Imperial Reckoning and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Learn more



or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering
Sell Us Your Item
For a $0.14 Gift Card
Trade in
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Start reading Imperial Reckoning on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.
Sorry, this item is not available in
Image not available for
Color:
Image not available

To view this video download Flash Player

 

Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya [Paperback]

Caroline Elkins
3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)

List Price: $18.00
Price: $12.03 & FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $5.97 (33%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Only 7 left in stock (more on the way).
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.
Want it Tuesday, May 21? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
Kindle Edition $8.89  
Hardcover --  
Paperback $12.03  
Unknown Binding --  
Image
Save on Popular Books This Summer
Browse our Bookshelf Favorites store for big savings on popular fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and more.

Book Description

December 27, 2005
Like new. Paperback.

Frequently Bought Together

Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya + Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire
Price for both: $28.36

Buy the selected items together


Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Forty years after Kenyan independence from Britain, the words "Mau Mau" still conjure images of crazed savages hacking up hapless white settlers with machetes. The British Colonial Office, struggling to preserve its far-flung empire of dependencies after World War II, spread hysteria about Kenya's Mau Mau independence movement by depicting its supporters among the Kikuyu people as irrational terrorists and monsters. Caroline Elkins, a historian at Harvard University, has done a masterful job setting the record straight in her epic investigation, Imperial Reckoning. After years of research in London and Kenya, including interviews with hundreds of Kenyans, settlers, and former British officials, Elkins has written the first book about the eight-year British war against the Mau Mau.

She concludes that the war, one of the bloodiest and most protracted decolonization struggles of the past century, was anything but the "civilizing mission" portrayed by British propagandists and settlers. Instead, Britain engaged in an amazingly brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that seemed to border on outright genocide. While only 32 white settlers were killed by Mau Mau insurgents, Elkins reports that tens of thousands of Kenyans were slaughtered, perhaps up to 300,000. The British also interned the entire 1.5 million population of Kikuyu, the colony's largest ethnic group, in barbed-wire villages, forced-labour reserves where famine and disease ran rampant, and prison camps that Elkins describes as the Kenyan "Gulag." The Kikuyu were subjected to unimaginable torture, or "screening," as British officials called it, which included being whipped, beaten, sodomized, castrated, burned, and forced to eat feces and drink urine. British officials later destroyed almost all official records of the campaign. Elkins infuses her account with the riveting stories of individual Kikuyu detainees, settlers, British officials, and soldiers. This is a stunning narrative that finally sheds light on a misunderstood war for which no one has yet been held officially accountable. --Alex Roslin --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In a major historical study, Elkins, an assistant professor of history at Harvard, relates the gruesome, little-known story of the mass internment and murder of thousands of Kenyans at the hands of the British in the last years of imperial rule. Beginning with a trenchant account of British colonial enterprise in Kenya, Elkins charts white supremacy's impact on Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu, and the radicalization of a Kikuyu faction sworn by tribal oath to extremism known as Mau Mau. Elkins recounts how in the late 1940s horrific Mau Mau murders of white settlers on their isolated farms led the British government to declare a state of emergency that lasted until 1960, legitimating a decade-long assault on the Kikuyu. First, the British blatantly rigged the trial of and imprisoned the moderate leader Jomo Kenyatta (later Kenya's first postindependence prime minister). Beginning in 1953, they deported or detained 1.4 million Kikuyu, who were systematically "screened," and in many cases tortured, to determine the extent of their Mau Mau sympathies. Having combed public archives in London and Kenya and conducted extensive interviews with both Kikuyu survivors and settlers, Elkins exposes the hypocrisy of Britain's supposed colonial "civilizing mission" and its subsequent coverups. A profoundly chilling portrait of the inherent racism and violence of "colonial logic," Elkins's account was also the subject of a 2002 BBC documentary entitled Kenya: White Terror. Her superbly written and impassioned book deserves the widest possible readership. B&w photos, maps.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 496 pages
  • Publisher: Owl Books; Reprint edition (December 27, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0805080015
  • ISBN-13: 978-0805080018
  • Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #108,291 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

I read this book as a supplemental material to an undergraduate course in African Politics. Jamie B. Szmurlo  |  6 reviewers made a similar statement
This book is very well researched and written. G. Goldwater  |  3 reviewers made a similar statement
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
99 of 120 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating History, Slightly Turgid Writing February 8, 2005
Format:Hardcover
First off, let me congratulate the author, an assistant professor at Harvard, for her solid research and documentation regarding a very specific period in Britain's colonial experience (and of course Kenya's history): the post-WWII Mau Mau rebellion, leading to Kenyatta's ascendency as leader of a free Kenya. Unfortunately, her writing skills are not on par with her research abilities, and the book often feels like an extended graduate paper, badly in need of expert revision and editing. The writing style is slightly stale and turgid, so even exciting events are flattened and reduced to yet another episode of graduate study documentation.

Also, while I am for the most part in agreement with the views of the author and no fan of the British empire or its impact on colonial cultures, I must say Ms. Elkins is a bit over-the-top in her defense of the Mau Mau rebels and her indictment of their British overlords. It's rare in 2005 to see an author boldly defending the local African custom of female genital circumcision, or the blood oaths of the Mau Mau which required taking a life and ingesting parts of the human sacrifice.

On the whole, the book is an impressive first effort and a solid example of graduate-level research. I believe a more textured, nuanced approach to this material can be written, building on the first-hand accounts that Ms. Elkins has so comprehensively collected.
Was this review helpful to you?
27 of 34 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars An important story interred in academic prose August 20, 2006
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Imperial Reckoning is a curiously disappointing book. It exposes us to a shockingly brutal and little known side of late empire British imperialism with overwhelming documentation, but in such flat prose that the horror and indignation proper to such events is leached away in a numbingly endless drizzzle of facts. This book seems a huge body of tragic facts in search of an organizing narrative. So much so that its chapters could be read in any random order without changing the book's overall readability. Historical tragedies, as much as heroic triumphs turn on random quirks of fortune and clashes of strong personalities, but in academic literature they seem to float on a sluggish tide of inevitable events, usually seen in retrospect and shrouded in a sanctified flotsam of documentation.

Professor Elkins gives some capsule vignettes of the principal colonial administrators, but the central player of this historical drama, Jomo Kenyatta--the colony's most famous political prisoner and later to become Kenya's first president, is presumed so familiar to the reader as to warrant almost no further space. Though he is mentioned repeatedly, we learn only enough about him (16 years in Britain, studied at the London School of Economics, wrote a controversial book, organized a pan-African conference) to make us wonder why he's barely a footnote participant in the story. Little of the temper of the colonial times seems to surface except allegations of an extreme and virtually universal British racism. The Mau Mau terror which inspired this ghastly holocaust seems in this account have been a mere handful of assassinations--so wildly disproportionate to the response that one feels uneasily suspicious. Were the colonials really that murderously bigoted or is Ms. Elkins reluctant to portray a real threat of native terror?

It's a book one wishes had been written by Adam Hochschild (King Leopold's Ghost, Bury the Chains). There's a shocking story buried here that needs to get out. My curiosity is aroused, I want to know more, but I'll have to read a different book. I haven't the tolerance for tedium to finish this one.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
21 of 26 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Slightely redundant, but excellent scholarship. March 6, 2006
Format:Hardcover
I am not new to the subject of colonial attrocities in Africa, however this detailed account disturbed me. Relying on hundreds of interviews and a mountain of archival evidence, Caroline Elkins has brought to light a story of cruelty, perpetrated by the British Empire, which rivals the attrocities of the Soviet Gulags or the Nazi concentration camps.

I found that in parts of the book Elkins repeats herself however, which made for a few dry parts of the book.

This book deals with some very graphic material that Elkins does not hesitate to state repeatedly. If you read this book, be prepared to read of monstrous torture stories on men, women and children.

Overall, this was a fantastic book. I could hardly put it down.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential, informative reading...
Factual, heart-wrenching, essential reading for all people . This level of injustice and cruelty is inexcusable.
Ms. Read more
Published 2 months ago by S. Dexter
2.0 out of 5 stars Dear lord, dry, repetitive, and sadly boring.
I purchased this book before heading out to Kenya. The book is difficult to read. The author goes off on gruesome tangents and is repetitive. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Boston Bradstreet
5.0 out of 5 stars The beans have been spilled and the cat is out of the bag.
A fantastic book with stuningly accurate facts.Its eye opening,gripping,exiting ,and shocking. This book reveals the HIDDEN TRUTHS of atrocities perpetrated during the colonial... Read more
Published 4 months ago by mtb
3.0 out of 5 stars A Detailed Account of the Brutality of Imperialism
Let me just say that this is a depressing and compelling book. Not a decade after the end of WWII Britain instituted its own system of brutal prison camps in Kenya that violated... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Lionel S. Taylor
5.0 out of 5 stars Why My Student Wept
As a part-time teacher of poitical science in many minority institutions, I have interacted with many African students over the years. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Dr. Irvin H. Bromall
4.0 out of 5 stars THE EMPIRE STRIKES FIRST
This book is about the last years (1952-9) of British colonial rule in Kenya. It is the story of the battle with Mau Mau terrorism, but it is not about the Mau Mau or how their... Read more
Published 12 months ago by DAVID BRYSON
4.0 out of 5 stars The Mau Maus have a case, as Barbara Castle knew long before Caroline...
Despite the anti-imperialist mindset of the book I was left in no doubt that the British have a case to answer regarding the treatment of the Kikuyus in the 1950's. Read more
Published 21 months ago by T. G. S. Hawksley
1.0 out of 5 stars Misleading account
Those inclined to believe the worst about western colonialism will find what they're looking for here. But this book has serious problems of fact and interpretation. Read more
Published on February 4, 2011 by J. Cowans
4.0 out of 5 stars Informative and emotional at times.
I now understand why this part of Kenyan history was never covered at school. Why my mother who was born in 1945 remembers very little and why her parents never spoke about this... Read more
Published on May 3, 2010 by B. Wight
5.0 out of 5 stars Imperial reckoneing
A stunning review of events in Kenya shortly before colonialism ended. I recommend this book highly.
Published on February 6, 2010 by molly
Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews




What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?


Forums

There are no discussions about this product yet.
Be the first to discuss this product with the community.
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 





Look for Similar Items by Category