Fifteen Questions: Caroline M. Elkins on Liberal Imperialism, Running in the Kenyan Highlands, and “The Crown”

Caroline M. Elkins is a Professor of History and African American Studies. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FM: I saw in a previous interview that you were a low income, first generation student when you entered Princeton. Starting with your college experience, what was it like to step into that Ivy League environment?

CME: Oh, it was overwhelming. I always say I felt like the pumpkin truck hit a bump and I fell off. It really took a good year or two to get my feet under me. At the same time, I think there were other students like me, and we kind of gravitated together. It makes me very happy now that Harvard and other schools are really focused on that.

FM: Speaking on that, I also saw an op-ed you wrote in the New York Times in January about DEI programs. Did your experience as a FGLI student influence how you're thinking about diversity and inclusion in academia today?

CME: Yeah. I mean, I would put into sort of a DEI equation socioeconomic background for sure. I was just teaching something on this today. Everybody just wants an equal shot, right? We want the opportunity. We want it to be truly a meritocracy. And in that sense, that’s what that piece was really focusing on. And I think we lose sight of that.

FM: And, while you were a student at Princeton, what drew you to studying African history? Was that something you were interested in prior?

CME: I'd always loved history. I went to a big public high school in New Jersey, where there was lots of American history and a teeny bit of European history. There was this course on modern African history the fall of my first year there. It was taught by a professor named Bob Tignor, and that was it. I knew that’s what I wanted to do. Professor Tignor became a lifelong mentor — he just passed away about a year ago.

Sometimes we find our passion when we’re not looking for it, and it sort of found me in that way.

FM: Then, after Princeton, you began a dissertation at Harvard on the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. Was there a specific moment or case that sparked your interest in Kenya’s colonial history and that rebellion specifically?

CME: There was a definite connection between what I did as an undergrad and as a grad student. When I was an undergrad, I was doing a senior thesis on the social transformation of Kikuyu women in Kenya. When I was in Nairobi the summer before my senior year, I came across these documents about the detention camps in Kenya. At that point, I knew I really wanted to be an academic. I discovered pretty quickly that nobody had written on this before. And I said, “well, if I ever go back to graduate school, this is gonna be the topic of my doctoral dissertation.” And sure enough, a couple years later, I came to Harvard for my doctoral work, and that was the topic of my dissertation.

FM: Your first book that came out of that project, “Imperial Reckoning,” received widespread acclaim, winning a Pulitzer Prize, but also some criticism. How did you approach researching such a contentious episode of history that even the British government had worked hard to keep secret?

CME: Understanding the degree to which the British government — both in the 1950s and in the present time — were trying to hide this story really became apparent to me in the context of doing my research.

The British colonial government put a lot of effort into trying to get rid of the documents. There’s a massive document destruction. But if you’re a graduate student with a lot of time and funding — I went through every single piece of evidence. It was about three or four years into it when I had an initial hypothesis, which was that these camps were largely about what was called a “hearts and minds” campaign and reform behind these barbed wires. There’s all kinds of documents left behind that told this story. But then I went out to the field and interviewed all these former detainees who told these horrendous, horrific stories of torture. And I was getting very frustrated and also pretty worried, thinking the evidence isn’t adding up.

It seems kind of self-evident now, but I thought to myself at the time, what happens if I take the entire premise and turn it upside down? That it’s not a story about hearts and minds or liberal reform and detention camps with some one-offs of abuse, but what if this is an entire story about systematic torture and abuse and then widespread cover up? And then suddenly all the evidence made sense. At that point, I was pretty young and pretty naive in terms of understanding the degree to which it was going to be an uphill battle once that research was published about people accepting this revised narrative.

FM: It seems like oral histories and that fieldwork played an important role in uncovering the narratives which entities have tried to suppress. Was there any particular person you interviewed or story that still sticks with you today?

CME: There are at least two immediately coming to mind. One is a woman named Molly, who shares in quite extensive detail with me about how her child was killed. At that time, I didn’t have children myself, but when somebody expresses to you such deep anguish, and they’re crying but they’re not making a sound — the anguish is so deep. And you don’t forget that. That never leaves you.

And then another is with a former British colonial officer named John Nottingham, who was a bit of a whistleblower, and him talking to me at the time about the guilt he felt about not doing more. It was also — in a very different kind of way — very poignant, and something that I can remember. These interviews were 20, 30 years ago, and you don't forget them.

FM: Working with this type of material that is incredibly difficult and emotionally taxing, do you have rituals or habits to help you decompress when your research is covering these atrocities?

CME: Back then, I don’t think we really talked about self care all that much, but I was a runner. I used to run up in the highlands of Kenya five, six, seven miles a day.

At the time, I don’t think I fully understood the connections. But certainly now looking back, I could tell you that the barometer of how I was doing emotionally could be calibrated by how far I would run.

FM: Your research laid the groundwork for the lawsuit against the British government that led to a formal apology and reparations. As a younger scholar at the time, how did you make the decision to join this lawsuit as an expert witness? Were you worried about repercussions for your academic career?

CME: Yes, I was definitely warned by several folks that this was not a good idea. I remember when I was doing all these interviews, nobody asked anything of me. They didn’t ask for money. They wanted one thing, and that one thing is they wanted people to know what happened to them.

I really felt a moral responsibility — and perhaps it was my life journey of coming from the kind of background I came from — but I had this privilege, and I was now custodian of this knowledge. For whatever reason, I was that person. And these five claimants were five elderly claimants who were going up against the British government, and it was made clear to me by the attorneys who were representing them in London and Nairobi that the case couldn’t go forward if I weren’t an expert witness.

On the one hand, it, at least at the time, did not seem like necessarily the best career move because you never know the outcome of a case. And at the same time, it was the absolute right thing to do. I have no regrets. I had no idea what I was getting into entirely—it was four years of a full time job—but it was probably the most extraordinary professional experience anybody could ever hope for as an academic, at least for my own self.

FM: Has that experience shaped how you’ve thought about the role of academia in the broader world throughout the rest of your career?

CME: I think again about the privilege we have. When I think about my education, that I landed here, that I have stayed on the faculty, it’s just an extraordinary life I’ve had, but with that comes a great deal of responsibility. I think that our ability to speak outside of the ivory tower, to make a difference in lived experiences, to listen. If you work on a period of time where the people that you are subject of your research are still alive, as a historian, that can often come with responsibility. I feel pretty strongly about — at least in my own mind — being able to lend my knowledge where it can be helpful.

FM: After “Imperial Reckoning,” your next book “Legacy of Violence” tackles more of a sweeping history of the British Empire. You explain that violence was “endemic to the structures and the systems” of the empire. Does conceiving of violence not as an anomaly but fundamental to imperial regimes have implications for histories beyond the British Empire or even our present moment?

CME: Just to back up for a moment, “Imperial Reckoning” was a book that established something as fact and bore witness to events that the British government had tried to erase. But the book was limited in so far as I got done with it and I was just filled with these questions of how and why did this happen? And in some ways, just that single set of questions — how and why did this violence unfold — and then maybe another question after that, was this unique to Kenya or to the empire, led me on 15 years of research. And my own interpretation of 14 different research sites and 200 years of history was that there was something about the nature of liberal imperialism. There’s this conundrum. How can an empire that professes reform and enacts reform — let’s be clear, it wasn't just window dressing — also be so immensely violent? How do we make sense of this? The theoretical framing of [“Legacy of Violence”] is saying there’s something endemic. There's something about the nature of liberalism itself, that liberalism has both at once the capacity to repress and reform. Two sides of the same coin.

When you start thinking about not just the ways in which violence is enacted by the state and who’s doing it, but if it is, in fact, adhering to liberalism, then it makes us question the liberal project more generally. So in some ways, the book is this sweeping book about violence and how it’s moved around by people crisscrossing across the empire, but it’s also about the pernicious nature of liberalism and its capacity, as I said, to be both reformist and coercive at the same time.

FM: What do you think is one of the biggest misconceptions people still hold about the British Empire today?

CME: That they got empire right. That somehow or another, Britain had a kind of exception to the broader rule about exploitation and violence and dispossession in empire. If anything, the myth of British imperial exceptionalism still continues to this day.

FM: Speaking of that myth, I took a class freshman year about British soft power and the mythology around it. I personally have enjoyed watching “The Crown” and other things that glamorize…

CME: Love “The Crown”! During the pandemic, I had to revise the entire manuscript. And my wife — who is also a professor here — and I were watching “The Crown.”

There were certain moments like, for example, when Mountbatten was assassinated on his boat. It’s a horrific scene right I mean, it’s horrendous. And of course Mountbatten had been the last viceroy in India, and the IRA ends up assassinating him. It wasn’t going to be in the book. And I saw this, and I thought to myself, this is the coda that I need for Mountbatten. So in some ways, “Legacy of Violence” is the anti-“Crown.” But there are many things in “The Crown” that were helpful as entertainment but also in terms of me thinking, “Oh, wait, okay, let me think about that.”

I do think ideas are sparked in the most interesting places.

FM: And based on that, is there a historical fiction show or movie that you love, even if it’s not so accurate?

CME: Oh, I love them all. What’s really great too is Shonda Rhimes’s “Bridgerton.” So I love all historical novels, I love historical films. Some of them obviously take liberty with facts. But, I’m a big fan.

FM: Beyond your scholarship, you also serve as the founding director of Harvard’s Center for African Studies. In 2010, the US Department of Education designated it as a National Resource Center and provided grants. In this current moment, we're seeing challenges to not just these grants but also the field of Black studies or African Studies. How are you navigating engaging in this research during this political moment?

CME: I think it’s incumbent upon those of us who are experts in these fields to help people understand why it matters and to remove it as much as one can from these political debates. Looking back, even in my own life, I’d always loved history as a young child and, when I got to university, I knew I wanted to be a history major. I knew nothing outside of the US and Europe, and the ways in which I think about the world differently, the ways in which I think about how we got to where we are, how we understand where we might be going — all these things have to be informed by a capacious reading of the past. And so the idea of once again getting back to the erasure of history, I’ve seen the consequences of that in the context of empire. Are we really going to go down that road here in 2025? It is incumbent of us to show and not tell people why this matters so much.

FM: Absolutely. Last question—what are you working on now?

CME: I sort of see my work on empires as a little bit of a trilogy. The first book was about, as I said, bearing witness and establishing something as fact. And then this recent one was about how and why these events happened. And this last one is about the trial. It’s about reparations. So I’m writing a book just about the trial.

It’s a story about a globally dispersed team who often don’t work well together — attorneys and governments and historians. Because, you know, the case was called—which I didn’t know at the time—it was called the “no hoper.” Nobody thought the case was going to be successful. Nobody filled me in on that, by the way. And, yet, four years later, it was an historic landmark case. Remember, it settled for 20 million pounds sterling. It was the first time they admitted to torture in their empire. They offered an apology in the form of sincere regret. They built a monument in Nairobi. Absolutely historic. And so the question becomes, how did that happen? That’s what this book is about.

—Magazine writer Rachael A. Dziaba can be reached at rachael.dziaba@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @rachaeldziaba.