Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

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Gopal has calmly and authoritatively produced this impressive study of resistance against Empire, in the face of the kind of constant hostility that only serves to reminds us why her work is so urgent in the first place. And men—nearly exclusively men—who were diasporic or globally mobile are the motors of this account of the empire insurgent. Significantly, in the 1960s Perham went on to help set up some of the first universities of the new African nations, supporting degree programmes that broke with the old convention of exporting textbooks from the mother country, replacing colonial curricula with courses better suited to African needs. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit.

Gopal ends her book where she began, in Oxford, with Margery Perham, the distinguished colonial expert, whose life journey is retold as a passage out of Africa, with Mau Mau as the turning point in her rejection of Britain’s imperial mission.

There is Wilfrid Blunt who, with his wife Lady Anne, wound up in Cairo in 1882 as the British invaded Egypt. 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. 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. I bought this out of curiosity after seeing the controversy arising from some comments made by the author on Twitter. 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.

Since 2016, campaigners have been trying to “decolonise” Britain’s history by removing memorials to imperialists such as Cecil Rhodes and the Bristol slave-trader Edward Colston, among others. It also shows how a pivotal role in fomenting dissent was played by anti-colonial campaigners based in London at the heart of the empire.ACT Contact / FAQ About Events / Videos Merch / Subs Sign in/up Insurgent Empire : Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent Gopal, Priyamvada More by this author. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Yet even then voices of dissent could be heard, as her vignette describing the Movement for Colonial Freedom, led by Brockway, brings out vividly. Gopal’s Global South does not include the Antipodes; Indigenous people under settler colonial regimes do not figure here.

The Chartist Ernest Jones, for example, was inspired by Indian revolutionary action, seeing in it models for working-class agitation. 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. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. Priyamvada Gopal has calmly and authoritatively produced this impressive study of resistance against Empire, in the face of the kind of constant hostility that only serves to reminds us why her work is so urgent in the first place.Gopal shows very successfully that the colonies - British relationship was not a one way street where only colonial peoples learnt from the British. I am unfamiliar with what goes on in Britain, but apparently it is necessary (to a certain extent here in the States as well) to insist that freedom is never bestowed as a free gift out of the pure generosity of those who had a certain measure of “power over”, but always in a context where those who lack it have been fighting to gain liberty for some time. 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

Sadly, it was impossible not to speculate that these would in all likelihood have been lone voices in the wilderness perceived as disloyal and cranky by most “right thinking” people, even if they left a trail for later generations. I appreciated the close reading of speeches delivered by these dissenters - especially those from the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when they’d clearly be going against the overwhelming consensus of the time.

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