It is just so on-message these days to self-flagellate, don’t you know? But it laid the ground for a legal case that has transformed our view of Britain’s past, Thu 18 Aug 2016 01.00 EDT Her victory lap has played out in op-eds, interviews and journal articles. All Kenyan files were to be classified either “Watch” or “Legacy”. A London law firm was preparing to file a reparations claim on behalf of elderly Kenyans who had been tortured in detention camps during the Mau Mau revolt. Mau Mau was still a banned movement in Kenya, and would remain so until 2002. The truth about Gallipoli has, unlike its victims, been buried deep. In October 2012, Justice McCombe rejected those arguments, too. You still hear this background when she speaks. He denied violence she hadn’t asked about. Abu Ghraib. But many other scholars slammed the book. The British government, defeated repeatedly in court, moved to settle the Mau Mau case. “I’m from New Jersey,” she answered. drove the expansion of the British Empire in Asia What was the impact of the loss of the 13 colonies to the history of the British Empire? The Mau Mau uprising had long fascinated scholars. And, as Elkins would eventually learn, Gavaghan had developed the technique and put it into practice. One day in the spring of 1998, after months of often frustrating searches, she discovered a baby-blue folder that would become central to both her book and the Mau Mau lawsuit. The time has surely arrived for all of us to be as proud of Empire at that great Victorian, Mary Seacole, whose statue stands opposite parliament and whose country of origin, Jamaica, so yearns for a return to its imperial past. The oppressive force in this case was neither a class nor a generation but the British empire itself: a regime founded on violence and hostile to dissent. The Truth About the British Empire By The Conservative Woman The British Empire was the greatest imperial power that the world has ever seen. Broadly speaking, she thinks end-of-empire historians have largely failed to show scepticism about the archives. The British destroyed documents in Kenya – scholars knew that. For example, in 1919 around 20,000 people gathered in Jallianwala Bagh gardens in … She met a former colonial official, Terence Gavaghan, who had been in charge of rehabilitation at a group of detention camps on Kenya’s Mwea Plain. Many documents relating to the detention camps were either absent or still classified as confidential 50 years after the war. “Who is controlling the production of the history of Kenya? Working with five students at Harvard, she found thousands of records relevant to the case: more evidence about the nature and extent of detainee abuse, more details of what officials knew about it, new material about the brutal “dilution technique” used to break hardcore detainees. • This article first appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. A former rebel colony that went on to fight its own war against us, now the USA, made the most formidable contribution of all to fighting and dying for its former colonial masters. Tony Badger, a University of Cambridge professor emeritus who monitored the Hanslope files’ release, writes that there was “no systematic process dictated from London”. Nothing about Caroline Elkins suggests her as an obvious candidate for the role of Mau Mau avenger. In this context, dreams offered a glimpse of the tensions that were integral to an undemocratic and hierarchical society, but which remained unsayable – at least to the British. Foul-mouthed, fast-talking and hyperbolic, Elkins can sound more Central Jersey than Harvard Yard. Elkins framed the story as a personal journey of discovery. It was so shocking that the Hunter Commission of inquiry was set up. Elkins has sold the film rights for her book and personal story to John Hart, the producer of hits including Boys Don’t Cry and Revolutionary Road. Elkins paraded with them outside the court. The idea was both legally improbable and professionally risky. “We’re a different breed. Through vicious military conquest, it used enslavement, massacres, famines and partitions to create profit. You want to destroy the documents that can be incriminating.”, Murphy says Elkins “has a tendency to caricature other historians of empire as simply passive and unthinking consumers in the National Archives supermarket, who don’t think about the ideological way in which the archive is constructed”. Her study, Britain’s Gulag, chronicled how the British had battled this anticolonial uprising by confining some 1.5 million Kenyans to a network of detention camps and heavily patrolled villages. Elkins was also accused of sensationalism, a charge that figured prominently in a fierce debate over her mortality figures. The British Empire was the worst colonial empire ever in History. But she remained nervous about the case. Our editors are unpaid and work entirely voluntarily as do the majority of our contributors but there are inevitable costs associated with running a website. The Times splashed the news across its front page: “50 years later: Britain’s Kenya cover-up revealed.”. Channel 4 and Newsnight should now come clean. By conveying the perspective of the Mau Mau themselves, Britain’s Gulag marked a “historical breakthrough”, says Wm Roger Louis, a historian of the British empire at the University of Texas at Austin. Elkins knew her findings would be explosive. It also fed speculation that many more colonial abuse claims would crop up from across an empire that once ruled about a quarter of the earth’s population. “The overarching takeaway is that the government itself was involved in a very highly choreographed, systematised process of destroying and removing documents so it could craft the official narrative that sits in these archives,” Elkins told me. Hawkish intellectuals pressed America to embrace an imperial role. (shelved 11 times as … Over some 300 interviews, she heard testimony after testimony of torture. Yes, we were taught in great detail about Henry VIII beheading his eight wives, the Plague and the Great Fire of London, but nothing about the British Empire and its part in slavery. Elkins was in the top-floor study of her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when the call came. She found a few hundred. Richard Drayton of King’s College London, another imperial historian, judged it an “extraordinary” book whose implications went beyond Kenya. No review was more devastating than the one that Bethwell A Ogot, a senior Kenyan historian, published in the Journal of African History. “I don’t think the trial really changes that.”, Susan L Carruthers feels the same about her own criticism of Britain’s Gulag. They’ve been far more sceptical than that, he says. The evidence was insufficient. Pick of our readers’ comments: Would you go back to Eton? She stumbled on to files about an all-female Mau Mau detention camp called Kamiti, kindling her curiosity. But some important records escaped the purges. 07-02-2020 07:00 via theguardian.com. These heavily patrolled villages – cordoned off by barbed wire, spiked trenches and watchtowers – amounted to another form of detention. The evidence backing this account comes from Justice McCombe, whose 2011 decision had stressed the substantial documentation supporting accusations of systematic abuses. • Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here. The turning point came in 2010, when Anderson, now serving as an expert witness in the Mau Mau case, submitted a statement to the court that referred directly to the 1,500 files spirited out of Kenya. These documents would probably have spared her years of research for Britain’s Gulag. This is a free service and we will never share your details. Her book cut against an abiding belief that the British had managed and retreated from their empire with more dignity and humanity than other former colonial powers, such as the French or the Belgians. It would be almost impossible to state the opposite of the truth with more misleading sincerity. When she failed to provide information, she said, they raped her using a bottle filled with pepper and water. She finds that Elkins’s current “narrative of victimisation” also rings a bit false. On 6 April 2011, the debate over Caroline Elkins’s work shifted to the Royal Courts of Justice in London. He needs to do some homework! ... was formed in England in 1891 with the explicit aim of expanding the British Empire across the entire globe. Help us sue the British government for torture. The Commonwealth’s membership of 53 nations, nearly all of them ex-colonies, is testimony to more than the generosity of our international aid programme. “There’s only so much ostracism one can plausibly claim if you won a Pulitzer and you became a full professor at Harvard – and this on the strength of the book that supposedly also made you outcast and vilified by all and sundry,” she says. We defeated the Nazis. Now 47, she grew up a lower-middle-class kid in New Jersey. And left to themselves the people of India resorted to unparalleled savagery in 1947. The broad strokes of British misbehaviour were known by the late 60s, Berman argued. There was a time when the sun never set on the British Empire. Donate to help cover our costs, The media ignores Trump’s fraud claims, but the story won’t die, Our trade with the EU is shrinking, so ‘no deal’ is no big deal, My despair as I see colleges turning out milksops, not men, Free speech? “That’s exactly what you would expect of a colonial administration, or any government in particular, including our own,” laughs Wm Roger Louis. But the ferocity of the response went beyond what she could have imagined. A careful combing-through of these documents might normally have taken three years. Indeed most of areas of the world ruled by British empire … He thinks Elkins and other historians did “hugely important” work on the case. A retired head teacher with 35 years’ teaching experience, Chris is a former advisor to the Policy Unit at 10 Downing Street under two Prime Ministers. And the story Elkins would tell about those papers would once again plunge her into controversy. Thank you. Britain’s Gulag opens by describing a “murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people” and ends with the suggestion that “between 130,000 and 300,000 Kikuyu are unaccounted for”, an estimate derived from Elkins’s analysis of census figures. The scale of the cleansing had been enormous. “What’s a nice young lady like you working on a topic like this for?” he asked Elkins, as she recalled the conversation years later. Britain’s Gulag had broken important new ground, providing the most comprehensive chronicle yet of the detention camps and prison villages. This helped contain the hatred between Kikuyu who joined the Mau Mau revolt and those who fought alongside the British. And she thinks all of this amounts to a watershed moment in which historians must rethink their field. But the book polarised scholars. Many more documents were coming out. Yes, imaginary evidence, ‘fake news’ in its purest form, to damn the Brits in general and the Empire in particular. Her prose seethed with outrage. The brutal, simple truth about the British Empire is that it no longer exists. Elkins had about nine months. “This is the moment where literally my footnotes are on trial.”. The claimants marching beside her were just like the people she had interviewed in Kenya. Britain’s Gulag, titled Imperial Reckoning in the US, earned Elkins a great deal of attention and a Pulitzer prize. And she stood behind her work. “Basically, I read document after document after document that proved the book to be correct,” Elkins says. It was an armed rebellion launched by the Kikuyu, who had lost land during colonisation. Others branded her a self-aggrandising crusader whose overstated findings had relied on sloppy methods and dubious oral testimonies. Elkins’s work, he wrote, depended heavily on the “largely uncorroborated 50-year-old memories of a few elderly men and women interested in financial reparations”. Scholars had mistreated Elkins in their attacks on Britain’s Gulag. Young, articulate and photogenic, she was fired up with outrage over her findings. “I never in my wildest dreams imagined this level of detail,” she added, speaking in a whisper but opening her eyes wide. Kenyan officials had sniffed this trail soon after the country gained its independence. Elkins thinks all of this amounts to a watershed moment in which historians must rethink their field. When Elkins interviewed Kikuyu in their remote homes, they whispered. It was also, comparatively, the most benign. To Elkins, the vituperation felt over the top. It is an undeniable fact that millions from the British Empire and its dominions fought for what was perceived as the ‘mother country’ in the two world wars. Its adherents mounted gruesome attacks on white settlers and fellow Kikuyu who collaborated with the British administration. Improbable because the case, then being assembled by human rights lawyers in London, would attempt to hold Britain accountable for atrocities perpetrated 50 years earlier, in pre-independence Kenya. Now the lawyer running the case wanted her to sign on as an expert witness. Women worked on uncontroversial topics such as maternal health, not blood and violence during Mau Mau. Over the decades, archivists and Foreign Office officials puzzled over what to do with the Hanslope papers. Ogot dismissed Elkins as an uncritical imbiber of Mau Mau propaganda. British Empire: Students should be taught colonialism ‘not all good’, say historians. The stonewalling continued as Kenyan officials made more inquiries in 1974 and 1981, when Kenya’s chief archivist dispatched officials to London to search for what he called the “migrated archives”. Back in London, Foreign Office lawyers conceded that the elderly Kenyan claimants had suffered torture during the Mau Mau rebellion. The disclosure sparked an uproar in the press and flabbergasted Elkins: “After all these years of being just roasted over the coals, they’ve been sitting on the evidence? Elkins enrolled in Harvard’s history PhD programme knowing she wanted to study those camps. Her career was now secure: Harvard had awarded her tenure in 2009, based on Britain’s Gulag and the research she had done for a second book. Bringing modern "progressive" "woke" values on history never ends well and this really isn't a balanced look at the British Empire though the lens of the world as it was during it's height but with a modern agenda. With roots in the 16th century, British Israelism was inspired by several 19th century English writings such as John Wilson's 1840 Our Israelitish Origin. The Mau Mau case has fuelled two scholarly debates, one old and one new. The Mughal Empire which Britain supplanted in the sub-continent was many, many times worse. She drew on them in two more witness statements. After high school, Princeton University recruited her to play soccer, and she considered a career in the sport. Likewise, the British-Indian state paid a sum of money every year to Britain for services like interest on public debt or salaries of expatriate military officers. And she believes there was more going on than the usual academic disagreement. Still, he does not believe that the Hanslope files justify the notion that hundreds of thousands of people were killed in Kenya, or that those deaths were systematic. A certificate of destruction was to be issued for every document destroyed – in duplicate. “If, at that late date,” he wrote, “she still believed in the official British line about its so-called civilising mission in the empire, then she was perhaps the only scholar or graduate student in the English-speaking world who did.”. Then came Bagram. That fight took place in a system of detention camps. Elkins laid out what she makes of this development in a 2015 essay for the American Historical Review. Her case for tenure, once on the fast track, had been delayed in response to criticism of her work. Maybe it was the squirrel-like tendency of archivists. What with the fear of a post-Brexit shortage of Italian olive oil, of EU- sourced avocados becoming ever scarcer and the burden of de-colonising British education, times are far from easy for our MSM opinion-forming elite. The facility occupies a 1970s-era concrete building beside a pond in Kew, in south-west London. This same repository, Hanslope Park, held files removed from a total of 37 former colonies. “I knew I was right.”. They describe, in extensive detail, how the government went about retaining and destroying colonial records in the waning days of empire. Yes, rule by the British had its very real downsides and being massacred by General Dyer was one of them. Threatened and shunned by colleagues and critics, Caroline Elkins persevered and brought to life the atrocities that were committed and hidden from the world for decades.”, But some scholars find aspects of Elkins’s vindication story unconvincing. “I’ve come to believe that during the Mau Mau war British forces wielded their authority with a savagery that betrayed a perverse colonial logic,” Elkins wrote in Britain’s Gulag. She calculated that the camps had held not 80,000 detainees, as official figures stated, but between 160,000 and 320,000. “That’s not how history works.”. She was willingly gullible as Sanghera explained to her how things have gone so wrong with our understanding of the Empire: I think we have this narrative in Britain where we are always the good guys, you know. This delegation was “systematically and deliberately misled in its meetings with British diplomats and archivists,” Anderson writes in a History Workshop Journal article, Guilty Secrets: Deceit, Denial and the Discovery of Kenya’s ‘Migrated Archive’. Anderson’s review of the evidence shows how the purging process evolved from colony to colony and allowed substantial latitude to local officials. In camps, villages and other outposts, the Kikuyu suffered forced labour, disease, starvation, torture, rape and murder. Elkins’s research had made the suit possible. Available for everyone, funded by readers. Elkins emerged with a book that turned her initial thesis on its head. Now move on, next question please. 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