Age of Emergency

Abstract

Abstract 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 at once remote and inescapable, existential and futile, unsettling and unstoppable, was central to the British experience of decolonization.