Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire

The book "Age of Emergency" explores the experiences of violence in imperial Britain during the post-1945 uprisings against colonial rule. It reveals how ruthless counterinsurgencies in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus shaped the home front, generating sentiments of unease and justifications for violence. The book examines various sources, including activist campaigns, soldiers' letters, missionary networks, newspaper stories, television dramas, sermons, novels, and plays, to document how Britons learned to live with colonial warfare. It also highlights the doubts, consequences, and aestheticizations of violence by contemporaries. The book emphasizes that the compromising entanglements of war extended far beyond the conflict zones of empire, with unsettling echoes in our own time.

Format: Hardback
Length: 328 pages
Publication date: 24 April 2023
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc

When uprisings against colonial rule broke out across the world after 1945, Britain responded with overwhelming and brutal force. Although this period has conventionally been dubbed postwar, it was punctuated by a succession of hard-fought, long-running conflicts that were geographically diffuse, morally ambiguous, and impervious to neat endings or declarations of victory. Ruthless counterinsurgencies in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus rippled through British society, molding a home front defined not by the mass mobilization of resources but by sentiments of unease and the justifications they generated.

Age of Emergency traces facts and feelings about violence as torture, summary executions, collective punishments, and other ruthless methods were employed in states of emergency. It examines how Britons at home learned to live with colonial warfare by examining activist campaigns, soldiers' letters, missionary networks, newspaper stories, television dramas, sermons, novels, and plays. As knowledge of brutality spread, so did the tactics of accommodation aimed at undermining it. Some contemporaries cast doubt on facts about violence. Others stressed the unanticipated consequences of intervening to stop it. Still, others aestheticized violence by celebrating visions of racial struggle or dramatizing the grim fatalism of dirty wars. Through their voices, Erik Linstrum narrates what violence looked, heard, and felt like as an empire ended, a history with unsettling echoes in our own time.

Vividly analyzing how far-off atrocities became domestic problems, Age of Emergency shows that the compromising entanglements of war extended far beyond the conflict zones. It also highlights the ways in which the legacies of colonial violence continue to shape contemporary Britain and the world. This is a powerful and essential book for anyone interested in understanding the complex and often painful history of imperialism and its aftermath.

Weight: 562g
Dimension: 169 x 244 x 36 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780197572030