Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

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To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Gopal carefully considers several long-forgotten pressure groups – including the League Against Imperialism and the International African Service Bureau – alongside a further series of exemplary figures, such as the enigmatic Reginald Bridgeman, and the incredibly resourceful Nancy Cunard, whose printing presses and magazines supported the cause of black liberation. Blunt, for his part, became a tireless popularizer of the story of Ahmed Urabi’s rebellion on the streets of Cairo, seeking directly to influence Prime Minister William Gladstone’s policy in the region

This is no alternative A-Z history of Britain’s inglorious empire, of the kind that has become fashionable recently. Much has been written on how colonized peoples took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination.My history teacher (back in the days of O-levels in the UK) taught us enough to sow seeds of disquiet about the Empire, and I was intrigued to learn more. Priyamvada Gopal is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. Against attempts to portray empire as something distant and past, or as something benevolent and enlightened, approaches such as this one are essential.

A superb study of anticolonial resistance in the British Empire from the 1857 Indian uprising to the Kenyan Mau Mau revolt a century later . Insurgent Empire shows how Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were not merely victims of empire and subsequent beneficiaries of its crises of conscience but also agents whose resistance both contributed to their own liberation and shaped British ideas about freedom and who could be free.Nor will readers find here many of the conventional critics of empire, such as JA Hobson or George Orwell. Gopal argues that colonised people always resisted their masters but, importantly, some white colonialists, a number of whom she follows in detail, were able to learn from their thinking and experience. Ostensibly there to negotiate with the Egyptian leader, Ahmad Urabi, Blunt ended up taking his side, immersing himself in reformist strands of Islam.

It was a revelation to me that many 19th century British intellectuals, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, John Tyndall, Charles Kingsley, Charles Dickens, Tennyson and J. I expected a general overview of resistance to British colonialism, but the content is accurately described by the full title of the book: "Insurgent Empire: anticolonial resistance and British dissent" - the reaction of politicians in the British Isles is a major part of the content.Often treated as either a matter of diversified curricula or felled statues, decolonisation actually enjoins us all to think about our relationship to history very fundamentally, to explore the precise nature of our entanglement, as peoples and as communities, with empire and colonialism. Gopal takes Blunt more seriously than most historians, who seldom get beyond his philandering and passion for Arabian horses. The book really comes into its own in its coverage of the interwar years, when London became the epicentre of an anti-imperial internationalism, drawing together black Americans, West Indians, Africans and a surge of British radicals. In addition, a pivotal role in fomenting resistance was played by anticolonial campaigners based in London, right at the heart of empire.

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. He belongs to a long tradition of radical opposition to British imperialism, charted by Priyamvada Gopal’s arresting and insightful book. It is with the multifarious forms assumed by this 'internal' tradition of dissent that Priyamvada Gopal concerns herself in this extraordinarily valuable and brilliantly readable book. She was shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize in 2020 for Insurgent Empire – Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit.She is the author of Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence; The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration and Insurgent Empire – Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent. From Joseph Chamberlain to Enoch Powell and on to the apologists for Victorian imperialism now lying in wait for a seat at the table of the new Brexit cabinet, empire has had a noisier impact at the Tory end of the political spectrum.