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Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, Caroline Elkins, Alfred A Knopf, New York, NY, 2022 and Hitlers American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, James Whitman, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. and Oxford, U.K., 2017.
Harvard history professor Caroline Elkins has written a six-hundredand-eighty-page book chronicling the history of the British Empire, published in 2022. Dr. Elkins has mastered the truly vast literature on the British Empire, most of which is written from a Western point of view, which ranges from extreme jingo nationalism to some conclusions on the order of, well, a lot of bad things were done and there was violence and exploitation but in the big picture the Empire was more helpful than hurtful to the at one time nine-hundred million non-British subjects, over which the empire ruled. It was the largest empire the world has seen and probably will ever see, as the age of empires in the traditional sense of the Imperial power claiming sovereignty over large areas of the planet, seems to be over.
Dr. Elkins is a meticulous investigator with a knack for finding previously hidden source material, most often documents concerning actions and policies carried out by the British colonial authorities in various corners of the Empire. In the course of her research for her previous book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, she located a previously unknown archive of documents describing multiple examples of violations of domestic and international law including the extensive use of torture in Kenya between 1952 and 1960 during the Mau Mau rebellion. Some of these documents were used in a court case in which several elderly Kenyan plaintiffs sued the British government for their illegal behavior in Kenya. In 2015 the plaintiffs received a favorable judgement in a British court. Part of the settlement involved the foreign secretary delivering an apology speaking to the House of Commons and saying:
I would like to make it clear now and for the first time on behalf of her Majesty's government that we understand the pain and grievance felt by those who were involved in the events of the emergency in Kenya. The British government recognizes that Kenyans were subject to torture...