
Legacy of Violence
A History of the British Empire
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Narrated by:
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Adam Barr
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By:
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Caroline Elkins
About this listen
The Baillie Gifford Prize, Short-listed, 2022
From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian: a searing study of the British Empire that probes the country's pervasive use of violence throughout the twentieth century and traces how these practices were exported, modified, and institutionalized in colonies around the globe
Sprawling across a quarter of the world's land mass and claiming nearly seven hundred million people, Britain's twentieth-century empire was the largest empire in human history. For many Britons, it epitomized their nation's cultural superiority. But what legacy did the island nation deliver to the world? Covering more than two hundred years of history, Caroline Elkins reveals an evolutionary and racialized doctrine that espoused an unrelenting deployment of violence to secure and preserve the nation's imperial interests. She outlines how ideological foundations of violence were rooted in the Victorian era calls for punishing recalcitrant "natives," and how over time, its forms became increasingly systematized. And she makes clear that when Britain could no longer maintain control over the violence it provoked and enacted, it retreated from empire, destroying and hiding incriminating evidence of its policies and practices.
Drawing on more than a decade of research on four continents, Legacy of Violence implicates all sides of Britain's political divide in the creation, execution, and cover-up of imperial violence. By demonstrating how and why violence was the most salient factor underwriting Britain's empire and the nation's imperial identity at home, Elkins upends long-held myths and sheds new light on empire's role in shaping the world today.
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Critic reviews
Winner of the 2024 NYU/Axinn Foundation Prize
Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize
“Sweeping and detailed . . . With its enormous breadth and ambition, [Legacy of Violence] amounts to something approaching a one-volume history of imperial Britain’s use of force, torture, and deceit around the world. . . . Assembling so many examples spread widely across space and time allows Elkins to build an impressively damning account of the British Empire.”—Howard W. French, The Nation
“In this sweeping, ambitious chronicle, [Elkins] extends her commanding investigative and interpretive powers around the globe to include India, South Africa and Palestine. Elkins convincingly makes the case that the British Empire, with its principles cloaked in uplifting paternalism, was built on violence.”—The National Book Review
“Elkins’s intricate but immersive account is 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.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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Story
Between 1861 and 1865, the clash of the greatest armies the Western hemisphere had ever seen turned small towns, little-known streams, and obscure meadows in the American countryside into names we will always remember. In those great battles, those streams ran red with blood-and the United States was truly born.
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Excellent Series
- By Rodney on 07-09-13
By: Gary W. Gallagher, and others
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Land Between the Rivers
- A 5,000-Year History of Iraq
- By: Bartle Bull
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 22 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Bull chronicles the story of Iraq from the exploits of Gilgamesh to the fall of the Iraqi monarchy that ushered in its modern era. The land between the rivers has been the melting pot and battleground of countless outsiders. Here, Judaism was born and the Sunni-Shia schism took its bloody shape.
By: Bartle Bull
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The Anarchy
- The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
- By: William Dalrymple
- Narrated by: Sid Sagar
- Length: 15 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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The Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world’s most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas in one small office, five windows wide, and answerable only to its distant shareholders. In his most ambitious and riveting audiobook to date, William Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.
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excellent book but awkward narration
- By TexasVC on 02-25-20
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Native Nations
- A Millennium in North America
- By: Kathleen DuVal
- Narrated by: Carolina Hoyos
- Length: 21 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today. Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
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An outstanding survey with many surprises
- By L Dickson on 06-05-24
By: Kathleen DuVal
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Empire
- By: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett
- Length: 15 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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The British Empire was the largest in all history: the nearest thing to global domination ever achieved. The world we know today is in large measure the product of Britain's age of empire. The global spread of capitalism, telecommunications, the English language, and the institutions of representative government - all these can be traced back to the extraordinary expansion of Britain's economy, population, and culture from the 17th century until the mid-20th. On a vast and vividly colored canvas, Empire shows how the British Empire acted as midwife to modernity.
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Not Balanced till Conclusion
- By Hectoris on 08-13-20
By: Niall Ferguson
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Revolutionary Spring
- Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849
- By: Christopher Clark
- Narrated by: Christopher Clark
- Length: 33 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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As history, the uprisings of 1848 have long been overshadowed by the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian revolutions of the early twentieth century. And yet in 1848 nearly all of Europe was aflame with conflict. Parallel political tumults spread like brush fire across the entire continent, leading to significant changes that continue to shape our world today. These battles for the future were fought with one eye kept squarely on the past. Revolutionary Spring is a new understanding of 1848 that offers chilling parallels to our present moment.
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Like the revolutions, it got off to a good start
- By Anonymous User on 06-23-23
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Heart of Europe
- A History of the Holy Roman Empire
- By: Peter H. Wilson
- Narrated by: Napoleon Ryan
- Length: 34 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The Holy Roman Empire lasted 1,000 years, far longer than ancient Rome. Yet this formidable dominion never inspired the awe of its predecessor. Voltaire quipped that it was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. Yet as Peter H. Wilson shows, the Holy Roman Empire tells a millennial story of Europe better than the histories of individual nation-states.
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Mixed feelings on this one.
- By Stuart Seymour on 09-19-17
By: Peter H. Wilson
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Orientalism
- By: Edward Said
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 19 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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This landmark book, first published in 1978, remains one of the most influential books in the Social Sciences, particularly Ethnic Studies and Postcolonialism. Said is best known for describing and critiquing "Orientalism", which he perceived as a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East. In Orientalism Said claimed a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture."
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We're lucky to have this on audio
- By Delano on 02-27-13
By: Edward Said
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Time of the Magicians
- Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy
- By: Wolfram Eilenberger, Shaun Whiteside
- Narrated by: Rhett Samuel Price
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
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The year is 1919. The horror of the First World War is fresh for the protagonists of Time of the Magicians, each of whom finds himself at a crucial juncture. Benjamin is trying to flee his overbearing father and floundering in his academic career, living hand to mouth as a critic. Wittgenstein, by contrast, has dramatically decided to divest himself of the monumental fortune he stands to inherit, in search of spiritual clarity.
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Narrator butchers foreign many language quotations
- By William G. Brown on 08-31-20
By: Wolfram Eilenberger, and others
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Indigenous Continent
- The Epic Contest for North America
- By: Pekka Hamalainen
- Narrated by: Kaipo Schwab
- Length: 18 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In Indigenous Continent, acclaimed historian Pekka Hämäläinen presents a sweeping counternarrative that shatters the most basic assumptions about American history. Shifting our perspective away from Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, the Revolution, and other well-trodden episodes on the conventional timeline, he depicts a sovereign world of Native nations whose members, far from helpless victims of colonial violence, dominated the continent for centuries after the first European arrivals.
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indigenous Continent
- By katherine on 07-09-23
By: Pekka Hamalainen
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The Middle Kingdoms
- A New History of Central Europe
- By: Martyn Rady
- Narrated by: John Curless
- Length: 22 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Central Europe has long been infamous as a region beset by war, a place where empires clashed and world wars began. In The Middle Kingdoms, Martyn Rady offers the definitive history of the region, demonstrating that Central Europe has always been more than merely the fault line between West and East. Even as Central European powers warred with their neighbors, the region developed its own cohesive identity and produced tremendous accomplishments in politics, society, and culture.
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Marred by the errors in the modern section
- By Paul Boothroyd on 10-20-23
By: Martyn Rady
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King Leopold's Ghost
- A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
- By: Adam Hochschild
- Narrated by: Geoffrey Howard
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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In the late 1890s, Edmund Dene Morel, a young British shipping company agent, noticed something strange about the cargoes of his company's ships as they arrived from and departed for the Congo. Incoming ships were crammed with valuable ivory and rubber. Outbound ships carried little more than soldiers and firearms. Correctly concluding that only slave labor could account for these cargoes, Morel almost singlehandedly made this slave-labor regime the premier human rights story in the world.
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Fascinating
- By Edith on 01-20-11
By: Adam Hochschild
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Weavers, Scribes, and Kings
- A New History of the Ancient Near East
- By: Amanda H. Podany
- Narrated by: Amanda H. Podany
- Length: 18 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In this sweeping history of the ancient Near East, Amanda Podany takes listeners on a gripping journey from the creation of the world's first cities to the conquests of Alexander the Great. The book is built around the life stories of many ancient men and women, from kings, priestesses, and merchants to brickmakers, musicians, and weavers. Their habits of daily life, beliefs, triumphs, and crises, and the changes that people faced over time are explored through their own written words and the buildings, cities, and empires in which they lived.
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word of advice
- By Jim Davis on 08-04-23
By: Amanda H. Podany
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Open Veins of Latin America
- Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
- By: Eduardo Galeano, Isabel Allende - Foreward
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx. Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation.
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Please up-date the addition
- By fishrock on 02-20-10
By: Eduardo Galeano, and others
What listeners say about Legacy of Violence
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- Freeman Fridie Jr.
- 06-09-23
The Other side of the story
Professor Elkins has the receipts. A devastating and long overdue accounting of centuries of violence perpetrated in the name of empire. Brilliant.
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- erich
- 01-17-23
Appalling behaviors.
When will we learn.
When will we see each other as humans and nothing more.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Michael Shields
- 10-05-24
Incredibly Informative and Thoughtful
This book is an outstanding reference of the systems and policies that underpin the British control of their colonies from the use of violent methods, control of media, use of all sort of manipulation and corruption. The direct connection to today’s foreign and domestic policy and practices are clearly laid out. Outstanding work.
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- O. Buraimoh
- 07-13-22
At last! A factual account of the real British history
An excellent and wonderfully detailed counterweight to the numerous books written by apologists for the utterly despicable and shameful imperial past actions of the British Empire, especially at a time when it’s still-burning embers seem to be re-igniting in certain parts of the U.K.‘s political and social consciousness.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Ashley Diaz
- 11-16-22
Great and authentic!
I’m half way through this book and I just needed to say how I’m glad I found it. Great insights into the real atrocities that occurred. I appreciate the transparency and well research events. I’m not even finished but I know I’m going to be listening a second time!
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- James
- 06-13-24
Finally the Untold Narrrative
The many many human rights abuses perpetrated by Britain are finally being examined. Perhaps by learning lessons of the past instead of an idealized propaganda we can collectively make a brighter future.
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- Matthew Bohrer
- 07-21-22
Solid but repetitive
The research and construction is great, but I find that in the attempt to move back and forth in the timeline to tell the various stories of the empire, the author too often repeated elements, not trusting the reader to remember. Still, worth l listening to.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Yuriy
- 10-31-22
Informative, ingaging, well delivered, a must read
Excellent narrator. Will read again. Highly recommend. Excellent book. An eye opener. Very involving.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-03-22
An Essential Read
An excellent review of the historical foundations of our (the Western World's) current institutions: political, legal, and cultural--our comfort in the camouflage of "The Rule of Law." The relentless focus on the gruesome foundations of Colonialism clarifies our acceptance of western exceptionalism vis a vis the rest of the world. It is hard to read but ultimately cleansing as you reflect on our path ahead.
Thoroughly researched and referenced.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Dousey
- 12-20-22
Best read of 2022
If you grew up in a former British colony you might not realize the scope, length and depth to which the empire went to retain control and dominance, further you may not see how your current laws were born out of that repression.
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2 people found this helpful