Age of Emergency with Erik Linstrum

Join Dane Kennedy for a discussion with Erik Linstrum about his latest work Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire. 

____

"When uprisings against colonial rule broke out across the world after 1945, Britain responded with overwhelming and brutal force. Although this period has conventionally been dubbed "postwar," it was punctuated by a succession of hard-fought, long-running conflicts that were geographically diffuse, morally ambiguous, and impervious to neat endings or declarations of victory. Ruthless counterinsurgencies in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus rippled through British society, molding a home front defined not by the mass mobilization of resources, but by sentiments of uneasiness and the justifications they generated. Age of Emergency traces facts and feelings about violence as torture, summary executions, collective punishments, and other ruthless methods were employed in "states of emergency." It examines how Britons at home learned to live with colonial warfare by examining activist campaigns, soldiers' letters, missionary networks, newspaper stories, television dramas, sermons, novels, and plays. As knowledge of brutality spread, so did the tactics of accommodation aimed at undermining it. Some contemporaries cast doubt on facts about violence. Others stressed the unanticipated consequences of intervening to stop it. Still others aestheticized violence by celebrating visions of racial struggle or dramatizing the grim fatalism of dirty wars. Through their voices, Erik Linstrum narrates what violence looked, heard, and felt like as an empire ended, a history with unsettling echoes in our own time. Vividly analyzing how far-off atrocities became domestic problems, Age of Emergency shows that the compromising entanglements of war extended far beyond the conflict zones of empire."

_____

Erik Linstrum is a historian of modern Britain in its imperial, European, and global contexts.  His research explores the politics of knowledge and the circulation of information with particular interests in science and technology, war and violence, and the long history of decolonization.  His first book, Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire, won the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association for the best book of the year in European international history.  His most recent book, Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire, traces reports of atrocities in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus as they circulated through British society after 1945: from the anticolonial left to the imperialist and fascist right, from Fleet Street to the Church of England, from BBC teleplays to the West End theater scene. Linstrum has held fellowships with the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy in Berlin, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and the Institute of Historical Research in London.  He serves as editor of the journal Twentieth Century British History and associate editor of the Journal of British Studies and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Modern History.

Dane Kennedy taught courses in British imperial, modern British, and world history before retiring in 2021. He is the author of seven books, the most recent of which are The Imperial History Wars: Debating the British Empire (2018), Decolonization: A Very Short Introduction (2016), and The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (2013).  He has also edited or co-edited three others, including How Empire Shaped Us (2016) and Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World (2013). His latest book, Mungo Park’s Ghost: The Haunted Hubris of British Explorers in Nineteenth-Century Africa, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.  Kennedy was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003-04 and a National Humanities Center Fellowship in 2010-11. He served as director of the National History Center from 2014 to 2020 and president of the North American Conference of British Studies from 2011 to 2013. For the past few years, he has been a contributing member of the annual international seminar, “Historizing the Refugee Experience.”