Facts about Atrocity: Reporting Colonial Violence in Postwar Britain

In the historiography of British imperialism, the question of scale – local versus global, micro versus macro – is fraught with political implications. When historians trace globe-spanning networks of populations, commodities, capital and information, do they necessarily obscure the human cost of empire: the messy on-the-ground realities of conquest, coercion and exploitation? In the eloquent view expressed by some critics, global scales end up privileging narratives about metropolitan elites and therefore sanitizing the violence which made British rule possible.¹ The recent resurgence of interest in imperial violence has, after all, focused heavily on the sanguinity of settler colonialism, which took shape from intensely local struggles over land and identity.² Perhaps the language of networks, movements, and flows is simply too distant, too impersonal, to do justice to the horrors of empire.³

The trouble here is that if we overlook one particular kind of global movement – the movement of information – we risk decoupling colonial violence from the state, the society and the culture which ultimately made it possible. Asking what metropolitan Britons knew about violence against colonized populations, arguably a matter of moral reckoning, involves recognizing at least that the use of force overseas inevitably reverberated in the metropole one way or another.⁴ Some of the most notorious atrocities inflicted on British subjects in the colonies – the suppression of the Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica in 1865, the Amritsar massacre in India in 1919, the Hola massacre in Kenya in 1959 – elicited widespread attention and impassioned responses in Britain.⁵ Other events – like the aerial bombardment of Iraq after the First World War – were not quite causes célèbres but provoked controversy in Parliament and the press nonetheless.⁶ Violent methods sometimes drew attention thanks to their defenders rather than their critics; Winston Churchill’s surprisingly frank account of a ‘punitive expedition’ on the North-West Frontier of India in 1897 is an example of this.⁷ Other kinds of knowledge were produced by the need to assess the effectiveness of violence and recalibrate it: for instance, the knowledge of bureaucrats, soldiers, and other counterinsurgency planners who recorded minutes on files, lectured at staff colleges, and crafted manuals of tactics and strategy.⁸

The history of knowledge about violence is, of course, inseparable from a broader debate about the impact of empire in Britain. Since John MacKenzie’s pioneering Propaganda and Empire (1984), the ubiquity of nationalist, militarist, and racist imagery has been seen both as quantitative evidence for the extent of that impact and as a motor of popular support for the use of force overseas. This was the world of what J. A. Hobson called ‘jingoism’ and George Orwell termed ‘gutter patriotism’: emotive symbols of identification and belonging which short-circuited critical scrutiny of empire’s dark side. In the late nineteenth century Fleet Street newspapers transformed military leaders into heroic figures of Christian masculinity.⁹ Between the wars, romantic visions of the unknowable and archaic Orient fed equally romantic visions of aerial bombardment as a panacea for restive subjects.¹⁰ In the age of emergency after 1945, press and broadcast journalists dwelled sympathetically on the victimization of British settlers abroad while demonizing anticolonial rebels as bestial and bloodthirsty.¹¹ Pervasive stereotypes of Britishness and Otherness, in short, snapped the bonds of empathy and legitimized the oppression of populations overseas.

Recently, this familiar narrative has been called into question. Was public opinion really so malleable and imperialist propaganda so effective? Was British culture itself really so unitary and so closely tied to empire?¹² The more evidence we have about the actual reception of propaganda, for instance, the more ambiguous its impact seems.¹³ Some would question the relevance of ‘public opinion’ altogether on the grounds that what the British saw and heard about their empire was less important than what they did not see or hear. The state that invented Official Secrets Acts and D-notices was adept at keeping embarrassing and controversial information from public view.¹⁴ Media historians have shown that imperial officials discouraged critical journalism by wielding legal powers of suppression and manipulating press...