INSURGENT EMPIRE

by Priyamvada Gopal

Upsets received views to show how rebellious colonies changed British attitudes to empire
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. The possibility of reverse influence has been largely overlooked. 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. 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. It also shows how a pivotal role in fomenting dissent was played by anticolonial campaigners based in London, at the heart of the empire.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, India, Race, Asia, British Literature

626 pages, Hardcover

First published June 25, 2019

Reviews

[Asim Qureshi · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you could turn Priyamvada Gopal’s excellent ‘Insurgent Empire’ into a pill, it would serve as a very strong antidote to liberal-saviour narratives that we are consistently ‘treated’ to by apologists for the British empire.

Largely concentrating the early sections of the book on key moments of insurgency or insurrection within the wider British imagination in the mid to late 1800s, we come to understand through Gopal’s work that these were not unique, but rather sit on a longer continuum of anticolonial resistance.

Although the work of other scholars makes the point well about moments like the 1857 Indian Uprising not being unique prior to their action, what is incredible about this book, is the way in which Gopal charts how intellectual movements within India, the Caribbean and Egypt, were educating those in the West in what Gopal terms an “act of reverse tutelage”. This is not a story of how western thinkers became enlightened by virtue of their own beneficence, but rather how both individuals and movements were intellectually enriched by anticolonial insurgent movements to become critics of Empire. If there was no other reason to appreciate the existence of this work, this would be enough. As Gopal writes:

“My own argument here turns away from the hypostatizing pieties of personal national conscience towards an examination of rebel agency as a catalyst for serious criticism of the imperial project.”

I honestly can’t remember the last time I read a book that so fundamentally shifted some of my own assumptions about the way in which some in Britain (England) interacted and indeed counteracted empire with its colonial subjects. There is so much to learn, not just to correct historical record, but to understand the roles we play in the world we inhabit today. Gopal leaves us with no thought except that reassessing this whole history is utterly necessary for debates that are currently ranging around what it means to be citizens/subjects of the state today.

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is an oft repeated argument in discussion of Britain’s Imperial past (and present). For some, it is that on balance the British Empire was a good thing, spreading civilisation and well-being, despite the occasional outbreak of violence and excess in response to provocations by colonial subjects. For other apologists, it goes something like, well, even if you can’t accept that the Empire was a good thing, at least it wasn’t as bad as the others were. Still, a remarkably dubious claim. One of the things that holds almost all apologists of Empire together, however, is the claim that the criticise it now is to anachronistically impose the measures and views of today on actions of the past. We see this in all manner of statements – undermining critique because imperialist X was a man of his time (and it is almost always a man), or the claim that the actions of Imperialists and colonialists had the broad support of ‘the people’, however that is defined. I grew up in a colony of settlement, the son of settlers in an era when settler ideologies were dominant – yet as I learned and engaged with Indigenous peoples it became painfully obvious to me how vacuous are those apologetics. And yet they have power – the power of myth, meaning it is hard to subject them to rational critique and they have deep-set roots.

Priyamvada Gopal takes on both the power of those myths and their deep roots in this essential critique of those apologetics; she does that by applying her skills as a critical scholar of literature to historical evidence – that is, she explores the discourses of Empire from mid-19th to mid-20th century Britain. Her case is deceptively simple: British attitudes to Empire were influenced by 1) responses in Britain to outbreaks of extreme violence, resistance and rebellion, 2) the experiences of metropolitan visitors to Imperial and colonial outposts and sites, and 3) engagement with the colonised living in Britain. She returns, on several occasions, to Labour MP Fenner Brockway’s (and others) observation that it is outbreaks of intense moments of resistance that focus the mind on Empire, and woven through her argument is the case that Britain’s myth of the benevolence of its Empire and the beneficence of granting independence, once the colonised were ready for it and could cope, is among Empire’s most dangerous myth.

Building on the two great moments of mid-19th century disruption of the myths of Empire – the Indian uprising of 1857 and the colonial massacres at Morant Bay in Jamaica in 1865 – Gopal shows convincingly that a powerful metropolitan critique of the excesses of Empire were sustained and enhanced by voices on and from the ground of those events. She highlights the openness of discussion while the dominant narrative was being developed and confirmed, and the presence of dissident British media voices ensuring that the simplicities of that dominant narrative were disrupted, unsettled and the falsehood exposed. She also points and explores the dynamics and relationships of the organisations supporting those dissident voices. She then shifts focus to explore the profile, impact and work of two individuals who are both significant in their own right and metonymical of wider shifts: the former colonial official and gentry farmer Wilfrid Blunt whose engagements with Egypt at the time of British occupation brought home to him the machinations of Empire, and the MP for South Battersea, Shapurji Saklatvala, who emerged as an activist voice in England before 1914 and after the war became the House of Commons only Communist Party MP. Whereas she depicts Blunt as a powerful voice around the state and increasingly linked to anti-colonial forces, Saklatvala can be seen as a dissident voice at the heart of the state, active in Parliament, linked to (mainly Indian) anti-colonial forces and given that he was several times re-elected clearly an effective constituency MP. As with the events of the 1850s and 1860s, Gopal also puts both Blunt & Saklatvala in their organisational contexts, and as woven into wider socio-political networks. In the midst of this exploration of two key figures she also explores the experiences of visitors to India – Keir Hardy, Ramsay McDonald and others.

Having set up the global dynamics, Gopal then shifts focus a little to draw out the networks of activists present in Britain, mainly London, in the 1920s and 1930s, from those active in support of those on trial in Meerut to those around organisations such as the League Against Imperialism, the International African Service Bureau and the Movement for Colonial Freedom. In much the way as she uses Blunt & Saklatvala to tell a wider story, much but by no means all, of this discussion is told through discussions of Brockway and through a focus on the Trinidadian activist George Padmore. Here, again, Gopal is convincing in her efforts to highlight the dialogic character of anti-Imperialist activism and the depth of political and cultural discussions – there is a long section on Nancy Cunard’s 1937 book Negro as a presentation of a richly diverse set of African-descent voices. Crucially, she brings home implicitly and explicitly, time and again, what she calls ‘reverse tutelage’ where the colonised teach (and in doing so, disrupt the ‘thingification’ that colonialism and Imperialism do so effectively). She then compellingly pulls all of these strands together through a discussion of Kenya, the ‘Mau Mau’ uprising and the limitations of colonial control; although not as explicit as she might have been here, there is a direct link back to the recurrent engagement with Padmore’s notions of ‘colonial fascism’.

In the manner of good revisionist historians Gopal has returned to the established sources, reviewed and revised interpretations. She unobtrusively brings to bear her skills as a textual critic and literary analyst, unpacking and unravelling the threads in and between texts in a manner that is theoretically and methodologically meticulous and made seem effortless by a clear, if in places detailed as these things need to be, exploration and discussion. Not only is this a potent exploration of the critics of Empire that rebuts the apologists in both academia and beyond, but it is a great example for others of us working in these ‘dialogues of Empire/colonialism’ of how our work could be.

This is a powerful contribution to histories and historiographies of Imperialism and colonialism, as well as to British political and cultural histories of Empire and anti-Imperialism/colonialism. It is an evisceration of the anachronism critique. In addition, it is that rare thing, a rational critique that weakens the deep roots of myth. It deserves a wide audience.

[Lasic · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is heavy post colonial jargon, thin on facts and personally i do not recommend reading it.

[Bookworm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Can't quite remember what drew me to the book (I may have heard of the author and by extension decided to read her work) and as part of Women's History Month I thought it would be a good read. If you couldn't tell this book is about British colonists and slaves who actively fought against British and how their battles would influence and shape the fight back home for British critics.

It was okay. Not being that familiar with the people, particular time periods or historical context made this a tough read for me. It felt like this was a book that was very much for someone already familiar with the material (at least, more than I am) or was already studying this in the context for a class.

There's a lot of interesting information in here, but overall it was a tough read that might not be for the layperson.

Library borrow was best.

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not a narrative history, but an examination of key individuals, movements and especially writings in opposition to the British Empire. It establishes their existence in both the metropolis and the colonies, it reviews some of the ways they linked with each other across time and space, and it evaluates their significance, individually and cumulatively. It takes a little time and effort to settle into the style of the book, but it rewards that investment many times over. Although it is quite a lengthy and very substantial work it is broken down into chapters that cover quite a range of topics, and it not only sustains interest but also produces all sorts of unexpected insights.

Some key points I took from the book, in my own language not Gopal's, which may not be the precise opinions of its author.

• The British Empire was not benign and only sustained its position by continuous use of brutal force against incessant insurrections and protest, which ultimately prevailed.

• The West favours a “whiggish” ideology, in which the actual present status of the West is unquestionably to be preferred to alternatives, and is the necessary and benevolent culmination of history. Gopal refutes this view. In fact, it is an accident of history and by no means indicative of any inherent superiority.

• The West has a habit of appropriating ideas that are universal or that arise in any case from other cultures and claiming them as their own, including appeals to the Enlightenment or concepts of freedom.

• When forced to make concessions, the West promptly claims the credit, as though the resulting gains are their free gift and not wrung from them by force. This minimises the risk of contagion, and especially the risk that working people in the West will learn from the struggles of others that they too have the capacity to overthrow the greed of the oligarchy. It may even be that the West urgently needs to learn from the example of the Third World. If that suggeston makes you sneer, then you badly need to read this book.

• The West likes to claim that third world people have struggled to achieve freedom in Western terms, including the benefits of free market capitalism and liberal democracy. The reality is that most insurgencies were in direct opposition to capitalism and motivated often by socialist ideals, that native people have their own conceptions of freedom derived from their own culture and history and that Western capitalism and indeed fascism continues to exploit them in new ways.

• There is nothing to distinguish imperialism from fascism, except that 1930s fascism targetted white Europeans. In time, the methods deployed against native people in the colonies could well be turned against workers in the metropolis, and indeed that is one way to view what happened to Europe in the Thirties and what could happen again (I think arguably is happening in the USA at least).

One starting point for the book was a lively and somewhat acidic argument between a number of writers, Gopal and Niall Ferguson with Hobsbawm, Colley and Beckford, on the topic of the British Empire, which disrupted the smooth flow of Andrew Marr’s BBC Radio 4 show “Start the Week” in June 2006 and it is amusing to find that the BBC have censored the recording of that event out of their archive rather than use it to demonstrate how lively and intellectually curious their flagship programme could be in different hands. Happily there is a samizdat copy available on the net and it is worth listening to:
https://web.archive.org/web/200606142...

Some quotes

Page numbers are from the digital edition, on Google Play, and differ a lot from the page numbers on the hard copy.

I hope Ferguson will forgive the temerity of ‘an obscure Cambridge lecturer’, as he has dubbed me, in daring to venture into terrain where only the mighty may expound. [p11]

It is this insight that then leads Douglass to make his famous pronouncement: ‘The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle … Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will.’ [p17]

Edward Said observed correctly that ‘a standard imperialist misrepresentation has it that exclusively Western ideas of freedom led the fight against colonial rule, which mischievously overlooks the reserves in Indian and Arab culture that always resisted imperialism, and claims the fight against imperialism as one of imperialism’s major triumphs’ [p18]

Whig historiography – typically figure the geopolitical West as rolling on inexorably towards greater freedom, the darker nations taught to follow in its wake... As the historian Victor Kiernan has observed, the word ‘freedom’ carries a racialized inflection, ‘easier made into a parrot-cry than defined, and Westerners boast now of being free very much as not long ago they boasted of being white’. [p19]

The familiar ‘rise-and-fall’ model is indeed misleading, suggesting a long period of stability followed by a sudden end, whereas the maintenance of imperial rule in fact required constant vigilance and frequently forceful responses to resistance.[p20]

In the contexts of both antislavery and anticolonialism, ‘freedom’ was a contested concept, its content emerging dialogically, determined through experience and struggle... for many Kenyan resisters and insurgents in the period following the Second World War, self-determination involved not individualism but collective land-ownership as manifested in a struggle for ‘Land and Freedom’ [p23]

Rather than properly considering the Enlightenment as at once historically and culturally situated, drawing on resources that are not in fact just ‘European’ but are potentially universal in some of their aspirations, intersecting with ideals theorized outside Europe, the field’s most influential scholars, as Neil Lazarus suggests, ‘have written at length to condemn as naive or, worse, tacitly authoritarian, any commitment to universalism, metanarrative, social emancipation, revolution’... The notion of the universal – in the sense of ideas and values that might have a certain supple applicability across cultures – is itself assumed a priori to have only ever been thought of in Europe, [p32]


Human commonality – and equality – were reclaimed by the colonized, not bestowed by the colonizer [p45] ... Even as the vocabulary of some forms of resistance drew on spiritual and religious frameworks that were clearly situated outside the European Enlightenment, there was no self-evident repudiation of ‘reason’ (in the lower case).[p47]

Insurgent Empire is written with Said’s insight in mind that what makes cultures and civilizations interesting is ‘not their essence or purity, but their combinations and diversity, the way they have of conducting a compelling dialogue with other civilizations’. 91 This means returning to ‘what has long been a characteristic of all cultures, namely, that there is a strong streak of radical antiauthoritarian dissent in all of them’.[p48]

Insurgent Empire does not aspire to achieve anything like comprehensive coverage of anticolonial insurgencies, bearing in mind that the Empire was subject to almost constant challenge. It also does not attempt to survey the whole terrain of British dissent on imperial matters. The maps of anticolonial insurgency and dissidence are vast and varied. Instead, my focus is on what I identify as exemplary crises of rule and engagement that helped create a tradition of dissent on the question of empire, looked outward to the colonial world, and sought to effect transformation as much in Britain as beyond. This book seeks to be capacious without pretending to be comprehensive. [p59]

With familiar Orientalist benevolence, Blunt suggested that the Arab was exceptional, and thus ‘fully entitled by his intellectual and moral powers to political freedom’. (Later, he would note that, while liberty, equality and brotherhood were ‘three blessings’ that Europe liked to boast about, ‘we do not in truth possess them’.) [p179] ... If there was one formative insight that changed Blunt’s perspective, it was that Islam and Islamic cultures were no less capable of introspection and change than any other – just as Christian societies were as capable of stagnation and reaction as any other. ‘I know’, he writes, ‘that it is a received opinion … that Islam is in its constitution unamenable to change, and by consequence to progressive life.’ For all that, there is plenty of evidence to marshal in favour of this assertion: ‘The fact is, Islam does move’[p182]... Blunt recognized, in a way that Frantz Fanon would also do decades later, that the capacity to change is not unique to particular cultures and societies. For Fanon, this is a capacity which is put into abeyance in the face of colonization, a ‘tragic labyrinth’ in which ‘the truth objectively expressed is constantly vitiated by the lie of the colonial situation’. [p182]... Blunt too was coming to understand what Fanon articulated so clearly well over half a century later: until it is distorted and arrested by the fact of colonialism and its insistence on ‘successful integration’ to the supposedly superior values of the colonizing entity, cultures have a healthy dynamic that includes engagement with new ideas and other cultures. 50 Reason and faith coexist as much in Muslim societies as in Christian ones [p182]

... much of [Ramsay] Macdonald’s argument is actually taken up with what he has learned from his encounters – that Indian nationalism in the wake of Swadeshi has found imaginative, spiritual and political resources of its own [p258] .. MacDonald argued, as Nevinson had, that it made no sense to insist that religion and politics be kept separate in a context where they never had been. ... ‘The Indian assassin quotes his Bhagavad Gita just as the Scottish covenanter quoted his Old Testament’, and inspires youths to ‘cast constitutionalism to the four winds’...[p259]

One of the insights that Hutchinson, the son of communists who was not himself a party member, had gleaned from witnessing both resistance and repression in various contexts was that imperialism had perforce to use different tactics in Britain and India, even though the ‘same oligarchy’ ran both countries: ‘But this oligarchy employs methods in India, which it does not dare employ as yet in Britain’... Given that young men were in jail ‘for doing nothing more than holding opinions distasteful to the Executive’, asks Hutchinson, in what respects did ‘the legislation of British Imperialism differ from that of Fascist Terrorism in Italy?’ His answer is bald: ‘In no respect.’ [p327]

The recognition that the principle of ‘tutelage’ had to be erased on the left as much as in the mainstream was also articulated by Clemens Dutt, the British communist who had been active in the Meerut campaign and was a member of the LAI. Dutt vociferously criticized the Labour and Socialist Second International’s own reformist paternalism: ‘A large section of the colonial peoples are not considered to have “reached the standard” for self-government, they are not fit to be free and they must be educated and led for their benefit by the kindly tutelage of the superior civilising imperialist power.’ As resistance was met by ‘bloody repression, hangings, shootings and air-bombings’ in places such as Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Samoa and New Guinea, it was possible to assess ‘what an invaluable experience in imperialist tutelage their inhabitants are receiving’. [p334]

There is also a scathing dismissal of the ways in which the time lags of inevitably uneven development in human societies form the basis of ‘adventitious and idiotic’ race hierarchies populated by demigods and apes, rather than accepted as part of the ‘richness and variety of human nature’ [p356]

It is less the case, James suggests, that insurgent slaves ‘embraced’ a revolutionary doctrine from Europe, than that the French Revolution provided a ready-made language as well as material support for aspirations that were already there but had been kept in check by the degradation and violence of the slave system. With their revolution, ‘these slaves, lacking education, half-savage, and degraded in their slavery as only centuries of slavery can degrade, achieved a liberality in social aspiration and an elevation of political thought equivalent to anything similar that took place in France’. Rebellion itself, James stresses repeatedly, is rooted not in systems of thought but in a human response to intolerable conditions [p434]

Another form of rebellion, James observes, was religious in form but deeply anti-European in nature: ‘Such education as the African is given is nearly always religious, so that the leader often translated the insurrection into religious terms.’ As Walter Rodney indicates, James stressed that the language of religion which inflected such revolts ‘should not obscure the fact that they sprung from such things as forced labour, land alienation and colonial taxation’. [p434] ... In the Belgian Congo, such resistance took the form of leaving European-controlled churches in favour of independent African ones under the leadership of Simon Kimbangu. [p435]

The value of James’s work from this period, Rodney noted, was that it gave African freedom from colonial rule a backstory, allowing the resistant consciousness of contemporary Africans to be ‘heightened by knowledge of the dignity and determination of their foreparents’; to ‘give historical depth to the process of resistance’. Silences in colonial history about the fact of rebellion proliferated through the first half of the twentieth century... Rodney reminds us that ‘African resistance to European colonization was not supposed to have existed as far as colonialist scholars were concerned’. For James, such silences were facilitated by omissions in the historical records [p435]

[In 1934, Padmore wrote How Britain Rules Africa] ...Although it annoyed British reviewers, one of whom saw it as an unsparing and unfair attack on ‘everything the white man has done in Africa’, the book was, in fact, also a warning that what was done in the colonies was coming home to roost in the form of fascism: Habits once formed are difficult to get rid of. That is why we maintain that Colonies are the breeding ground for the type of fascist mentality which is being let loose in Europe today. Therefore, the working class of England and other defenders of the hard-won democratic rights of the British peoples cannot beat back fascism at home and at the same time continue to be indifferent to the intolerable conditions of the overwhelming majority of the coloured people of the Empire who inhabit colonial lands. The fight against fascism cannot be separated from the right of all colonial peoples and subject races to Self-Determination. For any people who help to keep another people in slavery are at the same time forging their own chains. [p455]

[George Orwell:] What we always forget is that the overwhelming bulk of the British proletariat does not live in Britain, but in Asia and Africa. It is not in Hitler’s power, for instance, to make a penny an hour a normal industrial wage; it is perfectly normal in India, and we are at great pains to keep it so … Fresh from fighting fascists in Spain, Orwell was hardly suggesting that the war against fascism did not matter. He was, rather, much as Padmore had been doing, querying the ways in which anti-Nazi and anti-fascist rhetoric was turned into an alibi, a talisman to obscure colonialism’s own depredations [p473]

Padmore’s stringent and uncompromising condemnation of the failure of British ‘Internationalists’ to ‘see the claims of the coloured subject peoples of the Empire in the same light as the white ones under Nazi domination in Europe’ is reminiscent of Césaire’s fierce later polemic against white Europeans’ blindness to parallels, for forgetting of Nazism that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had only been applied to non-European peoples … reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.[p476]

It has been the argument of this book that British public life and political discourse have been mired in a tenacious colonial mythology in which Britain – followed by the remainder of the geopolitical West – is the wellspring of ideas of freedom, either ‘bestowing’ it on slaves and colonial subjects or ‘teaching’ them how to go about obtaining it. This assumption does not restrict itself to the undoubtedly copious body of writing on the idea of ‘liberty’ which is certainly a notable feature of British and American intellectual history; it extends, as we have just seen, to the very impulses that drive human beings to make their own history in circumstances not of their own choosing.... To undo this mythology systematically, then, remains a project of the highest intellectual and political importance. [p550]

Put another way, the resistance of the periphery helped radicalize sections of the metropole. In the process, ideas of freedom that were not reducible to Obama’s ultimate ‘triumph of a system of free enterprise that unleashes the full potential of individual men and women’ did make their claims heard, even if they were not always heeded.[p551] ... Indeed, ‘free enterprise’ as such rarely formed the basis of claims to independence and self-determination, even though, from India and Jamaica to Egypt and Kenya, demands for land and control of labour power formed the basis of insurgencies. More often than not, capitalism was the target of insurgency, not its goal, and socialism in one form or the other, certainly in the twentieth century, was a strong influence. [p551]

Invoking the example of rebellions in the West Indies, James observes: ‘Unless the Colonial Office claims that it trains the masses of the people to strike and revolt whenever a new stage of fiddling with the Legislature is reached, its elaborate claims for training colonial peoples is an elaborate fiction.’ Each concession wrested from colonial governments was the result of explosions causing loss of life and property, followed by one step towards self-government being ‘benevolently granted’. Full self-government takes place when it becomes too costly to repress the determined resistance that will not be denied [p553]

Myths matter because, unlike crude propaganda, they often drive action through sincerely held views, and possess a tenacity borne of limiting the horizon of possibilities: ‘the vast majority of the British people having no other views placed before them … have no other choice but to follow along the same lines of thought’.... Myth-making conceals another virulent poison for the myth-makers’, James observes. ‘It insists that they see themselves always as the givers, and Africans as the takers, themselves as teachers and Africans as the taught’, and never ‘the slightest hint’ that anything which took place in the colonies could, conversely, ‘instruct or inspire the peoples of the advanced countries in their own management of their own affairs’. [p553]

[Keen Reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 Stars

“The British Empire is also the history of resistance to it, and – importantly, from both beyond and within Britain such resistance is still not central to the writing of British imperial history.”

The British Empire came with a special kind of arrogance and elitism about it, one which was often tinted with unfounded religious and moral superiority, so that not only were millions of people around the world supposed to bow down and accept the fact the British elite wanted to rape and pillage from them, but they were actually supposed to feel gratitude that such a superior race had chosen them to exploit and oppress.

In spite of centuries of slaughter, slavery, occupation and theft, they were to believe that this benevolent empire always had their best interests at heart, and their intention was always for them to improve the countries they occupied. They should be thankful that such a nation had chosen them to steal their resources to enrich and empower themselves.

The introduction does waffle on a bit and gets a little repetitive, which is partly a foreshadowing of what is to come in the main body of this text. Her summary of the Morant Bay uprising of 1865 in Jamaica certainly made for compelling reading, and I was shocked to read the people who publicly defended and financially supported Governor Eyre (and by proxy slavery and the belief of the just superiority of the British Empire) included the likes of Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin.

One of the good things about this book is that does a fairly effective job of showing that there is so much more depth and complexity to the liberation and independence of India, too often, particularly in the west and the Anglophonic world the impression can be formed that Indian independence was all about Gandhi and his various protests and speeches, when in fact there is so much more to it than that.

In one sense I applaud the depth and scope of Gopal's writing, but with this comes a density that is so thick and heavy as to often be impenetrable and tedious. Ultimately the depth and density involved in this undertaking are not for everyone, and are likely to frighten off everyone apart from the most keen and intrepid of reader. I couldn't say I enjoyed this as such, but I did learn a few things.

[Zahida Zahoor · Rating 1 out of 5]

Priyamvada is a brilliant scholar and is invited to a number of news channels so I was keen to read her book. Unfortunately, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent is written for academics, I felt I was reading someone PhD thesis rather than a book to educate the public. Priyamvada makes an important point that there was significant anti-colonial resistance in the West that played a significant role in bringing down the empire. However, the book is poorly written: once sentence stretching into half a page, rammed with facts and names that make your head spin, dryly-written (though there are some attempts to inject the book with pictures and more light-hearted stories) and lots of jargon and acronyms. The book could also have done with significant editing.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

Great to keep this book handy should you run out of toilet roll or need a wonky table propping up.

Other than that it's one of the most inaccurate things I have ever read, the authors a nasty piece of work too, full of hatred and bitterness. Don't bother.

[Garret Giblin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very academic text that required a lot of focus to get through but very glad I persevered. Gopal expertly charts the two way movement of ideas between metropole and periphery by looking closely at specific texts and individuals. This book is an impressive achievement, especially as it comes from an author with a background in literature rather than history. Her focus on voice, agency, and the evolution of different individuals and organisations' ideas is very thought-provoking. Her command of the primary and secondary material is evident throughout

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a history of thought about Empire, looking at dissidents, moderates, converts and the general public in Britain and some of its colonies, with special attention to rebellions and uprisings. Its main arguments are that freedom and independence never gifts of the British Empire to give, that lands and autonomy had to be taken back by indigenous populations, and that rebellion often served to radicalize settler and homeland English people, some individuals in particular [the author includes profiles of the transition in thinking of some colonialists after subsequent visits to colonies with popular uprisings and exposure to their ways of thinking], and the population in general.

The writing is fairly academic, by which I don't mean it's hard to understand or inaccessible, but rather than the research is incredibly thorough and feels fully presented. It makes the book as a whole both educational and rather a slog. Well worth it, but [I often feel this way] the argument could have been made and probably more clearly in fewer pages. But on the other hand, knowledge is power.

[Bettie]

Insurgent Empire by Priyamvada Gopal review – a superb study of anticolonial resistance An important new history of opposition to the British empire, at home and overseas, from the Chartists and the Indian rebels to the Mau Mau uprising

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant takedown of the British Empire.
Gopal doesn't pretend to be comprehensive of all resistance to the empire, because there were so many critiques and rebellions against the British Empire in its time that it would be impossible to fit them all in one book, but she is extensive in her detailing of the case studies she selects. She goes through the incidents and people she selects with exhaustive, almost excruciating detail, but you'll walk away knowing more about the British Empire and how the colonized actively resisted it the entire time than you ever did. I only took off half a star because it is so dense that it became unreadable at times even for me, someone who studied history in college. There were a lot of five-dollar words used when a regular old word would have been enough.
Recommended for the next time you encounter some dodo who claims "but the British gave them railroads" and "they were just products of their time!" Either make them read it or whack them over the head with it, the book's thick enough to knock some sense into them.

[Ananya · Rating 3 out of 5]

incredible read but -0.5 for how (needlessly) academic most sections were

[Alasdair · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am absolutely here for this in theory, but the delivery just kills it for me. I'm somebody who reads and even occasionally enjoys ostensibly boring/dense academic writing, but this is Academic Writing (Derogatory). A real slog to get through, this thing is DENSE with theory that more often gets in the way than actually helps explain things. I'm convinced by the main thrust of the book, even if some of the individual points seem a little more sketchy/speculative (though I lack the subject specific knowledge to confidently confirm or refute them!).

If what Gopal is arguing is new or revolutionary within anti-colonial study of the British Empire then I weep for that field/sub-field. If this is instead supposed to disseminate academic research to a lay audience, it is possibly one of the least accessible attempts to do so that I've come across in some time.

Occasional bright spots include the bits on Shapurji Saklatvala who I knew very little about going in, but seems to have been pretty cool!

[Igor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve started reading this book when it came out back in 2019. It was a long read, and a long journey. But by the end of it I can say f@ck Britain.

[Jacky Chan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insurgent Empire is crystal clear on what it attempts to do: study the way there was active resistance to Empire from both within and without Britain, to dispel the myth that (a) liberation, freedom, etc. where somehow ideas that Britain paternistically granted to the 'dark races', (b) the logical final result of Empire was its dissolution, as well as to refute the cynical historicist idea that criticising Empire is anachronistic. Because it is particularly interested in showing how the colonised influenced the colonisers, the book inevitably examines individual after individual in a slightly more laborious way than I would have liked--the best history writing to me are ones that consider the winds of change, the big picture. Another slight problem I have with the book is that it is sometimes heavily descriptive--again, understandably, because there is sufficient analysis that follows, but not my favourite form of scholarship. Still, on the whole Insurgent Empire is enterprising, assured, and intelligent; the chapter I just finished today on early 20thC Pan-African resistance in the metropole, which posits the anthology Negro as the materialisation of such resistance in form, content, and enterprise, is excellent. So 4/5--a recommended read.

[Eivind · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were better men and women in those times, in Britain and throughout the empire, than the Men of Their Times.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant and important book. I just wish 1) it was slightly easier reading, for me and for my students, and 2) there was more of a focus on the history of the insurgencies themselves (the focus is overwhelmingly on how resistance in the colonies influenced the development of British anti-colonial dissent, with a focus on changing attitudes in Britain).

[Chris Caps · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very important book that sprung a number of important ideas into my head and a book that has significantly reshaped some of my understanding of Empire and Anticolonial resistance. For much of what this book reveals, I can't fault it.
However, it's execution is hard work. There are moments where the book is gripping as well as illuminating but there are more moments where the book is clinical and dense. At points, this inevitably lessened the books impact.
Overall, I'm still appreciative of what I got out of the book but it's probably better suited for someone who is not simply a lay reader on the topic of Anticolonialism. Which is a shame because its lessons should hit a wider audience.

[Moravian1297 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was heavy and I mean HEAVY man!
If Priyamvada Gopal's work here could be compared to music, it's paternal and maternal grandparents would be Black Sabbath, Rammstein, Napalm Death and Godflesh!

But putting all jocularity aside, it certainly was a very in depth and forensic study, that had initially lead me up the garden path somewhat, as I had originally thought the book covered the insurgencies and rebellions themselves. However, I quickly ascertained otherwise as the author stated that they would only have a quick overview of the uprisings and instead the focus would be on the resultant attitudes towards them back in the metropole, in this case London, England.
Again when the synopsis had mentioned the dissent emanating out from the said metropole, caused by the colonial insurgencies (the book concentrates mainly on fight backs in India, The West Indies, Egypt and Kenya), I was thinking more along the lines that it would be from the consciousness of the working class as a whole, but no, that wasn't the case, the author instead focuses on specific individuals and groups like the League Against Imperialism and the Independent Labour Party.
Which in the end, turned out to be a very rewarding experience as it introduced me to a whole swathe of people previously unbeknownst to me, revolutionaries such as, the courageous Shapurji Saklatvala, Claude McKay, Nancy Cunard, George Padmore and Femer Brockway among others. All daring anticolonial socialists of varying degrees and all bravely fighting against imperialism and the racism which it is inherently built upon, all within the beating heart of the capitalist monster itself.

"More often than not, 'capitalism' was the target of the insurgency, not it's goal and 'socialism' in one form or another, certainly in the twentieth century, was a strong influence."

While also learning more good things about fearless comrades I am familiar with, like the resolute Sylvia Pankhurst.

Unfortunately with the book being so weighed down with theoretical polemics and containing many, many words I had to Google (sometimes nearly every word in a sentence!), I honestly felt that initially, I wasn't really intellectually equipped or indeed savvy enough for a full appreciation of what the book was ultimately trying to get across.
This is why I had somewhat of a quandary on how many stars to give the book, because technically it's not the book's fault if I'm intellectually unable to cope with the content, but on the other hand and to use a word from the book I had to Google, perhaps the narrative WAS just a little too "prolix".
I did think however, on completion, that I had understood the book for the most part and despite it's complex narrative, I had in the end, thoroughly enjoyed it and subsequently absorbed and learnt much from it, which is all one can really ask for, is it not?
Now, just as General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmany Melchett did in ”Blackadder Goes Forth”, with the word ”gobbledygook”, I shall also be trying to use the word prolix a lot more in everyday parlance!

I was also amazed and dismayed in equal measure at two little nuanced lines that were seemingly inconsequential to the whole picture of a couple of chapters, but they certainly resonated and shone out like a beacon for me!
I was amazed when the author states that Nancy Cunard's seminal, collaborative book "Negro", was originally turned down by publisher Victor Gollancz. I was like,
”Woohoo!” That was John Bingham's publisher! I love being an autodidact, and so when books I've previously read, in this case, "The Man Who Was George Smiley", come to fruition and you can actually see recently learnt knowledge jump out at you before your very eyes, it does feel like a great sense of achievement and can be extremely rewarding!
And dismayed when I read that Indian philosopher and poet Sri Aurobindo called British MP (at the time) Ramsay MacDonald, English! (I'm aware that individual oppressed people might not have been overly caring of the nuances of their oppressors specific regional nationalities) MacDonald though, is not only Scottish, but was born in Lossiemouth, Moray, a few miles up the road from me, so I hope you understand why I couldn't let that particular faux pas slide!

I also stumbled upon a nice wee argument to stick it to the numpties in Labour, who facetiously try and rope the Scottish National Party, who practice a form of civic nationalism, in with "blood and soil" nationalism, which is effectively the basis for Nazi ideology and I quote Femer Brockway,

"the distinction between 'colonial nationalism' (meaning the nationalism of anticolonalism) and 'imperialist nationalism'. If a workers dictatorship is not the same as a fascist dictatorship, which it is not, then it is stupidly mechanical for the left to argue that all nationalisms are the same"

The argument in a nutshell I think and it does highlight that there are varying degrees of nationalism, inasmuch, that the republican nationalism in the occupied six counties of Ireland and the civic nationalism in an effectively imprisoned Scotland is indeed, completely different from the right wing nationalism that is unfortunately and resurgently prevalent at this moment in time in large swathes of Eastern Europe, like in Ukraine for example. The former two being the last vestiges of English colonialism.

There was also clear evidence of history egregiously repeating itself, where old colonial tropes are still widely trumpeted today in the same context of justifying wars of imperialist conquest.
Although it was over twenty years ago now, the illegal invasion of Iraq by the US and Britain, still lives long in the memory and would still be classed as a relatively contemporary example of Western imperialism, where the economic and social consequences are still reverberating back to these shores with frightening frequency.
When Britain invaded Egypt in the late nineteenth century, British PM William Gladstone succeeded in portraying the Egyptian leader Ahmed Urabi as a military dictator, who would usurp rather than represent Egypt's national aspirations. Here, we can very much see the echo of such tactics aimed at Iraq's Saddam Hussein in two thousand and three. The book continues,

"Egypt was represented as a land of lawless military violence, aggravated by cruel and wanton crime, while Urabi was a military oppressor and "our troops" were not engaged in a war with Egypt, but freeing Egyptians from oppression."

The parallels with Western propaganda, that bombarded us in the lead up to the lunacy of the war criminals, George W Bush and Tony Blair's illegal invasion of Iraq in two thousand and three is really quite scary, it's as if they're literally reading from a manual on ’how to do imperialism!'

I noticed in another review, someone said this book is heavy on rhetoric and hyperbole and light on facts. What an absolutely bizarre observation, this book is almost nothing but facts! It's crazy to say otherwise, the last third of the book is nothing but source notes, they must be someone who's pro-imperialist and pro-racist, in other words, a Tory, who consequently should be, if not beaten soundly about their head and ears with a manifestation of their own arrogance and self righteousness, then at least, roundly ignored!

So to sum up, although this book in places can be a bit of a grind, due to extremely in depth theoreticals, it is also very educational and absorbingly interesting, opening the eyes to a whole plethora of characters who have enriched my knowledge of a subject, that although seemingly complicated, it really, really isn’t. End imperialism, end racism!

I'll leave you with this passage from the book,

"British colonialism, like all colonialisms, has a sad history in its denials of personal liberties and human rights. During the last twenty years of national struggles, it has been an almost continuous record of detentions without trial, imprisonments on political charges, deportations, enforced periods of exile and of the repression of the freedoms of speech, writing, movement, association and trade unionism"

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal work that undermines completely the idea of the benevolence of the British empire while also killing any argument for key colonial actors being 'of their time' as if they could not possibly know otherwise. The link between colonised dissenters and activists in Britain is fascinating, the colonised were the tutors.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

At a time when too many ,often over-exposed on the MSM, big name historians have lent their prestige to the shameful distortions of "culture wars" and to an adolescent "identitarianism", it is refreshing to read a meticulous account of both the history of dissenting views of the Empire,from say, Ernest Jones, at the time of the Indian war of independence to that of Fenner Brockway over the Kenyan "emergency".
These British figures interacted with many coloured activists who, in fact , undertook a "reverse pedagogy" among the generally WASPish subjects of their Majesties in the UK.

C L R James can stand as the epitome of the colonial who provided such subjects who had eyes to see with both factual reports of restlessness among the natives and a historical context to help understand the basic truth that the colonised were equally human beings as the colonisers,with aspirations which were based on their own diverse histories. The British, above all, of course, the English, needed to understand that repression but also paternalism had no answer to the demands of the "mutineers" in India, the ex-slaves in Jamaica and, closer to our times, the exploited and colour-barred in Kenya [not allowed to grow coffee, a reserve of the white settler, for example] or the many other peoples of a huge, "fascistic" empire.
Ms. Gopal's immense reading and subtle insights into the literature and situations she examines should put paid to the childish nonsense, degrading and yet very much surviving the end of empire, the self-serving and immaturely narcissistic myth of a benevolent,"liberal"Empire. For example and tellingly, the Liberal Gladstone, not a red in tooth and claw imperialist but still an aggressive one ,benefitted financially from the invasion of Egypt in 1882 , it seems.[one might add, although this is not mentioned by Ms. Gopal, that Gordon could stand as an outstanding case of the kind of "empire-builder" who was red in etc, a psychopath no doubt;as for Mr Rhodes...]
Resistance to the empire was widespread and resilient; we could properly note that similar situations, with similar represssive responses arose in the smaller empires of the French and other European powers. Not enough attention has been paid, incidentally, by the general public in the UK to the atrocities of our fine friends, the Americans, in the Philippines and elsewhere- had we had a proper perspective on the dreadful history of US imperialism, recent events would come over as less shocking. Egypt in 1882, with massacres by "our boys", Egypt 2022, ongoing repression entirely backed by our US friends. This kind of parallel ought to convince ordinary people how vigilance is the price of freedom ,for themselves of course, and for "lesser breeds" ...
Ms. Gopal writes well, with a contained passion . I recommend her work heartily , hoping that many will react with action to challenge the continuing Establishment nostalgia for what was primarily, almost exclusively , an engine to serve UK capitalists, the kind of mindset pandered to by unscrupulous politicians who led us into Iraq, and several hundred thousand killed.
It is second nature, one can see, for the Great and Good to despise inferior human beings, including all of the lower races, of course, but, as is too often forgotten, the national proletariat. Ms. Gopal succeeds pretty well in showing that class interest, properly understood, could find felow feeling in the colonies with their darker-skinned workers.
How on earth do so many today still fall for the absurd insistence on racial identity trumping class ? Do you, dear reader, feel closer to ,say, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson or His Grace The Duke of Westminster than to a working person of similar socio-economic status to your own from ,well, anywhere ? How come, if so ?
Answers on a post-card please, to DM at the Athenaeum club, Pall Mall, London

[Nosemonkey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slightly odd book, in that it seems to be history but is actually literary criticism applied in ways designs to identify new historical insights. This means that large chunks of it go into quite microscopic detail to extract insights from textual analysis.

The insights, however, are well worth the effort - even if the approach means this isn't exactly the most engagingly readable of tomes sitting on my shelves.

The introduction sets out the core argument, the rest of the book supports it - and it's one of those arguments that seems so very obvious once it's laid out in front of you it's hard to see how the likes of the Daily Mail are giving the author such a hard time. Building on Edward Said in particular, the theory that colonial resistance to the British Empire impacted political thought back in Blighty and helped shape both the liberal tradition and the British Imperial myth of benevolence is an interesting one that becomes increasingly compelling as the argument plays out.

Of course, most of the people and organisations discussed are relatively fringe, so a counter-argument could run that this is a lot of detail about a bunch of people who didn't really matter. But the point is more that what started as radical soon became co-opted by the mainstream, albeit in altered forms, so the source of those radical ideas is in itself of interest. This point is well made, and convincing - even if, I'll confess, I did skip over many of the details.

[xtie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can’t BELIEVE I finally finished this, almost 2 years to the day I started it lol
In fairness, I was reading it on my phone so it was mainly read on various forms of transit - I think had I had a physical copy it could have definitely gone quicker

Some incoherent thoughts
- density of chapters varied - found mau mau chapter and chapter 7 the easiest to read and get to know
- this is, by and large, a Big Man type of history. And that is the nature of archive based research. But it ends up being a lot of digging into writings and speeches of a cast of characters, rather than a big picture / ground up kind of endeavour
- I know that gopal made her point - i can coherently tell you that the book is about deconstructing the myth of British “liberalism” and its role in the end of empire, and instead, insurgency was the key. Can I give you specific examples? Probably not, outside of the chapter I just finished. It’s really difficult to hold it all in your head and the writing is very typical academic writing (suuuuper long clauses)
- the epilogue made me emo and is soooo excellent
- I look up to gopal alot for her outsized impact on my uni times - I remember her physical presence and also written presence so emphatically. She is a necessary thinker

[Fay Abernethy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The history we were never taught at school

Reading this book took me months. The writing is dry and academic and the typeface is tiny: making it a physical challenge as well as a mental one. But there was never any question of giving up halfway through.
Every page held information which was new to me – revelations my school history lessons never taught me about. A pattern repeated in every corner of the former British Empire and which is absolutely relevant in today’s world. A tale of violent suppression by a government desperate to cling on to power.
Time and again throughout history, freedoms and rights were never ‘awarded’ by the incumbent elites. They had to be wrested from them, through decades of persistent struggle: by incredibly brave individuals building a movement which eventually became unstoppable.
To me, this book shows it is impossible to fundamentally change an unjust society without some form of disruption. But also that - when enough people put their minds to it - change is inevitable. We can all draw hope from that.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subject is incredibly important, and a must read for anyone interested in historical British attitudes to racism and colonialism.

But I was so disappointed that this fascinating book is written in such a difficult to understand manner that I think many will give up on it.

Most paragraphs are at least one page long - some are two pages long. Sentences often need to be read more than once in order to understand their meaning. Just one example:

'Saklatvala's criticisms enshrined the insight that, for all their humanitarian pretensions, reformist approaches to empire were devoid of a genuine universalism which ought to be, by definition, indivisible.'

I'm a writer and editor for a living, and I know that sentence could have been edited to be much easier to understand.

The aim is not to 'dumb down' the content; only to make it more accessible to more people. As I said, this is such an important subject and it deserves to be read by the widest possible audience.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gopal dives into the British archives in order to explore a reversed causality to a narrative that's been pushed by Žižek, et al. for ex. re: Haiti, that anti-colonial revolution merely actualizes a European ideal of political freedom, instead revealing the extent to which British dissidence was influenced directly by anti-colonial revolution, namely the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, the 'Urabi Revolt, and the Mau Mau Uprising, and the varied receptions to these events and the colonial situation in general in Britain, including on the Swadeshi movement, the Meerut conspiracy, Pankhurst and Cunard, responses to Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, and Padmore. It's ambitious in scope, and well-executed, a welcome new addition to the postcolonial canon.

[Slade Barret Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

while Gopal's prose is not always written in a way that flows elegantly, it is effective and informative in this impressive and inspiring study of various acts of resistance that informed and inpsired British dissenters and radicals

Throughout Gopal challenges imperialist narratives of benevolence and education by pointing to constant examples of resistance to colonial rule, and examples of colonized peoples engaging in "reverse pedagogy" that brings values of resilience, rebellion, freedom, and liberty to the imperial core rather than the other way around

Very much an academic history and academic study which may put off many readers but the work here is both crucial and illuminating

[Joanna Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

feels kinda dumb to rate this as it’s less a book than an insanely huge seminal collation of hidden archives of anti-colonial activity and organising....? and also would DEFINITELY not recommend reading cover to cover lol it’s informationally dense so kinda not a “book” in how good reads functions with “books” ??

but what can I say it really is an essential read, the whole point of the book is to help us un/relearn the history of resistance to colonialism and for that you have to actually comprehensively delve into the accounts and textual analysis presented here. heavy but invaluable !