Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

Product Information

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. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. She discusses in great detail the many Britons who were opposed to the British occupation of numerous lands around the world. Deeply rooted in the pacifist traditions of Protestant dissent, British radicals have always been more comfortable opposing war than empire. Here Gopal tracks an arc of anticolonialism, stretching from the Harlem renaissance to the Ethiopian struggle, from West Africa to the West Indies.

Contrary to some of the reviews on here - which I am inclined to believe are not even posted by readers of the book, but rather, people who are only interested in besmirching Dr. 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. 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. He belongs to a long tradition of radical opposition to British imperialism, charted by Priyamvada Gopal’s arresting and insightful book.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. But I was glad I persisted - once the author starts writing in her own voice, the language becomes much clearer, the style is engaging and the subject matter is of great interest. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. Although the book is deeply critical of the white supremacy that was one of the most consequential historical legacies of colonialism, it also requires the descendants of the enslaved and the colonised to reflect on their own relationship to history, to ask ‘why they are the way they are, why they do the things they do, why they live the way they live’ and in doing so, to develop a different and ‘more demanding relationship’ with the world. Rather than treat colonized humanity as victims or reactionaries, Gopal s narrative discloses a cast of resisters that shaped the idea of freedom across Britain and its possessions.

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. I would strongly recommend this to any general reader such as myself with a strong interest in the subject, willing to look up a few unfamiliar words in the dictionary. She contends that historians should not give as much credit to liberal and progressive voices from the centers of colonial power - as in fact these folk were inspired by resistance figures from among the colonized peoples themselves. Anticolonialism put a range of issues on the table that were not reducible to national sovereignty, important as that concept was for self-determination in the face of colonial rule.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. Anti colonialism at its best was based on this ‘reverse pedagogy’ showing the power of mutually tolerant and respectful alliance.

A superb study of anticolonial resistance in the British Empire from the 1857 Indian uprising to the Kenyan Mau Mau revolt a century later .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. And men—nearly exclusively men—who were diasporic or globally mobile are the motors of this account of the empire insurgent. 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. In many ways, this is well-trodden ground in metropolitan and anticolonial historiographies—bodies of work that have expanded our knowledge of actors and movements transimperially in the last quarter of a century and upon which Gopal liberally draws. 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.

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. The Chartist Ernest Jones, for example, was inspired by Indian revolutionary action, seeing in it models for working-class agitation. Gopal carefully considers several long-forgotten pressure groups – including the League Against Imperialism and the International African Service Bureau – alongside a further series of exemplary figures, such as the enigmatic Reginald Bridgeman, and the incredibly resourceful Nancy Cunard, whose printing presses and magazines supported the cause of black liberation. 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. 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.Nowhere in the world has decolonisation come to fruition: instead, it is often found in an ‘arrested’ condition, a process that was initiated but then diverted, hijacked, or morphed into something else entirely. Insurgent Empire shows how Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Fantastic book, very provocative,for those interested in the ideological fight against colonization.