Noted historian and Pulitzer awardee Harvard professor Caroline Elkins has expressed concern over still prevalent influence of colonial emergency laws on governance in the present-day world.
According to Elkins, violence in the British Empire was systematic in the form of a structured and state-driven mechanism. It was not episodic, and its effects continue to shape the modern world.
In conversation with renowned writer William Dalrymple at a session, “The Legacy of Violence,” on the concluding day of JLF2026 here on Monday, she was examining with Avi Shlaim the history of British rule in Palestine and related aspects, including its influence elsewhere.
She felt that colonial-era emergency laws still influence governance today, proving that imperial violence has not vanished; it has evolved.
In her illuminating and authoritative book “Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire”, Elkins reveals an evolutionary and racialised doctrine that espouses an unrelenting deployment of violence to secure and preserve British imperial interests.
Elkins outlines how the ideological foundations of violence are rooted in Victorian calls for punishing indigenous peoples who resist subjugation, and how, over time, this treatment becomes increasingly systematised.
In conversation with William Dalrymple, Elkins interrogated the pervasive use of violence throughout the twentieth century and traces how these practices are exported, modified, and institutionalized in colonies around the globe, exploding long-held myths and shedding disturbing new light on the empire’s role in shaping the world today.