n entry on the internet by a government agency for Pakistan describes its 881,913 square kilometres area as “slightly larger than France and the United Kingdom put together.” And yet the United Kingdom, or Great Britain as it was then known, with an area of only about 244,000 square kilometres, ruled over more than a quarter of the world’s entire landmass, a lot more than France and the United Kingdom put together.

Much ink has been spilt trying to explain the reasons for this phenomenon: from racial/ cultural superiority to low indigenous self-esteem to technological advancement to in-fighting. No two historians quite agree on the leading cause or how easy it was for Britain to conquer and then hold these disparate lands.

Caroline Elkins’s new book, Legacy of Violence: A history of the British Empire, is the latest addition to these voices. A professor of history at Harvard University, she has previously authored Imperial Reckoning, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, about Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, a concentration camp for the Mau Mau where the colonisers brutalised uncooperative native populations.

Legacy of Violence continues in a similar vein, expanding upon the various forms of violence unleashed by the British Empire to keep native populations under control.

Elkins details the contours of the violent tactics British statesmen first put to use in Ireland. Churchill created “a special corps of Gendarmerie”, which was known as the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Their brutal tactics and policing strategies were then deployed throughout the empire, most lethally in Palestine.

Henry Hugh Tudor, Churchill’s course mate, who had proven his bloody capability in Ireland, was sent to the British mandate of Palestine to train the colonial police. A mixture of violent suppression and taxes levied on farmers and the Bedouin lead to strife with the local Arab populations.

The fact that large amounts of potash were found in the Dead Sea was a catalyst for increasing the policing budget to “smooth out” difficulties, upon Tudor’s suggestion, and enable the British to benefit from the resources, a theme repeated throughout the empire: famines in Bengal caused by exporting too much of its produce to Britain are one example; violent suppression in Malaya of its rubber production is another.

The British implemented a policy of granting its armed police emergency powers. The strategy is still used by governments in many of the former colonies, arguing that “the man on the ground” knows best what to do in the circumstances. This, however, did not stop them from disavowing men who came in for harsh criticism. After the Amritsar massacre, where Gen Dyer opened fire on a peaceful crowd in Jallianwala Bagh, Churchill distanced himself and the British government from the uproarious criticism by branding him as an outlier and the occurrence as an anomaly.

However, these “anomalies” recurred throughout British rule, and disavowal became de rigeur every time they came to light. For her first book, Imperial Reckoning, Professor Elkins looked for records of British rule in Kenya. That was when she discovered that almost all records of activities that would prove embarrassing for the British were burnt before they left. Called Operation Legacy, this purging of the official record was carried out every time the British retreated from a territory.

Based on oral testimonies from survivors of the British Gulag and a trove of letters that proved that the British administration knew what was happening, Elkins pieced together a compelling picture whose coda appears at the end of Legacy of Violence. The Gulag survivors sued the British government in 2011 based on the evidence Elkins had uncovered. In response, the British government wisely decided to make public some more records of colonial times, claiming that they had been overlooked previously.

It was a move calculated to avoid further embarrassment in case the material came to light in the way of Wikileaks. A court in London ruled to waive the statute of limitations because the case was based on evidence that had not been in the public record before Elkins’s research so that the claimants could not have filed the case before it ran out. As patting oneself on the back goes, this is exceptional theatre.

Elkins goes into much detail in describing the dramatis personae of the Empire and their violent actions and policies in the colonies. The thread she weaves through these stories is that of liberal imperialism and the British justification of the “white man’s burden” and their “civilising mission” promoted by men like Rudyard Kipling and TB Macaulay, who looked down upon indigenous cultures as throwbacks to previous centuries. She also highlights dissenting voices like that of Edmund Burke. However, she does not really engage with the writings of indigenous peoples themselves: she mentions Tagore, Jinnah, Nehru and Gandhi but does not detail the ways in which they spoke back to Empire, using its own tools against its hegemonic discourse.

Elkins situates her book as an answer to contemporary historians like Niall Ferguson, who justify the Empire and laud it as a blessing for colonised places. She briefly reflects on the history of history-writing, of how official historians were granted access to records in exchange for crafting narratives that suited the government, while also acknowledging the difference that some historians like Christopher Bayly still made.

However, she fails to refer to historians and writers like Ayesha Jalal, Sugata Bose and Priyamvada Gopal, who have written in great detail about the concepts of nationhood in the Indian subcontinent and the histories of violent uprisings there. Yasmin Khan is mentioned only briefly and that too for her first book instead of the second, The Raj at War, which detailed the colonised populations’ contributions to British war efforts.

Sara Suleri, too, is not mentioned despite her book The rhetoric of English India, detailing the justificatory discourse employed by the British in contexts such as the trial of Warren Hastings with Edmund Burke leading the charge. Moreover, indigenous literatures, too, were not uncritical or oblivious of British policies.

In the Indian subcontinent alone, we had writers like Manto and Abdullah Hussein, to name only two, who were writing stories detailing British violence in daily contexts, but Elkins does not engage with those either. Many of these historians are not just Elkins’s contemporaries; some are also her colleagues so that it is near impossible for her to be unaware of their work.

At more than 700 pages of text alone, Legacy of violence is an excellent compendium of Britain’s violent actions in its colonies. However, it would have been better rounded if the author had included the critiques of those closer to these former colonies than white historians.

Legacy of Violence

A history of the British Empire

Author: Caroline Elkins

Publisher: Knopf

Pages: 700

The reviewer runs an Instagram account called @maddyslibrary, where she talks about books, colonisation and women’s rights