Book Review: Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020231198201 |
| Author | Jessi A. J. Gilchrist |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Caroline Elkins
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire
New York: Knopf, 2022, 896 pp. $37.50 USD (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-30-727242-3
Reviewed by: Jessi A. J. Gilchrist ,(jessi.gilchrist@kcl.ac.uk), Ax:son Johnson Institute for
Statecraft and Diplomacy; Centre for Grand Strategy, Department of War Studies, King’s
College London, London, UK
DOI: 10.1177/00207020231198201
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 increas-
ing use of both physical and epistemological violence in imperial governance. Within
the civilizing mission, violence had a particular “moral effect.”
1
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 wide-
spread use of violence through enslaved labour and dispossession, but that this vio-
lence diminished in the nineteenth century when liberalism emerged at home and
the “second”empire took on more grandiose global aims.
2
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.”
3
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.
4
1. Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (New York: Knopf, 2022), 15.
2. Christopher Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (London:
Longman, 1989), 8.
3. Elkins, Legacy of Violence, 46.
4. Ibid., 51.
Book Reviews 487
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