Legacy Of Violence: A History Of The British Empire
Author: Caroline Elkins
Stock information
General Fields
: $35.00 AUD
: 9780099540250
: Penguin Random House
: Penguin Books Ltd
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: 500.0
: 01 December 2023
: 3.5 Centimeters X 12.9 Centimeters X 19.8 Centimeters
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: 35.0
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: books
Special Fields
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: Caroline Elkins
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: Paperback
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: English
: 909.0971241082
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: 896
: HBG
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9780099540250
Description
**Shortlisted for theBaillie Gifford Prize 2022**
'This book is dynamite' - ROBERT GILDEA, author of Empires of the Mind
Asearing, landmarkstudy of the British Empire thatlays bareitspervasive use of violence throughout the twentieth century.
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. For many, it epitomized the nation's cultural superiority, but what legacy have we delivered to the world?
Spanning more than two hundred years of history, Caroline Elkins reveals an evolutionary and racialized doctrine that espoused an unrelenting deployment of violence to secure and preserve British imperial interests. She 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 systematised. And she makes clear that when Britain could no longer maintain control over the violence it provoked and enacted, Britain retreated from its empire, destroying and hiding incriminating evidence of its policies and practices.
Drawing on more than a decade of research on four continents, Legacy of Violence implicates all sides of the political divide regarding the creation, execution, and cover-up of imperial violence. By demonstrating how and why violence was the most salient factor underwriting both the empire and British imperial identity, Elkins explodes long-held myths and sheds a disturbing new light on empire's role in shaping the world today.