Sprawling across a quarter of the world’s land mass and claiming nearly 700 million people, Britain’s empire was the largest in human history.
In her illuminating and authoritative book Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, Caroline Elkins reveals an evolutionary and racialised doctrine that espoused an unrelenting deployment of violence to secure and preserve British imperial interests.
Elkins 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.
In conversation with author, historian and festival co-director William Dalrymple, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Elkins explodes long-held myths and sheds disturbing new light on the empire’s role in shaping the world today.
Caroline Elkins is a professor at Harvard University and the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. Her recent book, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, was short-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize.
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William Dalrymple is the author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, the Duff Cooper Prize-winning The Last Mughal, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. His book The Anarchy was shortlisted for the Duke of Wellington medal, the Tata Book of the Year, and the Historical Writers Association Award, and won the 2020 Arthur Ross Medal from the US Council on Foreign Relations.
Dalrymple has been awarded five honorary doctorates, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has held visiting lectureships at Princeton, Brown and Oxford, where he is currently an honorary Bodleian fellow and visiting fellow at All Souls. He was presented with the President’s Medal by the British Academy and was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers for 2020 by Prospect Magazine. He is a founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival.
Produced by: JLF International
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