Product Description
Britain's Gulag
Author(s): Caroline Elkins
Format: Paperback
The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya
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
About the Author
Caroline Elkins is a professor of history and of African and African American studies at Harvard University and the founding director of Harvard's Centre for African Studies. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Fulbright and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship.
Her first book, Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Her research for that book was the subject of the award-winning BBC documentary Kenya: White Terror. She also served as an expert in the historic Mau Mau reparations case, brought against the British Government by survivors of violence in Kenya. She is a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, Guardian, Atlantic, Washington Post and New Republic. She lives in Watertown, Massachusetts.
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