Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

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The book shows that resistance movements were, in fact, always present in those colonised nations, and it was the actions taken by colonised subjects that inspired British criticism of Empire. Upsets received views to show how rebellious colonies changed British attitudes to empire Much has been written on the how colonial subjects took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination.

Detailed and descriptive definitely recommend if you are familiar with this history and want to expand your knowledge! 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. Priyamvada Gopal is University Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and Fellow, Churchill College. And men—nearly exclusively men—who were diasporic or globally mobile are the motors of this account of the empire insurgent. It argues convincingly that, when it did occur, British anti-colonialism in the metropole was forged through exposure to imperial insurgency.Our case is more complex given the Indigenous nations within, as well as the intermarriage and assimilation and acculturation (in many directions) that has been going on since before Columbus’s voyage. Yet, for a great many people, decolonisation still remains nothing short of a vision of radical social emancipation and economic justice, either inspiring or threatening as such.

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.There is Wilfrid Blunt who, with his wife Lady Anne, wound up in Cairo in 1882 as the British invaded Egypt.

Rather than a necessarily divisive process (although it is always a demanding one), decolonisation requires, precisely, ‘understanding’ – historical and cultural – in a global frame. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. Much has been written on the how colonial subjects took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. Things are never “Black” or “White,” but rather, Mulatto and muddled, including the history of de-colonization, no doubt still underway. Nor will readers find here many of the conventional critics of empire, such as JA Hobson or George Orwell.This book is a must read if you want to know the history of dissent in Britain during the days of the Empire. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Regardless to what far right racists might say about this book, it is a refreshing read into the history behind the British 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. 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.

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. In a quiet London square, just off Holborn, stands a statue of Fenner Brockway, veteran leftwing MP and scourge of empire. 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. Cultures of dissent were also transimperial, crisscrossing and zigzagging wherever criticism and censure arose.

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. Combining an expertly delivered narrative with a study of prior interpretations of these encounters, this is an invaluable work which quotes extensively from both colonisers and colonised. While formerly colonial societies have to reckon with the ways in which they continue to benefit from the spoils of enslavement and colonisation, ‘decolonisation’ should not become an excuse for postcolonial states to enact their own forms of oppression. 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. 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.