Caroline Elkins | |
---|---|
Born | Caroline Fox 1969 (age 54–55) |
Nationality | American |
Occupation(s) | Professor and non-fiction writer |
Awards | Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, Guggenheim Fellowship, Fulbright, Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Harvard University Princeton University |
Academic work | |
Discipline | History and African and African American studies |
Institutions | Harvard University |
Caroline Elkins (American,born Caroline Fox,1969) is Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University,the Thomas Henry Carroll/Ford Foundation Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School,Affiliated Professor at Harvard Law School,and the Founding Oppenheimer Faculty Director of Harvard's Center for African Studies. [1] [2]
Her first book, Imperial Reckoning:The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (2005),won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It was also the basis for successful claims by former Mau Mau detainees against the British government for crimes committed in the internment camps of Kenya in the 1950s. [3] Elkins's later book, Legacy of Violence:A History of the British Empire (2022),received significant reviewer praise,with one calling it a "tour de force of historical excavation." [4] [5] [6] It was a finalist for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction,selected as one of The New York Times's Top 100 Books of 2022,and named as one of the best books of 2022 by the New Statesman,the BBC,History Today,and Waterstones. [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
Raised in Ocean Township,Monmouth County,New Jersey,Elkins graduated from Ocean Township High School in 1987. She was a three-sport varsity athlete (soccer,field hockey,and basketball),winning multiple all-state and all-Shore awards,and heavily recruited at the collegiate level,ultimately deciding to attend Princeton where she played varsity soccer and golf. She was inducted into her high school's athletic hall of fame in 2000. [13]
Elkins majored in history at Princeton,graduating summa cum laude before moving to Harvard for her master's and doctorate. Her historical methodology,which includes use of written sources as well as ethnographic field work and oral interviews,has led to major revisions in the fields of African and British imperial histories,and has also generated significant criticism,particularly from conservative academics. Elkins' Harvard PhD was concerned with the detention system employed by the colonial authorities during the Mau Mau Uprising,and served as the basis of the 2002 BBC documentary,Kenya:White Terror,in which Elkins and her fieldwork were both profiled. Kenya:White Terror won the International Red Cross Award at the Monte Carlo Film Festival. [14] [15] Elkins's dissertation provided the foundation for her 2005 publication,Imperial Reckoning,which was met with critical acclaim in newspapers and magazines around the world,including The New York Times , The Washington Post , The Guardian ,and The Economist . In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2006,Imperial Reckoning was named a book of the year by The Economist and an editors' choice by The New York Times,and was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize. [16] In its commendation of Elkins,the Pulitzer Prize Committee wrote:"Imperial Reckoning is history of the highest order:meticulously researched,brilliantly written,and powerfully dramatic. An unforgettable act of historical re-creation,it is also a disturbing reminder of the brutal imperial precedents that continue to inform Western nations in their drive to democratize the world." [17] [18]
Elkins has been a professor at Harvard University since she completed her doctoral degree in Harvard's history department in 2001. She received tenure in 2009,and subsequently became the founding director of Harvard's Center for African Studies. She was appointed the Oppenheimer Faculty Director and in her six years as director created one of the world's largest institutions for the study of Africa,raising significant funds and garnering from the US Department of Education the distinction as a National Resource Center for African Studies. [19] [20] Elkins currently teaches courses on contextual intelligence,modern Africa,the British Empire,and colonial violence in the 20th century.
In 2009,Imperial Reckoning served as the basis for an unprecedented legal claim filed by five Mau Mau detention camp survivors against the British government,and Elkins became the claimants' first expert witness before being joined by other historians in late 2010 and 2011. The case,known as Mutua and Five Others versus the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO),was heard at the High Court of Justice in London with the Honourable Justice McCombe presiding. London human rights law firm Leigh Day and the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) in Nairobi were the claimants' legal representatives. During the course of legal discovery the FCO discovered some 300 boxes of previously undisclosed files that validated on a large scale Elkins' claims in Imperial Reckoning and provided thousands of pages of new evidence supporting the claimants' case of gross abuses perpetrated by colonial officials in the detention camps of Kenya in the 1950s. [21]
On June 6,2013,the British government announced a settlement with the Mau Mau claimants,issuing its official apology of "sincere regret," a £20 million cash payment,and a monument to those tortured during the uprising,unveiled in Nairobi's Uhuru Park in 2015. [22] [23] In the wake of the settlement,Kenyan MP,Paul Muite,told the press that,"Without her research,we would not have been able to mount this suit. The research portion was a momentous task and I credit Elkins for the success of filing the case. We recognised the research and preparatory work (to file the case) had to be perfect." [24]
Elkins's later book, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (2022), received starred reviews from Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly, which also interviewed Elkins, who stated that, "I don’t believe that taking down statues erases or distorts history. Burning or hiding documents—that certainly erases and distorts history. I was an expert witness in a lawsuit against the British government by Kenyan survivors of detention camps, which led to the 'discovery' of several hundred boxes of unreleased government files on the camps. My book [Legacy of Violence] is, in part, about how we write history when much of the evidence has been destroyed or concealed. This is an important moment, in which statues and documents are coming together to help us reassess how the world became what it is." [25]
Reviewers call Legacy of Violence "Top-shelf history offering tremendous acknowledgement of past systemic abuses," and "a feat of scholarship that elucidates the bureaucratic and legal machinery of oppression, dissects the intellectual justifications for it, and explores in gripping, sometimes grisly detail the suffering that resulted. The result is a forceful challenge to recent historiographical and political defenses of British exceptionalism that punctures myths of paternalism and progress." [26] [27]
Positive reviewers include historians Rana Mitter, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Maya Jasanoff, Richard Drayton, Alex von Tunzelmann, John Darwin, Robert Gildea, Priya Satia, Erik Linstrum, Wm. Roger Louis, and Jill Lepore. Other scholars and journalists delivering positive reviews include Homi Bhabha, Howard W. French, Tim Adams, Amitav Ghosh, Robbie Millen, and Priyamvada Gopal.[ citation needed ]
Historian Robert Lyman (former British army major) gave it a negative review calling it "a piece of ideology masquerading as history". [28] University of Maryland historian Richard N. Price remarked that "if the book tends to overstuff its argument, it is also a book that is curiously thin in its conceptualization. Nuance and subtlety are strikingly absent throughout all the key arguments of the book." [29]
The Mau Mau rebellion (1952–1960), also known as the Mau Mau uprising, Mau Mau revolt, or Kenya Emergency, was a war in the British Kenya Colony (1920–1963) between the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), also known as the Mau Mau, and the British authorities. Dominated by Kikuyu, Meru and Embu fighters, the KLFA also comprised units of Kamba and Maasai who fought against the European colonists in Kenya, the British Army, and the local Kenya Regiment.
Evelyn Baring, 1st Baron Howick of Glendale,, was Governor of Southern Rhodesia from 1942 to 1944, High Commissioner for Southern Africa from 1944 to 1951, and Governor of Kenya from 1952 to 1959. Baring played an integral role in the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion. Together with Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd, Baring played a significant role in the government's efforts to deal with the rebellion, and see Kenya through to independence. Baring was aware of abuses against Mau Mau detainees. He was elevated to being the 1st Baron Howick of Glendale in 1960.
Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia,, is an English popular historian, journalist and member of the House of Lords. He is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow in the Hoover Institution in Stanford University and a Lehrman Institute Distinguished Lecturer in the New York Historical Society. He was a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery from 2013 to 2021.
Alan Tindal Lennox-Boyd, 1st Viscount Boyd of Merton, CH, PC, DL, was a British Conservative politician.
The 1959 Hola massacre was a massacre committed by British colonial forces during the Mau Mau Uprising at a colonial detention camp in Hola, Kenya.
Fitzval Remedios Santana Neville de Souza, often known as F.R.S. de Souza and Fitz de Souza, was a Kenyan lawyer and politician who was an important figure in the campaign for independence for Kenya, a member of the Kenyan parliament in the 1960s and Deputy Speaker for several years. He helped provide a legal defence for those accused of Mau Mau activities including the Kapenguria Six, and he was one of the people involved in the Lancaster House conferences held to draw up a constitutional framework for Kenyan independence.
The Kikuyu Home Guard was a government paramilitary force in Kenya from early 1953 until January 1955. It was formed in response to insurgent attacks during the Mau Mau Uprising.
The Kapenguria Six – Bildad Kaggia, Kung'u Karumba, Jomo Kenyatta, Fred Kubai, Paul Ngei, and Achieng' Oneko – were six leading Kenyan nationalists who were arrested in 1952, tried at Kapenguria in 1952–53, and imprisoned thereafter in Northern Kenya.
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, published in the UK as Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, is a 2005 nonfiction book written by Caroline Elkins and published by Henry Holt. It won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Gakaara wa Wanjaũ was a prolific Gĩkũyu author, historian, editor and publisher from Kenya.
The Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, commonly known as British Kenya or British East Africa, was part of the British Empire in Africa from 1920 until 1963. It was established when the former East Africa Protectorate was transformed into a British Crown colony in 1920. Technically, the "Colony of Kenya" referred to the interior lands, while a 16 km (10 mi) coastal strip, nominally on lease from the Sultan of Zanzibar, was the "Protectorate of Kenya", but the two were controlled as a single administrative unit. The colony came to an end in 1963 when a native Kenyan majority government was elected for the first time and eventually declared independence.
Ndeiya is located in Kiambu County, Kenya, and is near the Great Rift Valley. The name is derived from a Maasai word.
The Lari massacre was an incident during the Mau Mau Uprising in which the Mau Mau massacred approximately 74 people, including some members of the loyalist Home Guard, but mostly their families: women, children and elderly relatives. Those murdered included prominent local loyalist Luka Kangara. A total of 309 rebels were prosecuted for the massacre, of whom 136 were convicted. Seventy-one of those convicted were executed by hanging.
Dame Margery Freda Perham was a British historian of, and writer on, African affairs. She was known especially for the intellectual force of her arguments in favour of British decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office Migrated Archives are a collection of about 20,000 files and other records created by the governments of 37 British colonial dependencies, removed to the UK at independence, and held clandestinely for decades in various repositories in and around London. They came only from territories administered by the Colonial Office, so not from India and other dependencies administered by the India Office and its predecessors, whose records are in the India Office Records at the British Library.
Winning hearts and minds is a concept occasionally expressed in the resolution of war, insurgency, and other conflicts, in which one side seeks to prevail not by the use of superior force, but by making emotional or intellectual appeals to sway supporters of the other side.
The Ruck Family massacre took place during the Mau Mau Uprising. Farmer Roger Ruck, his wife Esme and six-year-old son Michael, along with one of their African servants, were killed by Mau Mau, one of whom allegedly worked for the family. The killing shocked the European community in Kenya and was widely reported in the Kenyan and British press, with many including graphic photographs of the dead child. The incident was significant in radicalising the settler population. Within 48 hours of the killings, 1,500 European settlers marched on Government House, demanding action from then Governor of Kenya Evelyn Baring.
Terence Gavaghan was a British colonial administrator. As a colonial district officer in Kenya, he was responsible for six detention centres in Mwea during the Mau Mau insurrection of the 1950s.
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire is a 2022 nonfiction history book by American historian and professor Caroline Elkins. The book covers the history of the British Empire from the Great Bengal famine of 1770 through the post-World War II period of recurring end-of-empire insurgencies up until the present-day, including the Mau Mau High Court case and the ongoing imperial history wars. The book was short-listed for the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.