The brutish empire

ALEX VON TUNZELMANN considers a global investigation into the intrinsic connection between racialised violence and the history of the world's largest-ever empire

- ALEX VON TUNZELMANN

The British empire CAROLINE ELKINS nominally ceased to exist in 1947, when India and Pakistan became independent (though substantial imperial power endured well into the Commonwealth period). Even 75 years later, though, questions and controversies about it are still rarely out of the news. Harvard professor Caroline Elkins is the latest historian to try to tell one aspect of its immense story. In the introduction, she declares: “My hope is that it [this book] will inform today's imperial history wars and struggles for racial equality, pushing debates over whether or not the British empire was a good or a bad thing, or better or worse than other imperial ventures, toward asking how and why the empire's past continues to shape the present."

Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins Bodley Head, 896 pages, £30

It is an admirable aim to sidestep the culture wars and engage directly with the facts but Legacy of Violence will probably upset defenders of the British empire before they have even opened it. As its title suggests, the book views the whole history of empire through the lens of violence - in particular, racialised violence.

No doubt the defenders would rather view the empire through the rosier spectacles of what they consider to be its achievements: the railways, cricket, the rule of law, and so forth. By the end of this book, Elkins has smashed those spectacles to bits and ground their fragments into the mud. “Violence was not just the British empire's midwife,” she asserts, "it was endemic to the structures and systems of British rule. It was not just an occasional means to liberal imperialism's end; it was a means and an end for as long as the British empire remained alive."