In 2005 there appeared, almost simultaneously, two highly controversial books which renewed or intensified debate on colonial legacies and in particular the role of atrocity, massacre and even genocide in these. In Paris, there was published Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison’s Coloniser, exterminer. Sur la guerre et l’État colonial, and in London and New York Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya by Caroline Elkins.