This is fresh air, I'm Terry Gross. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced last week

that he would be resigning. In 2002, in an article in The Spectator about how he thinks people

wrongly blame British colonialism for Africa's problems, he wrote,

the continent may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience. The problem is not that we

were once in charge, but that we are not in charge anymore. Our guest historian Caroline Elkins

documents the dark side of the British Empire in her new book Legacy of Violence, a history of

the British Empire. That empire became the largest empire in history, and by 1920 included 24%

of the Earth's landmass. Elkins spoke with guest interviewer Arun Benagupal, who's a senior reporter

in the race and justice unit at Public Radio Station WNYC in New York. They spoke before Johnson's

resignation announcement. Here's Arun with more. This year marked the platinum Jubilee of

Elizabeth II, her 70th year as the Queen of England. It's the first time any British monarch has

celebrated a platinum Jubilee. When Queen Elizabeth II took the throne in 1952, the British Empire

encompassed parts of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Pacific, and included 700 million people.

In her new book, our guest Caroline Elkins looks at how the use of violence was central to the spread

and maintenance of the British Empire, even as it portrayed itself, self-servingly as a benevolent force.

The book is called Legacy of Violence, a history of the British Empire, and it explores how colonial

officials from India to Malaya to South Africa hid evidence of their violent practices, while building

the largest empire in human history. In the 1990s, Caroline Elkins began to write her dissertation

about Britain's civilizing mission during the last years of colonial rule in Kenya. But then she

discovered British officials had created a vast network of secret detention camps that housed

as many as one and a half million members of Kenya's Kikuyu community. In those camps,

officials practiced unimaginably sadistic forms of torture upon Kikuyu men and women,

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