Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story Of Britain... __HOT__

A major work of history that for the first time reveals the violence and terror at the heart of Britain's civilizing mission in KenyaAs part of the Allied forces, thousands of Kenyans fought alongside the British in World War II. But just a few years after the defeat of Hitler, the British colonial government detained nearly the entire population of Kenya's largest ethnic minority, the Kikuyu-some one and a half million people.The compelling story of the system of prisons and work camps where thousands met their deaths has remained largely untold-the victim of a determined effort by the British to destroy all official records of their attempts to stop the Mau Mau uprising, the Kikuyu people's ultimately successful bid for Kenyan independence. Caroline Elkins, an assistant professor of history at Harvard University, spent a decade in London, Nairobi, and the Kenyan countryside interviewing hundreds of Kikuyu men and women who survived the British camps, as well as the British and African loyalists who detained them. The result is an unforgettable account of the unraveling of the British colonial empire in Kenya-a pivotal moment in twentieth- century history with chilling parallels to America's own imperial project.Imperial Reckoning is the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.

Imperial reckoning: the untold story of Britain...

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Caroline Elkins's Imperial Reckoning is a study of the British response to the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya in the 1950s. While the history of the Mau Mau or, more correctly, Land and Freedom Army, has engaged the attention of some scholars, the subject has not aroused popular interest in the same way the independent struggles in Portuguese and French empires have. It is as if British imperial scholarship, which at one point dominated colonial historiography, wanted to retain a sanitized version of the empire's disintegration. After all, India, the jewel of the British empire, gained independence nonviolently, while minor players such as the Gold Coast were granted freedom on a silver platter. Elkins's study of the Mau Mau and the British response to it puts to rest such sanitized interpretations of the fall of the largest seaborne empire in human history.

In a major historical study, Elkins, an assistant professor of history at Harvard, relates the gruesome, little-known story of the mass internment and murder of thousands of Kenyans at the hands of the British in the last years of imperial rule. Beginning with a trenchant account of British colonial enterprise in Kenya, Elkins charts white supremacy's impact on Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu, and the radicalization of a Kikuyu faction sworn by tribal oath to extremism known as Mau Mau. Elkins recounts how in the late 1940s horrific Mau Mau murders of white settlers on their isolated farms led the British government to declare a state of emergency that lasted until 1960, legitimating a decade-long assault on the Kikuyu. First, the British blatantly rigged the trial of and imprisoned the moderate leader Jomo Kenyatta (later Kenya's first postindependence prime minister). Beginning in 1953, they deported or detained 1.4 million Kikuyu, who were systematically "screened," and in many cases tortured, to determine the extent of their Mau Mau sympathies. Having combed public archives in London and Kenya and conducted extensive interviews with both Kikuyu survivors and settlers, Elkins exposes the hypocrisy of Britain's supposed colonial "civilizing mission" and its subsequent coverups. A profoundly chilling portrait of the inherent racism and violence of "colonial logic," Elkins's account was also the subject of a 2002 BBC documentary entitled Kenya: White Terror. Her superbly written and impassioned book deserves the widest possible readership. B&w photos, maps. Agent, Jill Kneerim.(Jan. 11)

In recent years, the topic of the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya has engendered public and scholarly debate. Caroline Elkins's Imperial Reckoning has been the center of much of this dialogue and controversy. Intended to revise the history of Mau Mau's civilian war, Imperial Reckoning uses a range of sources to interrogate the nature of late colonial rule in Kenya. Five years after the book's publication, however, the fields of Kenyan and imperial histories have further evolved. The significance of Imperial Reckoning has also changed, as have the author's thoughts on its construction and style. 041b061a72