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Vivid, terrifying first-hand accounts of the last wars of the British Empire.

Empire Warriors - The British Empire at War 1945-1967

As the Union Jack finally descended on former colonies all over the world after the Second World War, communist, nationalist and religious guerrilla forces saw their chance.

The British Empire was leaving - and creating a dangerous power vacuum in its place. The war to succeed the British had begun. The new DVD Empire Warriors – is made up of extended versions of the episodes from the BBC TV series of the same name. The series looks at four encounters between the British authorities and the forces that were busy working to replace them (and in most cases to be seen to drive them out). Empire Warriors focuses on four bloody wars fought by British service personnel – and often the Police and MI5 - at the end of Empire in Kenya, Malaya, Aden and Palestine.

These two discs features original archive and news footage together with dramatic reconstructions of key events, while former soldiers, terrorists, politicians and intelligence specialists offer vivid, first hand accounts of the last wars of Empire. The DVD also includes extended interviews – some quite chilling - with key participants that were not broadcast on television.

The episodes break down like this:

Kenya - The Hunt for Kimathi (originally transmitted on BBC2 10/12/2004)

Aden – ‘Mad Mitch’ and his Tribal Laws (originally transmitted on BBC2 19/11/2004)

Malaya - The Intelligence War (originally transmitted on BBC2 03/12/2004)

Palestine - The Jewish War (originally transmitted on BBC2 26/11/2004)

With a complete running time of just over six hours this is a comprehensive series that well illustrates an often unsavoury part of Britain's history that many may be unaware of - as a post World War II colonising power being swept away by the tide of history.

Further reading:

The National Archives ‘Learning Curve’ - detailed section on the history of the British Empire

British Empire website

Barbarity is the inevitable consequence of foreign rule - article by Seumas Milne originally published in The Guardian (27/01/05)

Bristol’s superb British Empire & Commonwealth Museum

For further reading on the issues raised by the documentary The Hunt for Kimathi also see the book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt & Company, 2005) - which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction - by Caroline Elkins and Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (W. W. Norton & Company, 2005) by David Anderson. Both contain some pretty terrifying and often brutal stories that need telling about earlier 'wars on terror' fought by the British administrative authorities overseas - often with the support of members of the UK's Police and MI5, as well as locally recruited soldiers and 'home guards' - at the tail end of Empire.

Empire Warriors - The British Empire at War 1945-1967 is available now as a two-disc DVD set from DD Home Entertainment.

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