Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to address the ways in which selective readings of Holocaust history have informed both Holocaust memorialisations in the UK and how the British Empire is represented and remembered. While an awareness of the Holocaust in the UK has been raised, there is a tendency in the UK to emphasise the perpetration of violence by others while occluding Britain’s historical role in extreme violence. This chapter argues that the explorations of the Holocaust need to be accompanied—not replaced—by greater examination and self-reflection related to British history and violence. There has long been a prevalent view of the British Empire, which tends to adhere to the longstanding view that the empire was fundamentally benevolent and was beneficial to both the ‘colonisers’ and the ‘colonised’; this approach needs to be challenged and the violent legacies of empire acknowledged.
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Notes
- 1.
On ‘screen memory’ see Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 12–16 and Dan Stone, ‘Britannia Waives the Rules: British Imperialism and Holocaust Memory’, in Stone, History, Memory and Mass Atrocity: Essays on the Holocaust and Genocide (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2006), p. 190.
- 2.
Dan Stone, ‘From Stockholm to Stockton: The Holocaust and/as Heritage in Britain’, in Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen (eds), Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 212–29.
- 3.
Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (London: Earthscan, 1990 [1965]). An advocate of empire is Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2002).
- 4.
David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949 (Pan Books, 2016), Kindle edition.
- 5.
Cesarani, Final Solution.
- 6.
Tom Lawson, ‘Britain’s Promise to Forget: Some Historiographical Reflections on What Do Students Know and Understand about the Holocaust? Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 23:3 (2017), 345–63 and Stuart Foster et al., What Do Students Know and Understand about the Holocaust? Evidence from English Secondary Schools (London: UCL Institute for Education, 2016).
- 7.
Notably, Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014).
- 8.
See Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness.
- 9.
Paul Salmons, ‘Why Do We Continue to Ignore the Holocaust?’ Paper presented at the David Cesarani Holocaust Memorial Lecture at Royal Holloway University, Egham, 26 January 2016.
- 10.
Salmons, ‘Why Do We Continue to Ignore the Holocaust?’
- 11.
See Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness, Chapter 6.
- 12.
David Cesarani, Britain, the Holocaust and Its Legacy: The Theme for Holocaust Memorial Day (2002), http://www.ofmdfmni.gov.uk/2002_theme_paper.pdf: accessed 21 November 2011, p. 2; see also: Tony Kushner, ‘Too Little, Too Late? Reflections on Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Day’, The Journal of Israeli History, 23:1 (2004), 116–29.
- 13.
See Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933–1948: British Immigration Policy and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
- 14.
Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen, ‘Introduction’, in idem (eds), Britain and the Holocaust, p. 3.
- 15.
Eric Markusen and David Kopf (eds), The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide and Total War in the Twentieth Century (Boulder; Oxford: Westview Press, 1995).
- 16.
We need to move beyond demarcating ‘the Holocaust’ as ending in 1945: Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015).
- 17.
Sharples and Jensen, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.
- 18.
See Donald Bloxham, ‘Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Days: Using the Past in the Service of the Present’, Immigrants and Minorities, 21:1 (2003), 47.
- 19.
Stone, ‘Stockholm to Stockton’, p. 222. See, Holocaust Memorial Day 2017, ‘Recipe from the Jewish Community’, https://www.hmd.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/jewish_community_recipe_card_hmd_2017_final.pdf: accessed 1 September 2018. Although, on local HMD commemorative efforts and their deviation from the centralised narrative of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust see, John E. Richardson, ‘“If Not Me, Then Who?” Examining Engagement with Holocaust Memorial Day Commemoration in Britain’, Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, 32:1 (2018), 22–37.
- 20.
Stone, ‘Stockholm to Stockton’, p. 213.
- 21.
Stone, ‘Britannia Waives the Rules’, 188; Martin Shaw, ‘Britain and Genocide: Historical and Contemporary Parameters of National Responsibility’, Review of International Studies, 37:5 (2011), 2417–38.
- 22.
See, Tom Lawson, ‘The Holocaust and Colonial Genocide at the Imperial War Museum’, in Sharples and Jensen (eds), Britain and the Holocaust, pp. 160–68.
- 23.
Lawson, ‘The Holocaust and Colonial Genocide’, p. 160; Rebecca Jinks, ‘Holocaust Memory and Contemporary Atrocities: The Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition and Crimes Against Humanity Exhibition’, in Sharples and Jensen (eds), Britain and the Holocaust, pp. 142–59.
- 24.
On the ‘“good war” paradigm’ see Mark Donnelly, ‘“We Should Do Something for the Fiftieth”: Remembering Auschwitz, Belsen and the Holocaust in Britain in 1995’, in Sharples and Jensen (eds), Britain and the Holocaust, p. 173 and Jon Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence, and Fear of Brutalization in Post–First World War Britain’, The Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003), 557–89.
- 25.
Elizabeth Edwards and Matt Mead, ‘Absent Histories and Absent Images: Photographs, Museums and the Colonial Past’, Museum & Society, 11:1 (2013), 32, in reference to: Lynn Meskell, ‘Negative Heritage and Past Mastering in Archaeology’, Anthropological Quarterly, 75:3 (2002), 557–74.
- 26.
The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol was closed completely in 2009. The International Slavery Museum in Liverpool marks something of an exception. Harriet Sherwood, ‘Imperial War Museum in Clash over Planned Holocaust Memorial’, The Guardian, 7 October 2017 and Afua Hirsch, ‘Britain’s Colonial Crimes Deserve a Lasting Memorial: Here’s Why’, The Guardian, 22 November 2017.
- 27.
Ed Balls and Lord Pickles, ‘Why a New Memorial to the Holocaust Is Essential’, UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, originally published in the London Evening Standard on 3 September 2018. Available online: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/why-a-new-memorial-to-the-holocaust-is-essential: accessed 21 October 2018. See also, Britain’s Promise to Remember: The Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission Report (London: Cabinet Office, 2005).
- 28.
See Richard Gott, ‘Shoot Them to Be Sure’, in Stephen Howe (ed.), The New Imperial Histories Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), p. 108.
- 29.
Tom Lawson, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), p. 23.
- 30.
Shaw, ‘Britain and Genocide’, p. 2428.
- 31.
Salmons, ‘Why Do We Continue to Ignore the Holocaust?’
- 32.
A. Dirk Moses, ‘Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History’, in Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn, 2010 [2008]), p. 26. On the misperceptions of the ‘mechanical’ nature of the Holocaust see also, Cesarani, Final Solution; Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 153.
- 33.
Edward T. Linenthal cited in Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, p. 9.
- 34.
See Dan Stone, Concentration Camps: A Short History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) and Aidan Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876–1903 (CA: University of California Press, 2017).
- 35.
Stone, ‘Britannia Waives the Rules’, 174. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001). In relation to the Holocaust see for example: Shelley Baranowski, “Nazi Colonialism and the Holocaust: Inseparable Connections.” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, 27:1 (2013), 60.
- 36.
Dan Michman, ‘The Jewish Dimension of the Holocaust in Dire Straits? Current Challenges of Interpretation and Scope’, in Norman J. W. Goda (ed.), Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transitional Approaches (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2014), p. 17.
- 37.
Tom Lawson, ‘Coming to Terms with the Past: Reading and Writing Colonial Genocide in the Shadow of the Holocaust’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 20:1–2 (2014), 135, 147.
- 38.
See Dan Stone, ‘Genocide as Transgression’, European Journal of Social Theory, 7:1 (2004), 45–65 and Rebecca Jinks, Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm? (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). In response, advocates for other genocide victims have made their own uniqueness claims: Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997).
- 39.
On the problems of ‘uniqueness’ see Lawson, ‘Coming to Terms with the Past’.
- 40.
Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory.
- 41.
Bloxham, ‘Britain’s Holocaust Memorial Days’, p. 57.
- 42.
Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London: Penguin, 2009 [2008]) and David Furber and Wendy Lower, ‘Colonialism and Genocide in Nazi-Occupied Poland and Ukraine’, in Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide, pp. 372–402.
- 43.
See, Richard H. King and Dan Stone (eds), Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide (New York: Berghahn, 2008).
- 44.
Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944).
- 45.
Dan Stone, ‘Defending the Plural: Hannah Arendt and Genocide Studies’, New Formations, 71 (2011), 52; idem, Histories of the Holocaust, pp. 214–16.
- 46.
A case in point is the destruction of the Aborigines in Australia; for further discussion see: A. Dirk Moses, ‘Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History’, in Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York: Berghahn, 2005), pp. 24–25, pp. 28–35; Alison Palmer differentiates between ‘state-led’ and ‘society led’ genocide: Palmer, ‘Colonial and Modern Genocide: Explanations and Categories’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21:1 (1998), 89–115.
- 47.
Stone, Histories of the Holocaust and Cesarani, Final Solution.
- 48.
Moses, ‘Empire, Colony, Genocide’, p. 9.
- 49.
Lemkin, Axis Rule, p. 79.
- 50.
See Moses, ‘Empire, Colony, Genocide’, pp. 12–13. See Lemkin, Axis Rule, Chapter 9.
- 51.
Lawson, ‘Coming to Terms with the Past’, p. 147; Dan Stone, ‘Raphael Lemkin on the Holocaust’, Journal of Genocide Research, 7:4 (2005), 539. As Hannah Arendt acknowledged, Nazi genocide would not have been limited to European Jewry, in the event of Nazi victory: ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship’ (1964), in Jerome Kohn (ed.), Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), p. 43 and Robert Gellately, ‘The Third Reich, the Holocaust, and Visions of Serial Genocide’, in Gellately and Ben Kiernan (eds), The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 241–64.
- 52.
See, Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, pp. 215–17.
- 53.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1976 [1951]), p. 223. For further discussion see: Stone, ‘Defending the Plural’, pp. 46–57. On ‘the moment of the boomerang’ in reference to decolonisation: Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 2001 [1965]), p. 7.
- 54.
For example Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000 [1955]); W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto’, Jewish Life (1952), 14–15.
- 55.
On these connections, Michelle Gordon, ‘Colonial Violence and Holocaust Studies’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 21:4 (2015), 272–91.
- 56.
As discussed by Moses, ‘Genocide and Settler Society’, p. 4.
- 57.
Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism: A Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination’, Patterns of Prejudice, 39:2 (2005), 197–219.
- 58.
Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Nationalsozialismus postkolonial: Plädoyer zur Globalisierung der deutschen Gewaltgeschichte’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 57:6 (2009), 534.
- 59.
Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz’, Central European History, 42 (2009), 279–300; Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, p. 237; and Susanne Kuss, German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence, trans. Andrew Smith (London: Harvard University Press, 2017), p. 3. Including Isabel V. Hull’s Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005).
- 60.
Hull, Absolute Destruction.
- 61.
Kuss, German Colonial Wars.
- 62.
Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, Volume II: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), p. 52. On genocidal ‘moments’: A. Dirk Moses, ‘An Antipodean Genocide? The Origins of the Genocidal Moment in Australia’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2:1 (2000), 89–106.
- 63.
A key text on colonial warfare remains J. A. de Moor and H. L. Wesseling (eds), Imperialism and War: Essays on Colonial Wars in Asia and Africa (Leiden: Brill, 1989).
- 64.
A point also made by Stone, ‘Britannia Waives the Rules’, p. 175.
- 65.
On the Holocaust as ‘subaltern genocide’ see Moses, ‘Empire, Colony, Genocide’, p. 38.
- 66.
A. Dirk Moses, ‘Moving the Genocide Debate Beyond the History Wars’, Australian Journal of Politics & History, 54:2 (2008), 264. Of course much depends on how one defines ‘The Holocaust’: for contrasting definitions see: Michman, ‘The Jewish Dimension of the Holocaust’, pp. 17–38 and Carroll P. Kakel, III, The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide: Hitler’s ‘Indian Wars’ in the ‘Wild East’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. vii.
- 67.
A. Dirk Moses, ‘Hannah Arendt, Imperialisms, and the Holocaust’, in Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama (eds), German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), emphasis in the original.
- 68.
Gordon, ‘Colonial Violence’, p. 6.
- 69.
As highlighted in Donald Bloxham et al., ‘Europe in the World: Systems and Cultures of Violence’, in Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth (eds), Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 40.
- 70.
Birthe Kundrus, ‘Forum: The German Colonial Imagination’, German History, 26:2 (2008), 259. See Ulrike Lindner, ‘German Colonialism and the British Neighbour in Africa before 1914: Self-Determination, Lines of Demarcation, and Cooperation’, in Langbehn and Salama (eds), German Colonialism, p. 266.
- 71.
An illuminating discussion is the exchange between Duncan Bell and John Darwin, ‘Roundtable: Imperial History by the Book: A Roundtable on John Darwin’s The Empire Project’, Journal of British Studies, 54:4 (2015), 987–97. However, there are exceptions, notably, V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow Man, and White Man in an Age of Empire (London: The Cresset Library, 1988 [1969]).
- 72.
A case in point: Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Also noted by Stone, ‘Britannia Waives the Rules’, p. 182.
- 73.
Not least, in order to incorporate the experiences of indigenous troops wherever possible. One attempt is Ronald M. Lamothe, Slaves of Fortune: Sudanese Soldiers and the River War 1896–1898 (Oxford: James Currey, 2011).
- 74.
Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (London: Verso, 2011).
- 75.
See, Kim A. Wagner, ‘Seeing Like a Soldier: The Amritsar Massacre and the Politics of Military History’, in Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless (eds), Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 23–37. For a traditional approach see, Donald Featherstone, Colonial Small Wars 1837–1901 (Newton Abbot, Devon: David & Charles, 1973).
- 76.
Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007); Robbie McVeigh, ‘“The Balance of Cruelty”: Ireland, Britain and the Logic of Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research, 10:4 (2008), 541–61.
- 77.
These include: Levene, The Rise of the West; Michael Lieven, ‘“Butchering the Brutes All Over the Place”: Total War and Massacre in Zululand, 1879’, History, 18 (1999), 614–32; Elizabeth Kolsky, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception: Frontier “Fanaticism” and State Violence in British India’, American Historical Review, 120:4 (2015), 1218–46. Kim A. Wagner, Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
- 78.
On the contradictory approach of the British to issues of slavery and exploitation see for example, Esme Cleall, ‘“In Defiance of the Highest Principles of Justice, Principles of Righteousness”: The Indenturing of the Bechuana Rebels and the Ideals of Empire, 1897–1900’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 40:4 (2012), 601–18.
- 79.
Tom Lloyd, ‘States of Exception? Sovereignty and Counter-Insurgency in British India, Ireland and Kenya circa 1810–1960’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009).
- 80.
See Kolsky, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law’, p. 1236.
- 81.
David Cesarani, Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War against Jewish Terrorism 1945–1948 (London: Vintage, 2010), p. 39; Kolsky, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law’.
- 82.
See Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
- 83.
Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
- 84.
Patrick Wolfe, ‘Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race’, American Historical Review, (2001), 867. Cf. Palmer, ‘Colonial and Modern Genocide’, p. 103.
- 85.
Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
- 86.
Regarding southern Africa: Nigel Penn, ‘The British and the “Bushmen”: The Massacre of the Cape San, 1795 to 1828’, Journal of Genocide Research, 15:2 (2013), 188–89.
- 87.
Moses, ‘An Antipodean Genocide?’ pp. 89–90. Of course the issue of ‘intent’ has been central to debates on the Holocaust: see Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, Chapter 2.
- 88.
Jordanna Bailkin, ‘The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British India?’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48:2 (2006), 467.
- 89.
Bailkin, ‘The Boot and the Spleen’, p. 467.
- 90.
Stone, ‘Defending the Plural’, p. 52.
- 91.
See: Amanda Nettlebeck and Robert Foster, ‘Colonial Judiciaries, Aboriginal Protection and South Australia’s Policy of Punishing “with Exemplary Severity”’, Australian Historical Studies, 41:3 (2010), 319–36.
- 92.
Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), p. 1.
- 93.
Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, p. 2.
- 94.
Lemkin discusses ‘barbarity’ and ‘vandalism’: Axis Rule, p. 91.
- 95.
Jill C. Bender, The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 19, p. 144.
- 96.
Bender, The 1857 Indian Uprising, pp. 132–33.
- 97.
Charles Edward Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, 3rd edn (London: General Staff, War Office, 1906 [1896, 1899]), p. 42, p. 159.
- 98.
Callwell, Small Wars, p. 42, p. 148.
- 99.
Moses, ‘Empire, Colony, Genocide’, p. 26.
- 100.
Callwell, Small Wars.
- 101.
Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (London: Basic Books, 2000 [1999]).
- 102.
Gordon, ‘Colonial Violence’.
- 103.
Vinay Lal, ‘The Concentration Camp and Development: The Pasts and Future of Genocide’, A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone (eds), Colonialism and Genocide (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 131–32. See Gordon, ‘Colonial Violence’, p. 8.
- 104.
Cited in Edward M. Spiers, ‘The Use of the Dum Dum Bullet in Colonial Warfare’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 4:1 (1975), 7. See Alex J. Bellamy, ‘Mass Killing and the Politics of Legitimacy: Empire and the Ideology of Selective Extermination’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 58:2 (2012), 159–80.
- 105.
See Sheldon Anderson, ‘Metternich, Bismarck, and the Myth of the “Long Peace,” 1815–1914’, Peace & Change, 32:3 (2007), 301.
- 106.
See Ann Curthoys, ‘Genocide in Tasmania: The History of an Idea’, in Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide, p. 231.
- 107.
Kim A. Wagner, “‘Calculated to Strike Terror”: The Amritsar Massacre and the Spectacle of Colonial Violence’, Past and Present, 233:1 (2016), 207; idem, ‘Savage Warfare: Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency’, History Workshop Journal, 85:1 (2018), 218.
- 108.
Michelle Gordon, Extreme Violence and the ‘British Way’: Colonial Warfare in Perak, Sierra Leone and Sudan (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).
- 109.
See for example, Garnet Wolseley, ‘The Negro as a Soldier’, Fortnightly Review, 44 (1888), 689–703.
- 110.
Kim A. Wagner, The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 (London: Hurst, 2017), Chapter 10.
- 111.
Lawson, The Last Man, p. 51.
- 112.
Lawson, The Last Man, pp. 18–19.
- 113.
Martin Thomas, Bob Moore, and L. J. Butler (eds), Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial States (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
- 114.
Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23:4–5 (2012), special issue: British Ways of Counter-Insurgency: A Historical Perspective.
- 115.
Arendt, preface to the first edition, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. xvii.
- 116.
David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005), p. 5.
- 117.
Dan Stone, ‘Editor’s Introduction: Postwar Europe as History’, in Stone, The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 15.
- 118.
For an overview of the historiography of counterinsurgency and decolonisation see: Ian F. W. Beckett, ‘British Counter-Insurgency: A Historiographical Reflection’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23: 4–5 (2002), 781–98.
- 119.
Cesarani, Major Farran’s Hat.
- 120.
Matthew Hughes, ‘The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39’, English Historical Review, 124:507 (2009), 332.
- 121.
Cesarani, Major Farran’s Hat, p. 9.
- 122.
Cesarani, Major Farran’s Hat, p. 215.
- 123.
Stone, Concentration Camps, pp. 95–96, p. 98.
- 124.
See, Stone, Liberation of the Camps.
- 125.
Cesarani, Final Solution.
- 126.
For example, Karl Hack, ‘Everyone Lived in Fear: Malaya and the British Way of Counterinsurgency’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23:4–5 (2012), 671–99.
- 127.
In relation to the Congo see, Sarah De Mul, ‘The Holocaust as a Paradigm for the Congo Atrocities: Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost’, Criticism, 53:4 (2011), 587–606.
- 128.
Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005).
- 129.
Elkins, Britain’s Gulag, p. 121.
- 130.
Elkins, Britain’s Gulag, p. 97. See Gordon, ‘Colonial Violence’, p. 7.
- 131.
Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, p. 297.
- 132.
Elkins, Britain’s Gulag, p. 67.
- 133.
Huw Bennett disputes this approach in Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 108 and Martin Crook, ‘The Mau Mau Genocide: A Neo-Lemkinian Analysis’, Journal of Human Rights in the Commonwealth, 1:1 (2013), 18–37.
- 134.
Elkins, Britain’s Gulag, see p. 49, p. 89, p. 90.
- 135.
Marshall S. Clough, Review of ‘Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya’, The Journal of Military History, 69:3 (2005), 886.
- 136.
Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, p. 7.
- 137.
Elkins, Britain’s Gulag, p. 96.
- 138.
Elkins, Britain’s Gulag, p. 214.
- 139.
Stone, Concentration Camps, p. 102.
- 140.
See John Newsinger, ‘Why Rhodes Must Fall’, Race & Class, 58:2 (2016), 70–8.
- 141.
One example is a consideration of Lord Cromer, Consul-General of Egypt in 1896 within the context of Arendt’s study of Adolf Eichmann: Yehouda Shenhav, ‘Beyond “Instrumental Rationality”: Lord Cromer and the Imperial Roots of Eichmann’s Bureaucracy’, Journal of Genocide Research, 15:4 (2013), 379–99 and Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963).
- 142.
For example, Michelle Gordon, ‘Viewing Violence in the British Empire: Images of Atrocity from the Battle of Omdurman, 1898’, Journal of Perpetrator Research, 2:2 (2019), 65–100. Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (New York, NY: I.B. Tauris, 2004).
- 143.
Kitty Millet, The Victims of Slavery, Colonization and the Holocaust: A Comparative History of Persecution (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
- 144.
See, Charlotte Lydia Riley, ‘Imperial History Wars’, History Workshop Online, 19 March 2018, http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/imperial-history-wars: accessed 9 May 2018.
- 145.
Piers Brendon, ‘A Moral Audit of the British Empire’, History Today, 57:10 (2007), 44–47.
- 146.
‘Did the British Empire or the Nazis have more Impact on the Modern World?’ BBC World Service, 20 February 2013.
- 147.
Wagner, ‘Seeing Like a Soldier’, p. 25.
- 148.
A case in point is the Sierra Leone ‘Hut Tax’ War: Gordon, Extreme Violence, p. 127.
- 149.
Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance’, Archival Science, 2 (2002), 99–100. This task has been made even more difficult: Ian Cobain, Owen Bowcott and Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Britain Destroyed Records of Colonial Crimes’, Guardian, 18 April 2012.
- 150.
Owen Jones, ‘William Hague is Wrong… We Must Own Up to Our Brutal Colonial Past’, The Independent, 3 September 2012.
- 151.
Lawson, ‘Coming to Terms with the Past’, p. 145.
- 152.
See, Will Dahlgreen, ‘The British Empire is “Something to be Proud of”,’ 26 July 2014, https://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/07/26/britain-proud-its-empire: accessed 1 September 2018.
- 153.
Shaw, ‘Britain and Genocide’, p. 2418 and Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (London: Penguin, 2017), p. xxvii.
- 154.
Richard Drayton, ‘Where Does the World Historian Write From? Moral Objectivity, Moral Conscience and the Past and Present of Imperialism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 46:3 (2011), 671–85.
- 155.
Stone, ‘Britannia Waives the Rules’, p. 175. See, Edwards and Mead, ‘Absent Histories’, p. 19 and Jenny Kidd, ‘Challenging History: Summative Document’, November 2009, https://www.city.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/84082/Challenging-History-Summative-Document.pdf: accessed 1 September 2018.
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Gordon, M. (2020). Selective Histories: Britain, the Empire and the Holocaust. In: Lawson, T., Pearce, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55932-8_11
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