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

An eye-opening account of how violence was experienced not just on the frontlines of colonial terror but at home in imperial Britain. 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 uneasiness 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 of empire. "When uprisings against colonial rule broke out across the world after 1945, Britain responded with overwhelming and brutal force. What did people in Britain know about the use of torture, summary executions, collective punishments, and other ruthless methods? How did they learn about the violence committed in Britain's name? And how did they learn to live with it? The brutality of counterinsurgencies in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus rippled through British society, molding a home front defined not by the mobilization of resources, but by moral uneasiness and the justifications they generated in response. Age of Emergency traces facts and feelings about atrocity as they moved through activist campaigns, soldiers' letters, missionary networks, newspaper stories, sermons, novels, plays, and television dramas. While many Britons voiced opposition to colonial violence, an array of tactics employed to undermine dissent proved decisive. Some contemporaries cast doubt on facts about brutality. Others stressed the unanticipated consequences of intervening to stop it. Still others celebrated visions of racial struggle or aestheticized the grim fatalism of dirty wars. Accommodating violence that was both remote and inescapable, duty-bound and depraved, necessary and futile, shaped the British experience of decolonization"-- Provided by publisher Age of Emergency examines how metropolitan Britons understood colonial violence in the two decades after V-E Day when ""small wars"" raged on the frontiers of empire in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus