Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of Empire

In his Academy project, Linstrum asks how British society responded—or failed to respond—to the use of torture in its overseas empire after 1945. Although the absence of sustained outrage is often attributed to the lack of information, he argues that awareness of brutal violence was in fact widespread. Networks of activists, soldiers, journalists, filmmakers, and others bridged the gap between the conflict zones of empire and everyday life in Britain. Linstrum traces how reports of atrocities in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus circulated through British society: from the anticolonial Left to the unabashedly imperialist Right, from Fleet Street to the Church of England, from veterans’ associations to the British Red Cross, from BBC teleplays to the West End theater scene. At the same time, Linstrum argues that “the ways of knowing that eroded secrecy about violence also undermined action to stop it.” He chronicles these tactics of accommodation, which blurred epistemology and ethics: insisting on the unknowability of definitive truth about violence, distinguishing between knowledge and the duty to act on it, and valorizing the acceptance of “hard truths.” In Berlin, Linstrum plans to decenter the “exceptionalist and insular narratives” that place the historiography on modern Britain at odds with its continental European counterparts. Distinct strands of his project speak to issues in German historiography: the relationship of fascist movements to overseas violence, especially interracial and colonial violence, the relationship between atrocity and modernity, including the dynamics of denial, rationalization, and depersonalization, and the history of the production and circulation of knowledge.