John Newsinger
Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave; 2002
hb £47.50
To my knowledge this is the first account of Britain’s post-1945 colonial wars written from a radical left stand-point. By which I don’t mean that it is a load of left rhetoric – that is entirely absent; but the assumptions about legitimacy and right are on the side of those who were fighting this country’s state forces. Lefties don’t pussy-foot around; imperialism is imperialism; and they look the facts in the face. Facts like the number of dead. Here’s your reality-checking question: how many people do you think the British state killed in Kenya during the Mau-Mau uprising? 1000, 5000? 10,000? 20,000? The official figure is 11,000 – but who believes official death figures? Newsinger tells us some estimates put it as high as 50,000, with only 593 deaths on the British state’s side, of which only 63 were white. It was less a war than a slaughter; and the RAF dropped napalm.
Presented in chronological order, the procession of wars – Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, South Yemen, Oman, Dofar (Dofar?) and Northern Ireland – nicely illustrates the decline of the British empire. Twenty years after the big wars of the early 1950s, we’re down to SAS skirmishes in minor bits of the Middle East.
It’s a difficult trick, producing a synthesis of subjects as large as, say, the war in Kenya, in 20-30 pages, without it feeling sketchy; but Newsinger pulls it it off. I’m not a specialist in this field and this kind of brisk, assertive account, with lots of documentation if I chose to pursue it, is what I want. But £47.50 for a 220 page book – this is taking the piss. And it’s self-defeating: at that price this won’t sell many copies – thus confirming the pessimistic guesstimate of his publisher.