Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

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The book contributes something altogether new and exciting to the existing critical literature in its suggestion that the internal opposition to imperial policies and polities was from the outset a dialogical exercise, premised on an active learning from the anti-colonial movements. 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.

Priyamvada Gopal’s Insurgent Empire challenges the monopoly of metrocentric approaches to British imperial history with her contrapuntal account of the role that anticolonial resistance played in shaping dissidence about imperialism at home as well as in the empire itself. Against attempts to portray empire as something distant and past, or as something benevolent and enlightened, approaches such as this one are essential. Polemic there is, but her battles with the empire denial lobby come in the opening pages and towards the close, and do not detract from a rigorous, persuasive revisionist history. Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. It aimed also to think about the quite varied definitions of freedom that constituted the content of anticolonial struggles.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. 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.

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. Nor will readers find here many of the conventional critics of empire, such as JA Hobson or George Orwell. One effect of Gopal’s broad narrative sweep in part 2 is that the impact on dissidents at home in Britain is rather overshadowed, at least in comparison to the cross-pollination we see at work in the Victorian cases. 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. The Communist party MP for Battersea, he was in effect the “member for India” as British policy in the 1920s gyrated from velvet fist to iron glove, but rarely engaged with Indian nationalism.Insurgent Empire ] sets out to celebrate the political agency of colonised peoples, its importance in bringing an end to empire and the impact it had on metropolitan liberal and radical thinking.

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. 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. Drawing attention to this new wave of organised opposition to empire – not only Britain’s, but also the colonialism of all the European powers – is an important addition and corrective to that all that has been written recently about the rise and fall of liberal internationalism in the two decades after the Treaty of Versailles of 1919.

She discusses in great detail the many Britons who were opposed to the British occupation of numerous lands around the world. 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. Priyamvada Gopal examines a century of dissent on the question of empire and shows how British critics of empire were influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies, from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. 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.