But it’s by no way an anomaly within this larger story. And the same actors were all over the place.

[00:48:37.00] LARRY BOBO: Let me focus on something that may surprise some readers that a thread that recurs throughout your work and is. I think, really played up in certain select chapters comes from the voices of colonial populations themselves, at least from the intelligentsia, the political actors, the press, who were the voices of those being, in effect, trod upon by British empire.

[00:49:07.09] So what is the part of the tale, for example, of a voice like W.E.B. Du Bois in this and his efforts toward Pan-Africanism or George Padmore perhaps more centrally as you developed it.

[00:49:22.42] CAROLINE ELKINS: Thank you for that question, Larry. One of the things I– when you write a book like this, you also– if you’re just a nerd like– I won’t call you one, but I’m certainly one. And you go down these rabbit holes, and you just keep reading because you just– and you only need the stuff for maybe a chapter or even worse, even a paragraph and much has been done.

[00:49:42.52] And I’m not going to say I, in any way, discovered the topic of the Black radicalism in Padmore and C.L.R. James and Du Bois’ words, no. There’s a massive literature on this. But I was trying to fit them into this larger narrative that we’ve been talking about. And so often in the imperial literature, we see more discussion equally important around the South Asian intellectuals.

[00:50:03.74] And what I was quite interested in was understanding the ways in which we see Black radicalism and also tracing this arc, if you will, from the interwar period along with some of these other narratives. And it does it very nicely within the book itself. So I became obsessed with George Padmore and C.L.R. James and Du Bois.

[00:50:24.92] And what I’m struck by– and, in particular, Padmore is the degree to which, if we think about current human rights claims and what we know about that, and then the profession, in general, is the importance and it seems facile of documentation, of numbers, of precision, not sentiment, precision. George Padmore, along with his extraordinary writing that just– he was prolific, constantly hammering away at colonialism, pamphlets, books, you name it.

[00:50:54.44] And he was working very closely with the Independent Labor Party, the whole range of folks who wasn’t alone. But he was really the brainchild here. But it’s a combination of a motive. Very clear, he calls it fascist imperialism. He’s making– he really– but the degree to which he knows the history and the facts, he would sit in parliament and take copious notes. And he was feeding the information and showing the Labor Party how to document the cases, how to make these arguments.

[00:51:24.42] So when you get to years later, he’s really most prolific in the interwar and was a bit more quiet during the Second World War period. All of them could have been rounded up and arrested had they been. But you could see glimmers of Padmore in people like Barbara Castle and then people later on. And so my point with this is that if we go back and look to some of these writings, how prescient these Black radicals were.

[00:51:48.89] LARRY BOBO: Absolutely.

[00:51:49.52] CAROLINE ELKINS: And it just– honestly, for somebody like me, I was really– I wept at some of these.

[00:51:53.90] LARRY BOBO: It helped clear the eye they had on the things.

[00:51:56.81] CAROLINE ELKINS: Clear and wept. I wept sometimes, Larry, because they were so clear-eyed, and they were so spot on. And they knew– I mean, people in power weren’t listening. But they were relentless. And for academics and historians, it’s their clear-eyedness, but it’s a form of documentation that becomes an extraordinarily powerful in a book like this.

[00:52:19.67] LARRY BOBO: Let me pick one bone with you as I’ve mentioned before. The book opens with the dephasing of a statue of Winston Churchill. It says Winston Churchill is a racist on the bottom of it, and I, kind of, hate to confess here at the end that like many people, I’ve always regarded Churchill as a great avatar of democracy and freedom and–

[00:52:45.37] CAROLINE ELKINS: A dagger through my heart, Larry.

[00:52:46.94] LARRY BOBO: –political enlightenment, all of which you have profoundly disabused me of. But Churchill is an interesting figure in another sense in that he is there almost from beginning to end, almost from A to Z. He’s either present as a journalist, a soldier, or a high-level government official throughout much of the history that you recount here from being in Pakistan, the Northwest frontier era through Sudan and the Omdurman era, the South African War, obviously, then become a parliament, the Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, First Lord of the Admiralty, Secretary for War, Minister of Air, Secretary for the Colonies, and ultimately prime minister twice.

[00:53:43.61] How should we regard Winston Churchill over the arc of this period and as a player in this story?

[00:53:52.43] CAROLINE ELKINS: I love how you can recite his CV.

[00:53:54.35] [LAUGHTER]

[00:53:55.24]

[00:53:56.13] LARRY BOBO: Yes, absolutely.

[00:53:58.91] CAROLINE ELKINS: You know what, I think– and this is not to be reductive as with all actors. This is a complicated historical figure. I mean, he’s a man, I say this in the book. He led Britain through the war if we think we think about these moments and at the same time, in more recent times in 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter protesters and not just a few, a massive spray paint of his name was a racist.

[00:54:29.34] How do we reconcile that? And yes, it begins with 1897 with his first political speech in Bath, which is where the book opens up. I mean, you can’t make these narrative threads up. I mean, it was a gift to me. And he plays all these roles and in some ways, he is, in the 1950s, when he’s finishing up his second premiership and he is about to take over, he’s literally shuffling through 10 Downing, talking to himself, slightly non compos because he’s had a stroke.

[00:55:00.57] It’s literally the rise and fall of Churchill and the beginning and end of empire when we think about this. So it’s a beautiful narrative device, but he– well, it’s a great example of how we can look at somebody who is renowned for his leadership skills and also understand not only was he deeply flawed, but he was the one calling the shots.

[00:55:25.82] LARRY BOBO: He was making big decisions–

[00:55:27.32] CAROLINE ELKINS: Big decisions.

[00:55:27.86] LARRY BOBO: –in all of these places.

[00:55:28.88] CAROLINE ELKINS: Practicing aerial bombing in Iraq, weapons testing, facilitating the torture of prisoners, the creation of the Auxiliaries, the moving, personally handpicking his friend, Tudor, to leave Ireland with the Black and Tans to go to Palestine, unleashing a whole new wave there, being in charge of places, at the time, coming in after the Atlit government in places like Malaya, then later, Kenya where the consequences are so devastating that we see the impact all the way down today in 2022.

[00:56:09.48] And so we have to look– I think we have to be able to– and this gets back to dualisms, to read both of this on the same page, not necessarily to be judgmental because that gets us nowhere in a book like this, but to understand how and why this can happen, and how and why somebody like Churchill encapsulates so much of the complicated mess that was the British empire.

[00:56:34.56] LARRY BOBO: Thank you, and so I had toyed with the idea of ending on a more scholarly, if not nerdish note of what it is like to try to pull together all of the archival source material to try to weave together a narrative of this depth and reach in complexity. But I don’t want to go down that avenue now. We’ll let others pore through the footnotes here.

[00:57:05.01] But I guess I would encourage you to offer a parting thought or comment on how we should read the current and ongoing legacy of British empire. And we’ve had one recent, relatively well-publicized incident where Prince William and Duchess Kate make their Caribbean tour as part of Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations.

[00:57:29.97] And they certainly encountered something they hadn’t expected to encounter, which was former colonies saying, yeah, we’re done with this. We’re going to be independent. And don’t expect all of us to applaud and wave and thank you as might once have been the case.

[00:57:47.91] CAROLINE ELKINS: Yes, absolutely. And I think we’re really at a pivotal moment, Larry, I think the– and it’s not just because it’s the topic that I work on. But the past doesn’t form the present. And the questionings that we have today, unrelenting, vociferous, necessary. The British Commonwealth, the successor to the empire was the British Commonwealth, 54 nations of which most are former British colonies.

[00:58:12.15] But there are Commonwealth realms. There are 15 of them for which the monarchy, the Queen, is the head of state. And that includes Jamaica and Belize, and elsewhere. So that’s where William and Kate were. They’re were like canary into the coal mine. And before they even left, there were protests and angry letters, demands for reparation sent to them. They carried on like it was Empire was still at high noon. But William was quickly chastened.

[00:58:36.39] LARRY BOBO: Quickly.

[00:58:36.99] CAROLINE ELKINS: Quickly chastened. And I have to say, look, I’m a big believer in– you can’t be an historian and not see change over time. That’s what we do. That’s a trade of our business. And I was– look, I was unimpressed by some of his iconography, dressing up like he was William Mountbatten and all this nonsense while he was in Jamaica. And I was deeply impressed by some of his prescient notions around we have to understand better how the past is informing the present and what we need to do in the future.

[00:59:04.05] And what he’ll do with this is anybody’s guess. But I think at the end of the day, and in some ways, marking this period of time of the Platinum Jubilee, to honor a queen who is extraordinary, they’re going to have to rethink what the relationship is between monarchy and empire. And if anybody can lead the way, perhaps we– that’s a role for them to carve out for themselves. And we shall see.

[00:59:27.01] But I’m hopeful. But certainly at the same time, I think it’s anybody’s guess. And I think the demands are going to have to keep coming from the Empire and to force the kind of change that is long overdue.

[00:59:39.96] LARRY BOBO: And no doubt, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire will play some role in shaping their thinking and how they engage these issues. I have to say, Carrie, thank you so much. This is a remarkable book genuinely. And I don’t say this lightly, genuinely magisterial. It’s a game-changing work in terms of its scope, its detail, its engaging read.

[01:00:04.89] And you really are to be applauded for this kind of major entry into ideas of understanding the geopolitical world and the role that British empire has an empire building has played in shaping it. So thank you.

[01:00:21.63] CAROLINE ELKINS: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Larry. Thank you for those very generous words and for having me today.

[01:00:25.74] LARRY BOBO: Very good. This has been another edition of Upon Further Review: Frontline Conversations with Dean Bobo. Thank you so much for joining us.