Should be required reading in British schools

Deep research, put together in a forensic case for the criminality of the British Empire. Quite why there are still people who defend the Empire is mystifying. The cruelty, the evil, and the belief in British exeptionalism leading to treating "subjects of the empire" (victims of colonialism) as inferior, are disgusting.
Some of the book is disturbing listening, as it details British abuse, so beware.
I marked the performance down for the many obvious glaring mispronunciations,

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Well researched, not well read, quite a slog.

First of all, why is a book written by a woman narrated by a man? When men doninate academic fields, this seems like an effort to minimise womens' work further.

I found the narration grating and the tone a bit too American entertainment / presenter voice for the gravity of the topic.

But it is incredibly well researched and a much needed expose of the horrors of the Empire. As such it is not an easy read and I found I had to keep listening to other things for a while to break it up. It is very long but maybe that was necessary to provide a comprehensive critique. It was a hard slog, but worth it. I learned a lot and had my opinions on the Empire utterly vindicated. I have a much greater understanding of the Palestine-Israel conflict too.

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Torn

An outstanding account of the darkest moments in the empires history. The epilogue however is rife with biases and assumptions of racism in modern British that are quiet easily countered with many alternative perceptions.

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Essential History

The uncut, violent, lawless, history of the British Empire. This should be mandatory reading in the British Post 11 school curriculum. By the time they reach 6th form, age, the youngest generations will be devoid of any illusion that the 'civilising Empire' narrative bears any relation to reality. Harrowing, jaw-dropping, outstanding both in the organisation of story-telling, revelation, retelling of first hand accounts & narration. An outstanding & masterful exposure of the root causes of the mounting psychological ills that plague western societies from top to bottom to this day.

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A must read if wanting to learn about the British empire

A well researched and detailed study on the true horrors of British empire. Sheds much needed light on how the British gained, maintained and subsequently fought to continue to control and subjugate millions of people and their resources across the world. Essential reading for understanding monden Britain today.

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Unrelenting, shocking, but necessary

This book is sadly still necessary, given the ongoing culture wars over the legacy of the British Empire (of which it is a part), but won't convince any of the people who need convincing.

For the bulk of it's 900-odd pages this is a solid piece of targeted, selective historical research (and summarisation of existing research) into how violence and oppression was repeatedly used across the British Empire, backed up by (at best) paternalistic racist prejudices and domestic brainwashing propaganda about the benefits of liberal imperialism both at home and in the colonies.

It's particularly good tracing the evolutionary path from the invention of concentration camps in South Africa during the Boer War through the use of extreme sectarian violence by the Black and Tans in Ireland during the move to independence, to similar tactics being deployed against both Zionist settlers and Palestinians in Palestine from the 20s to the 40s, and on to the brutal suppression of various perceived enemies in Malaya and Kenya through to the 50s and 60s. It's also good at showing how these British tactics in turn inspired similarly violent, terrorist responses - from the IRA to Zionist assassinations of British officials in Palestine and the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, to the horrors of Partition in India. Many of the details here were new to me, despite having studied parts of the fall of Empire at university, and the case made for cause and effect for "a legacy of violence" is compelling.

But this is a selective history, its opponents will fairly claim. It ignores large chunks of the Empire entirely, picking out the evidence that suits its argument. If that argument is that the British Empire used violence systematically, that repression and racism was central to the Imperial endeavour, being selective could be seen as a flaw. Equally, the solid focus on the British Empire - especially when judged by today's ethical standards - could be seen as selective. How did British actions compare to those of other imperial powers? Was this violence and racism unique to Britain? The usual get-out of the imperial apologists is that even if we weren't bad, we were nowhere near as bad as the Belgians in the Congo, or the Germans in the Herero and Nama genocide - to counter this, it needs to be addressed head on more substantially than it is here.

Meanwhile, this historical body is bookended by polemics that are so unrelenting in their attacks on carefully chosen targets (especially right-wing culture warriors Niall Ferguson, Nigel Biggar, Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, and the like - but also the concept of "liberal imperialism" more broadly) that it starts to spread its net a bit too wide into starting to build a case for the entirety of British society being fundamentally racist, suggesting this as the ultimate cause for all the violence and horror detailed throughout the book. There is definitely a case to be made for Britain as racist, but in these polemical bookends too many ideas and attacks are thrown in too enthusiastically and without the depth of evidence provided in the rest of the book, to the extent that it became unconvincing even to me, and I'm very sympathetic to the case being made.

This all probably isn't helped by the fact that I was listening to the audiobook, which is incongruously read by an American man with a rather patronising, hectoring tone (and a tendency to mispronounce certain names), which - over the course of many hours - increasingly began to put me off.

Still four stars, though, because books like this can - and hopefully will - start to increase awareness of the darker side of British imperial history. This is, sadly, needed now more than ever, with a government that's spent the best part of a decade and a half trying to turn the empire back into a source of national pride, and to distract the British people by putting all the blame for everything bad in the world onto foreigners and immigrants, rather than take responsibility for its own failings for once.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose,as they say. Which is, after all, part of the point of the book.

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Essential History

There are few history books that can be regarded as essential reading. This is one. Elkins shows how the British Empire, in case after case, colony after colony, built on laws of repression, methods of torture and dubious dissembling, to try to hold on to its crumbling edifice.

A note on the performance: it is excellent , but delivered in an American accent (the. author is, after all, a Harvard Professor). Would the book’s searing message have been even more powerful if delivered in an English RP style accent?

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A devastating indictment of the British Empire

Superbly written and researched. 31 hours of irrefutable evidence against anyone still proud of empire

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Amazing

I wrongly though I was w
Ell informed about the British e
Moire.An amazing piece of historical research.

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Disturbing

This was an amazing peice of work and i believe it should be required listening/reading for anyone who requires a comprehensive insight into the colonial policies of the british empire. At times i found myself thinking...did this really happen? so sickened i was by what was being recounted sometimes in quite explicit detail.

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