Britain's Gulag
The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Publishing:6th Mar '25
£16.99
This title is due to be published on 6th March, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£16.99(9781847922946)
The twentieth anniversary edition of Caroline Elkins’s Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé, now with a new introduction
After decades of British rule in Kenya, 1952 saw the start of the Mau Mau uprising – a mass armed rebellion by the Kikuyu people, demanding the return of their land and freedom. The draconian response of Britain's colonial government was to detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million. Detainees in their thousands – possibly a hundred thousand or more – died from exhaustion, disease, starvation and systemic physical brutality. For decades these events remained untold.
Caroline Elkins conducted years of research to piece together this story, unearthing reams of documents and interviewing several hundred Kikuyu survivors. A groundbreaking account of Kenya’s fight for independence and its violent suppression, Britain's Gulag details the ruthless determination with which Britain sought to uphold its empire.
'An extraordinary act of historical recovery' New Yorker
'Disturbing and horrifying...important and memorable' Caroline Moorehead
A tale of systematic violence and high-level cover-ups * Guardian *
Caroline Elkins has starkly illuminated one of the darkest secrets of late British imperialism. She has shown how, even when they profess the most altruistic of intentions, empires can still be brutal in their response to dissent by subject peoples. We all need reminding of that today -- Niall Ferguson
Given the number and nature of the atrocities that filled the 20th century, the degree of brutality and violence perpetrated by British settlers, police, army and their African loyalist supporters against the Kikuyu during the Mau Mau period should not be surprising. Nor, perhaps, the fact that the British government turned a blind eye, and later covered them up. What is surprising, however, is that it has taken so long to document the whole ghastly story-this is what makes Caroline Elkins's disturbing and horrifying account so important and memorable -- Caroline Moorehead
ISBN: 9781529946185
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 35mm
Weight: 500g
496 pages