Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire

by Erik Linstrum

Overview

An eye-opening account of how violence was experienced not just on the frontlines of colonial terror but at home in imperial Britain. When uprisings against colonial rule broke out across the world after 1945, Britain responded with overwhelming and brutal force. Although this period has conventionally been dubbed "postwar," it was punctuated by a succession of hard-fought, long-running conflicts that were geographically diffuse, morally ambiguous, and impervious to neat endings or declarations of victory. Ruthless counterinsurgencies in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus rippled through British society, molding a home front defined not by the mass mobilization of resources, but by sentiments of uneasiness and the justifications they generated. Age of Emergency traces facts and feelings about violence as torture, summary executions, collective punishments, and other ruthless methods were employed in "states of emergency." It examines how Britons at home learned to live with colonial warfare by examining activist campaigns, soldiers' letters, missionary networks, newspaper stories, television dramas, sermons, novels, and plays. As knowledge of brutality spread, so did the tactics of accommodation aimed at undermining it. Some contemporaries cast doubt on facts about violence. Others stressed the unanticipated consequences of intervening to stop it. Still others aestheticized violence by celebrating visions of racial struggle or dramatizing the grim fatalism of dirty wars. Through their voices, Erik Linstrum narrates what violence looked, heard, and felt like as an empire ended, a history with unsettling echoes in our own time. Vividly analyzing how far-off atrocities became domestic problems, Age of Emergency shows that the compromising entanglements of war extended far beyond the conflict zones of empire.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197572054
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	03/28/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	18 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Erik Linstrum is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire, which won the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: The Wars Were Like a Mist Part I: Knowing about Violence Chapter 1: Out of Apathy Chapter 2: War Stories Part II: Justifying Violence Chapter 3: Violence without Limits Chapter 4: The Claims of Conscience Part III: Living with Violence Chapter 5: Covering Counterinsurgency Chapter 6: Performing Counterinsurgency Epilogue: The Afterlives of Colonial War Notes Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

"Age of Emergency is a masterwork of a new Imperial history which stares unblinkingly into the violence of colonial rule and exposes how that horror reached deeply into twentieth-century British life. Linstrum's achievement is to show that the end of empire in Britain was no less a domestic trauma than in France: British decolonization did not happen 'in a fit of absence of mind.'" — Richard Drayton, King's College London

"Well-crafted and meticulously researched, this originally conceived work penetrates deep into the serial ambiguities of empire's end-not least the vexed question of how the British people grappled with imperial retreat. Age of Emergency traces the intricate strategies of evasion-the self-censorship, the silences, the 'circles of knowing'-and how these produced ubiquitous forms of tacit imperial knowledge in their own right. Brought to life with all manner of illuminating portraits-in-miniature, it offers a sophisticated new perspective on British society at the tipping point of decolonization." — Stuart Ward, author of Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain

"A sweeping, meticulous account of the reckoning with colonial brutality in post-war Britain. What happened in Kenya, Malaya, and Cyprus, Linstrum establishes beyond a doubt, was no secret back home. Age of Emergency masterfully explains how democratic publics come to live with-even to embrace-the violence done in their name." — Deborah Cohen, Northwestern University

"Meticulous, innovative, damning...Linstrum is innovative in the breadth of his research, trawling the BBC and ITV archives to explore how popular teleplays tried to make sense of endless colonial war." — Christopher Kissane, The Irish Times

"As Britons and other Europeans continue to confront the legacies of empire and especially of colonial violence today, this book is an urgent read for anyone interested in questions of culpability, knowledge, and what comes next for former colonial powers." — Taylor Soja, Europe Now Journal

"Intimate knowledge of the small wars of the twentieth century spread in what Erik Linstrum calls 'circles of knowing'. His exploration of how these circuits worked and overlapped is original and subtle." — Dublin Review of Books

"Age of Emergency documents a wide range of opposition." — TLS

"Compendious and insightful" — TLS

"Highly convincing book." — Sehepunkte

"The Age of Emergency is an original and significant contribution to historiographies of colonial violence and the end of the empire. This book will be of great interest to a wide range of scholars, students, and general readers, whether interested in postwar British culture, society, and politics, the nature of decolonization or late-imperial counterinsurgency." — Matthew J. Lord, Modern British History

"Linstrum catalogues with impressive detail the ways in which information was processed before and after it reached the public ... an important corrective to the idea that few in Britain knew about the horrors of empire." — Christienna Fryar, London Review of Books

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