Although Elkins nods from time to time at empire’s variety and “kaleidoscopic processes,” her quest for a unifying theory sends her gliding over significant distinctions in the governance of wildly different colonial territories—some crowded treaty ports, some sparse hinterlands, some with settler populations, some holdings acquired in the eighteenth century and others in the twentieth. She posits the presence of a “colonial state”—enforcer of order and dispenser of violence across the various jurisdictions of empire—and yet the capacity to deliver and control violence was hardly uniform. In the late nineteen-thirties, as the Arab revolt in the Mandate was under way, plantation and factory workers rose up in Jamaica, whose bananas and sugar were more immediately valuable than even the potash of Palestine. Initially, true to form, the British killed resisters, but when protests intensified the Empire didn’t unleash the Dobermans and quell the workers. Instead, Britain started making concessions. Six years later, the Jamaicans had gained universal suffrage, becoming one of the first British colonies to be fully enfranchised. Hughie Tudor was one face of empire; it had others.

By the time Elkins considers the case of Aden, which she identifies as the end point of her great arc of post-1945 imperial violence, she seems to have lost the energy to insert another colony into her nuance-vaporizing ideological apparatus: the port city, with its century of colonization and its final overthrow, is dispatched in a single paragraph. Perhaps theories of imperial power this grand don’t need to descend to the specific case?

Just as the nature of colonial governance varied across time and space, so did liberalism, whose “perfidiousness” is as much a bête noire of Elkins’s book as empire is. Strains of liberalism embraced or accommodated paternalism, racism, and authoritarianism, helping provide intellectual cover for unimaginable cruelty. Yet liberal philosophies also elaborated ideas of autonomy, individuality, and collective self-rule that, in turn, seeded principles about legitimacy that anti-colonial thinkers and activists enlisted to their cause. Amid colonial condescension about their peoples’ civilizational adequacy, they sought to teach their Western liberal counterparts to imagine politics in genuinely universalist terms.

In Elkins’s book, however, the contributions of intellectuals like Tagore and Yeats are notable only as “accounts of suffering and resilience,” just as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Josiah Mwangi Kariuki are valued for their “firsthand accounts of suffering.” Ingrained presumptions can be hard for even self-described “revisionist” historians of empire to shake off, and one such presumption involves the division of intellectual labor. The judgment about whose ideas and actions counted in the making of history is taken as the prerogative of the professional historian, usually Western. The primary job of colonial subjects, for these historians, is to have borne witness: their task, in Elkins’s account, is to pen “wrenching indictments” that leave “a trail of evidence” for her and her colleagues to follow.

Near the end of “Legacy of Violence,” Elkins revisits the campaign to bring justice to the Mau Mau victims in the London courts, describing a climactic moment when, after her work in the Kenyan uplands to recover the survivors’ stories, she helped expose “liberal imperialism’s underbelly” to the world. To underline what she was up against in that recovery effort, she invokes, as she often does, a line from Kenya’s first leader, Jomo Kenyatta: “Let us agree that we shall never refer to the past.” Curiously, though, she fails to acknowledge that, shortly after those words were spoken, government officials and private citizens in Kenya embarked on a decades-long effort to surmount British stonewalling and reconstruct the nation’s colonial history. Remembering wasn’t just the white man’s burden. Mau Mau veterans and former detainees, too, were piecing together their past, bridling at being cast as mere spectators to how their history was shaped. Although the movement was long banned by the government, a study by the historian Wunyabari O. Maloba noted that, by the mid-nineteen-eighties, former members were gathering evidence to counter the narratives being produced by scholars. Soon, there were nearly two hundred groups of lay historians. Assisting them were renegade British ex-colonial officers like John Nottingham, who had married the sister of a Mau Mau general, helped Kariuki write his memoir, and been working to connect movement activists to professional historians, Elkins included.

A salutary methodological precept of Elkins’s is that, because official records can’t be trusted, historical sourcing must be broad and deep. So I was surprised to see such a shrewd scholar repeatedly minimize the impact of anti-colonial thinkers and actors. As she once again evoked her “arduous” struggle in Kenya, meanwhile skating over a colonized people’s greater struggle to bring their own history to light, I found myself reminded of the stirring hero tales of my childhood—tales that, as Elkins reminds us, should not always be taken whole. Like the historians she draws on, she has added important dimension to our still partial understanding of the British Empire’s sadism and hypocrisy, joining the novelists and the dramatists who, as she says, have reminded the world “that alternative narratives lie buried beneath the rubble of power.” Yet oversimplified theories are themselves prone to bury other histories. The ungainly truth is that liberal thought has been a resource for repression and resistance alike, and theories of imperial power impatient with this ambiguity may not withstand the scrutiny they deserve. ♦

Published in the print edition of the April 4, 2022, issue, with the headline “Cruel Britannia.”