Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

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Gopal's exploration of the interplaybetween anti-colonial resistance in India, the West Indies and Britain deploys biography, history and cultural studies to support her persuasive argument that the colonies were not just the passive recipient of Britain's "civilising mission" but also the sources of a more refined understanding of key principles like equality and freedom. 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. 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. Much less widely known, however, is the record of active dissension from the imperial project within the metropole itself.

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. 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. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. Remarkably, there are very few counterweights to this kind of account, let alone ones with grand narrative ambition.In addition, a pivotal role in fomenting resistance was played by anticolonial campaigners based in London, right at the heart of empire. 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. It aimed also to think about the quite varied definitions of freedom that constituted the content of anticolonial struggles.

Things are never “Black” or “White,” but rather, Mulatto and muddled, including the history of de-colonization, no doubt still underway. Gopal shows that the ideas of freedom, justice and common humanity, in the name of which the metropolitan dissenters against imperialism raised their standard, had themselves taken shape in the struggle against imperialism. What’s more, empire has never split the British left as it did the German SPD before 1914, or the French Communist party in the 1960s. 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. In the end, morality and ethics are Christian and the author is able to convey it though inadvertently!

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.