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Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Erik Linstrum, "Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Description: When uprisings against colonial rule broke out across the world after 1945, Britain responded with overwhelming and brutal force. Although this period has conventionally been dubbed "postwar," it was punctuated by a succession of hard-fought, long-running conflicts that were geographically diffuse, morally ambiguous, and impervious to neat endings or declarations of victory. Ruthless counterinsurgencies in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus rippled through British society, molding a home front defined not by the mass mobilization of resources, but by sentiments of uneasiness and the justifications they generated.Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire (O...