Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

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This book examines dissent over the question of empire in Britain and shows how it was influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. Much has been written on how colonial subjects took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. But I was glad I persisted - once the author starts writing in her own voice, the language becomes much clearer, the style is engaging and the subject matter is of great interest. To those on here that have labelled it as 'racist,' or have branded it as 'far-left extremism,' one has to wonder what it is about the text that has got you so riled up. In a quiet London square, just off Holborn, stands a statue of Fenner Brockway, veteran leftwing MP and scourge of empire.

It aimed also to think about the quite varied definitions of freedom that constituted the content of anticolonial struggles.Nowhere in the world has decolonisation come to fruition: instead, it is often found in an ‘arrested’ condition, a process that was initiated but then diverted, hijacked, or morphed into something else entirely. I also expected more background on each incident, but the reader is expected to either know the historical background of e. Tomes like Niall Ferguson’s Empire (2003) and John Darwin’s The Empire Project (2009) run to hundreds of pages, dominating the shelf when it comes to options for large-scale narrative imperial histories. These include land use, economic redistribution, the meaning of human rights, the undoing of race thinking and racism, ecological and resource protections, the expansion of knowledge bases and traditions of inquiry, the meanings of ‘development’, and justice for minoritised groups.

Professor Gopal traces the dynamic relationship between anti-colonial resistance (from the Indian Mutiny in 1857 to the Mau Mau in Kenya in the late 1950s) and the few, often isolated individuals and groups in Britain who broke ranks and challenged the idea of Empire. Insurgent Empire illuminates the role that peoples of the global south have played in the development of ideas of freedom - including in the west itself - within the context of anti-colonial struggles. I would strongly recommend this to any general reader such as myself with a strong interest in the subject, willing to look up a few unfamiliar words in the dictionary.

The Part I: Crises and Connections discusses the 1857 Uprising in India (Chapter 1), the Jamaican uprising in 1865 (chapter 2), the Urabi revolt in Egypt (chapter 3) and the experiences of many Edwardian travellers (chapter 4). Sudhir Hazareesingh, TLS Books of the Year, 2019 Gopal has a sharp eye for forgotten characters and lost histories.

Today, as many postcolonial societies struggle not just with deep inequality but also intensifying authoritarianism and lethal ethnonationalism, they must examine not only those historical forces in their midst that abetted colonial subjugation but also contemporary tendencies to act much as the coloniser once did. Nor will readers find here many of the conventional critics of empire, such as JA Hobson or George Orwell. The author demonstrates how liberation was fought for, and won by, Britain's colonised and enslaved subjects, picking apart the myth that freedom was so generously bestowed upon Britain's colonies by the Establishment when they were deemed 'ready' for it. Insurgent Empire interrogated the familiar claim that criticism of the British Empire was anachronistic by tracking some dissident strands on the question of colonialism in Britain through the latter half of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Priyamvada Gopal examines dissenting politics in Britain and shows that it was influenced by rebellions and resistance among the colonies in the West Indies, East Africa, Egypt, and India.

Insurgent Empire sets the record straight in demonstrating that these people were much more than victims of imperialism or, subsequently, the passive beneficiaries of an enlightened British conscience—they were insurgents whose legacies shaped and benefited the nation that once oppressed them. Here Anglophone empire is neatly bracketed between the successive conquests of territories and peoples from the seventeenth century forward and the “granting” of independence in the mid-twentieth century. I have to admit I nearly gave up while reading the preface - I'm not used to reading historical works with an academic flavour so some of the language was unfamiliar, and some of the language quoted from other works was pretty opaque.