![]() Some praised Elkins for breaking the “code of silence” that had squelched discussion of British imperial violence. Britain’s Gulag, titled Imperial Reckoning in the US, earned Elkins a great deal of attention and a Pulitzer prize. Elkins framed the story as a personal journey of discovery. ![]() It was also an unconventional first book for a junior scholar. It was a tale of systematic violence and high-level cover-ups. Her study, Britain’s Gulag, chronicled how the British had battled this anticolonial uprising by confining some 1.5 million Kenyans to a network of detention camps and heavily patrolled villages. Risky because investigating those misdeeds had already earned Elkins heaps of abuse.Įlkins had come to prominence in 2005 with a book that exhumed one of the nastiest chapters of British imperial history: the suppression of Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion. Improbable because the case, then being assembled by human rights lawyers in London, would attempt to hold Britain accountable for atrocities perpetrated 50 years earlier, in pre-independence Kenya. The idea was both legally improbable and professionally risky. That was the request Caroline Elkins, a Harvard historian, received in 2008. H elp us sue the British government for torture.
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