Reflections on the Mau Mau and the End of Empire
Caroline Elkins, Harvard University
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Overview
Harvard University Professor Caroline Elkins will discuss Reflections on the Mau Mau and the end of empire.
In recent years, the topic of the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya has engendered public and scholarly debate. Caroline Elkins's Imperial Reckoning has been the center of much of this dialogue and controversy. Intended to revise the history of Mau Mau's civilian war, Imperial Reckoning uses a range of sources to interrogate the nature of late colonial rule in Kenya. Five years after the book's publication, however, the fields of Kenyan and imperial histories have further evolved. The significance of Imperial Reckoning has also changed, as have the author's thoughts on its construction and style.
Caroline Elkins is Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her first book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, won the Pulitzer Prize. She is presently completing a manuscript on the British Empire and counterinsurgency after World War II.
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Speaker
Christian F. Ostermann
Woodrow Wilson Center
Hosted By
History and Public Policy Program
The History and Public Policy Program makes public the primary source record of 20th and 21st century international history from repositories around the world, facilitates scholarship based on those records, and uses these materials to provide context for classroom, public, and policy debates on global affairs. Read more
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