Newsletter of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs | Harvard University | Vol. 20 Num. 3 | Fall 2006
Features
- Colonial Counterinsurgencies: Britain’s Past and America’s Present
- By Caroline Elkins
- Caroline Elkins is the Hugo K. Foster
Associate Professor of African Studies in the Department of History at
Harvard University and a Faculty Associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
She won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for her book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s
Gulag in Kenya. The book, which evolved from her doctoral dissertation,
uncovers the truth of how the colonial British administration put down
the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya during the 1950s and 1960s.
- In perusing the “recent arrival” shelves of the Harvard Book Store or the Coop one could
swing a cat and hit, in one shot, at least a dozen or so new volumes on “empire.” Many of these
books are polemical works on the current American empire , while others address the broad comparative
question of empires over time, and some, like my own work, look at very narrow moments
of the imperial past. The question of empire, of its place in the past and its role in the present, is
something very much on the minds of many of today’s social scientists and public intellectuals
My interest is to look at Britain’s imperial past, or more specifically at the end of the British Empire after World War II, and at the various counterinsurgency
operations that it undertook in roughly a twenty-five year period. Additionally, what effect, if any, did these counterinsurgency
precedents have on the contemporary American operations in Afghanistan and Iraq?…
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- Au coeur de l’Amérique française: A History Field Trip to Québec
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- Professor Laurier Turgeon, an ethnologist and historian from the University of Laval, Québec,
was appointed by the Department of History at Harvard University as the William Lyon
Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies for spring 2006. Under his leadership, eight of the
Harvard College students enrolled in his course, The French in North America (History 1617), embarked
on a three-day field trip to Québec City.
The spring field trip aimed to enrich the students’ understanding of the city’s history in the North
American context. This essential urban center of French North America was the first permanent establishment
of Canada, the capital of colonial New France, the site of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham
(1759)—which determined the outcome of the French and British colonial rivalry in North America—and Canada’s main nineteenth century port and
shipbuilding center. Today, Québec City is the capital of the Québec provincial government.
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In December 2005, I had an experience that changed my perspective on workshops and conferences. I sat around a table in the Knafel Building with my “dream team” of scholarly critics and we discussed a book manuscript I had been working on in isolation for two years. From early morning to mid afternoon (with a well-deserved lunch break), I benefited from the suggestions and insights of both my colleagues here at Harvard and four scholars from around the country who flew, at Weatherhead Center expense, to give me their undivided attention on the question of how to whip this manuscript into final form for publication. Like a strenuous physical workout, the pain was exceeded only by the gain in the quality of my research and its presentation. The result will be a (much improved and now nearly complete) manuscript on the role of international law in influencing human rights practices around the world...