Imperial Reckoning

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Britain fought in the Second World War to save the world from fascism But just a few years after the defeat of Hitler came the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya a mass armed rebellion by the Kikuyu people, demanding the return of their land and freedom The draconian response of Britain s colonial government was to detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population of one and a half million to hold them in camps or confine them in villages ringed with barbed wire and to portray them as sub human savages.From 1952 until the end of the war in 1960 tens of thousands of detainees and possibly a hundred thousand or died from the combined effects of exhaustion, disease, starvation and systemic physical brutality Until now these events have remained untold, largely because the British government in Kenya destroyed most of its files For the last eight years Caroline Elkins has conducted exhaustive research to piece together the story, unearthing reams of documents and interviewing several hundred Kikuyu survivors Britain s Gulag reveals what happened inside Kenya s detention camps, as well as the efforts to conceal the truth Now, for the first time, we can understand the full savagery of the Mau Mau war and the ruthless determination with which Britain sought to control its empire. New Download Imperial Reckoning [ author ] Caroline Elkins [ Kindle ePUB or eBook ] – kino-fada.fr Can t give it anything other than five stars, as it accomplishes everything it sets out to do, and is vivid and readable and very thorough Not the kind of book that the casual reader who likes a little history now and then is going to really enjoy Not that I think the casual reader is going to have a lot of trouble understanding it, but do you really want to immerse yourself in the world of concentration camps and secret torture and execution in 1950s Kenya I m not sure you do The thing that Can t give it anything other than five stars, as it accomplishes everything it sets out to do, and is vivid and readable and very thorough Not the kind of book that the casual reader who likes a little history now and then is going to really enjoy Not that I think the casual reader is going to have a lot of trouble understanding it, but do you really want to immerse yourself in the world of concentration camps and secret torture and execution in 1950s Kenya I m not sure you do The thing that is so hard to believe about this book is that the British, immediately after fighting against and defeating the Nazis, and liberating the Nazi concentration camps, were able to justify to themselves the detention of thousands of Africans in concentration...If I could, I would give it a 2.5.The book was the author s dissertation on the Mau Mau uprising of the Kikuyu people in Kenya during the end of the colonial era Specifically, it detailed the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu in the Pipeline, a huge prison system designed to draw from prisoners confessions of their allegiance to the Mau Mau cause The confessions were forced from prisoners through torture so brutal, i...An extraordinary account and a must read for those that wish to gain some insight into colonialism and the atrocities that have been committed in the name of so called civilization Very well researched book Its probably only of interest to those who study colonialism or have an interest in Kenya C...This book is very hard to read, though not because of the quality of the prose Elkins covers the background to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the deliberations on how to respond to it by the colonial leadership in Nairobi and the British government, and the resulting protests and calls for inquiries by missionaries, journalists, and Labor MPs, but a good half orof the book details day to day life as it was experienced by practically all Kikuyu, with the exception of a small cadre of loyal This book is very hard to read, though not because of the quality of the prose Elkins covers the background to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the deliberations on how to respond to it by the colonial leadership in Nairobi and the British government, and the resulting protests and calls for inquiries by missionaries, journalists, and Labor MPs, but a good half orof the book details day to day life as it was experienced by practically all Kikuyu, with the exception of a small cadre of loyalists and the actual forest guerrillas, though once captured they mostly went to the same ...The author discloses in the beginning of the book that this book was borne from her dissertation, and it reads as a dissertation Elkin s central argument is that Britain deliberately and knowingly skirted around its own domestic and international laws in order to brutally crush the Kikuyu Mau Mau movement with torture, maiming, and widespread killing and indefinite detention of suspects They did so because the dehumanization of the Kikuyu, already deep rooted in pervasive racism of the time The author discloses in the beginning of the book that this book was borne from her dissertation, and it reads as a dissertation Elkin s central argument is that Britain deliberately and knowingly skirted around its own domestic and international laws in order to brutally crush the Kikuyu Mau Mau movement with torture, maiming, and widespread killing and indefinite detention of suspects They did so because the dehumanization of the Kikuyu, already deep rooted in pervasive racism of the time allowed any acts of violence from the Kikuyu to be seen as as a savage, animalistic threat to the survival of Kenya s white settler community and the very existence of the Britain s civilizing mission, whi...This was an eye opening book and I read it at a time when Britain s role in the world and in Europe has been dramatically altered with their withdrawal from the EU The importance of this book is understood when put in the context of the time Britain had just helped defeat Germany in WWII and liberate concentration and death camps filled with people Only a handful of years later a group of Kenyans seek their freedom and independence and there are a few killings of white settlers The Colonial This was an eye opening book and I read it at a time when Britain s role in the world and in Europe has been dramatically altered with their withdrawal from the EU The importance of this book is understood when put in the context of the time Britain had just helped defeat Germany in WWII and liberate concentration and death camps filled with people Only a handful of years later a group of Kenyans seek their free...An stunning and exhaustive account of Britain s gruesome suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya Elkins s work here has been widely criticized for overestimating the number of rebel casualties and for failing to represent equally the brutality employed by the Mau Mau fighers The former critique seems to have been largely ratified by historians, but the latter strikes me as misguided.Elkins does not set out to revise well documented accounts of Mau Mau savagery but to contextualize them ag An stunning and exhaustive account of Britain s gruesome suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya Elkins s work here has been widely criticized for overestimating the number of rebel casualties and for failing to represent equally the brutality employed by the Mau Mau fighers The former critique seems to have been largely ratified by historians, but the latter strikes me as misguided.Elkins does not set out to revise well documented accounts of Mau Mau savagery but to contextualize them against a vast and capricious system of colonial repression Her project is to explore the hypocrisies of the British Colonial Office and its claims of civility and moral rectitude To this end, Imperial Reckoning is a forceful indictment of Britain s administration of Kenya, revealing it to be at once incompetent, racist and willfully cruel.This book certainly could have provided athorough and nuanced account of how the uprising was perceived by the broader...This book is about the colonial reign of the British in Kenya It gives a history of the country and then really focuses on the British being in Kenya When reading about the treatment of the Kenyans by the British, it brings up feelings of disgust and absolute horror I recommend the boo...Starred Book It is about Britan s smashing of the Mau Mau 1950s uprising Now called Kenyans, they were driven off their land, fought back against the British and were crushed It took a L O N G time for the British people to get the story because of the lies by the colonial administrati...This is bound to make you sick A solid historical study, and the author is mad But she has good reason The indictment of British colonialism in Kenya is convincing, even though the Brits cleaned out their archives and left few damning clues.

Imperial Reckoning
  • English
  • 06 October 2018
  • Paperback
  • 496 pages
  • 0805080015
  • Caroline Elkins
  • Imperial Reckoning