Love Me or I Shoot You

In the early​ 2000s, a trend emerged among historians of the British Empire. Many of them began to consider their own childhoods in mid-20th-century Britain and the extent to which the empire had featured in them. Catherine Hall opened Civilising Subjects (2002) by describing her Baptist upbringing in Leeds. Missionaries and African students often passed through the home: ‘The sense of a Baptist family stretching across the globe was always part of domestic life.’ In an appendix to Ornamentalism (2001), David Cannadine described the way his father, who had been stationed overseas during World War Two, ‘talked endlessly about India’. Unlike Hall and Cannadine, Bernard Porter remembered the empire coming up rarely during his childhood – no family connections or conversations, no books at home, no lessons at school – even though, as he writes in The Absent-Minded Imperialists, ‘the empire … was still (just) a going concern.’

These accounts weren’t merely reflections on the ways encounters with empire had influenced their authors’ later work. They were interventions that either advanced or questioned what was then a controversial approach to the history of the British Empire. The ‘new imperial history’, which emerged in the 1990s, sought to challenge the view that the empire had been wholly separate from Britain. Instead, its advocates argued, Hall chief among them, metropole and colony had always been intertwined and the relationship between them constantly changing. Historians of this new method tended to make their argument by reading culture closely. Like any method, it had its critics (Porter was one). And since many of its most prominent exponents worked in the US, it seemed removed from the way British history was developing in Britain itself, where ‘domestic history’ and ‘imperial history’ remained distinct.

As the authors themselves admitted, their memories were shaped both by what their parents had allowed them to witness or discuss and by the milieux in which they had grown up. As some of them noted, their whiteness was also significant. If Hazel Carby’s memoir, Imperial Intimacies (2019), is any indication, a Black child born in Britain around the same time had a much more immediate relationship to events in the colonies. What was most striking about these accounts, however, was that although the authors drew on memories from the 1940s and 1950s, their historical analysis was concerned with earlier eras. Indeed, the new imperial history focused almost exclusively on the 18th and 19th centuries, invoking the more recent period in which formal empire ended as the preserve of memory rather than academic scrutiny. Inadvertently, this contributed to the myth-making that surrounds decolonisation.

There are two prevailing versions of the end of the British Empire. The first posits it as an orderly disbanding: benevolent Britain bestowing independence on its former colonies (the implied contrast is with Algeria). The second claims that the end of empire was in fact extremely violent, but that knowledge of this violence was successfully suppressed, both at the time and in the decades since. Erik Linstrum’s Age of Emergency makes clear, however, that suppression was both impossible and undesirable, since officials needed a certain amount of news to reach the public in order to win support. There was a careful dance between keeping the worst details quiet while allowing the right kind of information to get out, in the hope that the public would accept some brutality as the price of securing Britain’s place in the world.

Linstrum focuses on three counterinsurgency campaigns, officially known as ‘emergencies’: in Malaya (1948-60), Kenya (1952-60) and Cyprus (1955-59). After the Second World War, during which Malaya was occupied by Japan, the British returned to re-establish colonial rule. The Malayan Union was a coercive project: Malay sultans were forced to step aside, to the disgruntlement of their subjects, who were also unhappy about proposals to extend citizenship to ethnic Chinese and Indians in the colony. The union foundered, but its replacement, the Malayan Federation, made enemies of the Malayan Chinese, especially those who were members of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Once the MCP’s forces began killing white planters, the British declared an emergency. Under regulations imposed by the high commissioner, Henry Gurney, British soldiers and police forces held tens of thousands of suspects without trial, burned homes, shot people indiscriminately and deported as many Malayan Chinese as they could, while forcibly resettling hundreds of thousands of people in militarised ‘new villages’. MCP insurgents lost support and a political alliance, led by the United Malays National Organisation, steered the country towards independence in 1957. The new government declared the end of the emergency three years later.

Under British rule in Kenya, millions of acres of land were handed over to European settlers, whose numbers grew from a few hundred early in the 20th century to nearly thirty thousand by the mid-1950s. Expropriation intensified after World War Two and thousands of people (the Kikuyu in particular) were forced off their lands. In 1952, the Mau Mau began attacking white settlers, as well as Kikuyu they believed to have sided with the Europeans. The British responded with summary assassinations of militants and civilians, followed by the removal of tens of thousands of people to detention camps and more than a million to villages under military control, where torture and forced labour were common. At least 35,000 people died, possibly many more.

The insurgents in Cyprus were Greek Cypriots who wanted decolonisation in the form of unification with Greece, against the wishes of Turkish Cypriots. Britain was reluctant to allow this, since Cyprus had become an important base for its Middle East operations. In 1955, the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters, an anti-communist guerrilla group, launched a bombing campaign. As in Kenya and Malaya, British forces, some of them veterans of those emergencies, responded with arbitrary violence, detention and torture, leading Greece to file two applications with the European Commission of Human Rights arguing that Britain had violated its convention. Around a thousand Cypriots were killed in the conflict.

Despite the official language, these were wars. A Britain still reeling from World War Two became a home front once again. This time, however, significantly fewer British troops were involved – tens of thousands rather than millions – and there was no risk that the metropole itself would come under attack. Linstrum catalogues with impressive detail the ways in which information was processed before and after it reached the public. Some patterns emerge. For the most part, those on the left condemned the violence deployed by British forces and many tried to challenge it in print or through organising and protest. But their efforts were stymied by longstanding ideological divisions, the romantic hold the empire still had over much of society and mainstream suspicion of communists. Left-wing activism was also a conspicuously white affair – a source of tension for émigré activists. Mbiyu Koinange, who would later serve in Kenyatta’s cabinet, accused the Labour Party of failing to condemn the excesses of settlers in Kenya. And while the Movement for Colonial Freedom, supported by the Labour MPs Fenner Brockway, Tony Benn and Barbara Castle, successfully publicised imperial atrocities and attracted multiracial crowds to its rallies, Joseph Murumbi (Kenyan, though not Kikuyu) broke with the movement over its uncritical response to Suez.

Some conscientious objectors specifically refused to fight in colonial wars, though their chances of success at tribunals were greater if they argued that their religion prohibited them from participating. Many people wrote letters to local and national newspapers: one reader told the Daily Telegraph ‘“Love me or I shoot you dead” is no substitute for a sane foreign policy.’ Some argued that the British people were collectively responsible for the violence conducted in their name. As one man explained in a letter to Castle, the most vocal critic of imperial brutality among MPs, the British would face divine punishment for their wars overseas ‘until we change our foul methods’. In all, the British left succeeded in cultivating moral unease across parts of society. But whatever opposition it mustered, it never had more than a small audience and limited sway.

Liberal writers and organisations had far more influence, but were rarely supportive of decolonisation. Even when they sought to express concern, their statements often ended up bolstering counterinsurgency campaigns. The professional norms and modes of argument they observed demanded deference, deliberation and what was considered objectivity. This dynamic was perhaps most apparent in newspaper journalism. A Times correspondent, Oliver Woods, received a number of reports – including from other journalists and officials – that British soldiers were using torture in Kenya. Yet none of these made their way into his stories, apparently because he was unwilling to believe them. Censorship sometimes came from editors who considered official sources to be more reliable than eyewitness testimony. The Observer sat on a dispatch from Kenya for months, then published a heavily edited version that omitted references to violence.

There were also, of course, people who defended or even celebrated violence against colonial subjects. Letters home and official dispatches often included frank descriptions of atrocities, committed both by insurgents and British soldiers, intended to appeal to jingoistic sentiment and discredit squeamish liberals. One National Service conscript in Cyprus told his father about the method he had learned for splitting the cheeks of prisoners. Officials didn’t go so far as to admit that torture was taking place: it was, they said, nothing more than a little ‘roughness’ or ‘rough stuff’, even if this was itself an acknowledgment that soldiers had transgressed certain norms. Among right-wing politicians and pundits the fear was that humanitarian critiques would weaken or hamper the military. Popular books, meanwhile, described the torture and killing of Malayans, Kikuyu and Cypriots in graphic language and justified violence as a means of commanding the respect of colonial subordinates. In his memoir Spearhead in Malaya (1959), J.W.G. Moran described the pleasure he took in beating a suspect. ‘I shook him like a rat,’ he wrote. ‘His eyes shot up and down like ping-pong balls.’ In Gordon Landsborough’s novel The Violent People (1960), set in Cyprus, the hero is initially unconvinced that brutality is necessary, but comes to see the British as victims who must defend themselves by any means.

One of the most interesting sections of Linstrum’s book concerns the reactions of Christians and humanitarian groups. Insofar as they offered critiques, these rarely condemned the campaigns outright, but instead questioned their ferocity. (Christian socialists were a notable exception.) Some humanitarian organisations offered elaborate justifications for not getting involved: the International Committee of the Red Cross, for instance, remained silent on the grounds that speaking out would violate its commitment to neutrality. Although some of its delegates wrote reports about their visits to detention camps in Kenya, the ICRC briefed the government in private and didn’t release its findings to the public. The British Red Cross Society was officially neutral, but its aid workers were paid by the colonial governments and the organisation never challenged British policy, even as its own staff reported inhumane conditions in detention camps. Indeed, BRCS officials publicly sanctioned these facilities, with one describing Kenyan detention camps as ‘comfortable’. They also claimed that the Geneva Convention only applied during war – and therefore not to the ‘emergency’ in Kenya – and determined not to provide supplies to Cypriot detainees.

Protestants, especially in the Church of England, had been staunch imperialists in the past and Anglican leaders continued to offer their support in the 1950s, motivated in part by the belief that the empire was a bulwark against communism. Archbishops visited Malaya and Kenya, gave sermons to troops and took part in choreographed photo-ops. Christians of various denominations worked in detention camps as missionaries, nurses and teachers, and their presence lent the wars moral legitimacy. Even the Church Missionary Society clergymen who witnessed atrocities in Kenya relayed them to their superiors and the British government rather than to the public. This reluctance, Linstrum argues, stemmed in part from the belief that individual conscience, ostensibly at the heart of Protestantism, had to be tempered in favour of Church and state authority.

More​ than anything, these wars were a reaction to loss. Britain left India the year before the start of the war in Malaya; by the time it officially ended, in 1960, Malaya itself had already been independent for almost three years, and Sudan and Ghana had both declared independence. ‘Living with violence at the end of the British Empire’, as Linstrum’s subtitle has it, often stirred strong feelings. Many of those who supported the torture and detention of civilians and insurgents seemed to be motivated by a fear of humiliation. As a machine operator in Stevenage told Raphael Samuel in 1959: ‘These little countries, they seem to just throw us out when they feel like it, whereas one time they wouldn’t have dared do that … I don’t think we should let other people trample on us the way they do.’ What particularly alarmed some commentators was that these were countries inhabited by racialised others. Anger, disgust and dismay shaped the arguments of those on the left and led them to be more direct in the way they discussed and publicised the violence of British forces: the Daily Worker was the only British newspaper to publish photographs of a Royal Marine holding the severed head of an insurgent in Malaya and of other marines posing next to corpses.

The problem with focusing on the emotions of the British, though, is that it risks treating the psychic toll of collapsing national self-image as more important than the experiences of colonial subjects. Aside from a brief overview of the origins of the three colonial wars, this isn’t really a book about those conflicts or the people who lived through them. And while it is an important corrective to the idea that few in Britain knew about the horrors of empire, it achieves this by placing the victims of that violence far from the centre of the story.

This was a common feature of plays and TV dramas at the time, even those written to inform. Plays about colonial wars tended to be set in living rooms, with characters responding to violence happening elsewhere. They often featured disagreements over the way the empire should be defended, if at all. In Strangers in the Land by the Australian playwright Mona Brand, first performed in 1952, Christine travels to Malaya in the middle of the emergency to visit her fiancé, Rod. The play is set in Rod’s home, with news of British atrocities filtering in through the dialogue: the living room might be in the colonies, but it’s still a place apart. Strangers in the Land wasn’t a polemic – Rod supports the counterinsurgency while Christine grows increasingly opposed to it – but it was sufficiently controversial to be censored by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which warned its staging could lead to a ‘breach of the peace’. (The play had limited runs in socialist theatre clubs, which were able to evade censorship on the grounds that only members could attend performances.) A few dramas, such as The Long and the Short and the Tall by Willis Hall, did depict murder on stage or on screen, but the victims were usually ciphers who served to demonstrate how quickly the main characters’ moral fibre deteriorated in wartime.

Writing about violence is difficult: too many gruesome details and you might appear to be revelling in them or exploiting readers’ emotions, too few and you risk downplaying atrocities. Linstrum describes violent incidents in a detached though not bloodless tone, and only when necessary to explain the British response. In other words, the people ‘living with violence’ are those encountering information about it, rather than the perpetrators or victims. If Age of Emergency is an example of the new imperial history – and one especially worthwhile for the way it reworks the mid-20th century approach – it seems we still need to ask whether accounts that look at metropole alongside colony must focus on Britain quite so often.

The book also has echoes of more recent history: in the way newspaper editors in the 1950s gave too much credence to official sources, in the many references to ‘hearts and minds’ – a phrase associated with Gerald Templer, high commissioner of Malaya during the emergency – and the mention of ‘keeping Britain great’. When Linstrum describes British soldiers posing for pictures next to detainees’ corpses, it’s hard not to think of Abu Ghraib. Only once does he make these parallels explicit. A brief note early on mentions that General Petraeus saw Britain’s wars in Cyprus and Malaya as ‘models’ for the invasion of Iraq.