A new book by Caroline Elkins. A review “ With its enormous breadth and ambition, it amounts to something approaching a one-volume history of imperial Britain’s use of force, torture, and deceit around the world. As devastating as the details of these tactics are, even more damning is Elkins’s account of what she argues has been the persistent and perverse misuse of law to cast a veneer of justice and respectability over the remorseless exploitation of others. “As its title suggests, Elkins’s book argues that violence was not just an incidental feature of the British Empire, not simply its midwife, so to speak. Rather, it was foundational to the system itself, a fact borne out in considerable detail.” But Elkins’s “most original argument lies not in the violence itself but rather in London’s use and abuse of the notion of the rule of law, much touted by Britain as an elevating feature of modern Western civilization and a pillar of democracy. “ Elkins convincingly demonstrates that duri
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51