Insurgent Empire : Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent by Priyamvada Gopa - 2019 - 628 Pages
I first became aware of this book on a broadcast at Democracy Now- The War and Peace Report.
"Priyamvada Gopal is an astonishing writer and thinker, one who is fearless in how she uses history to explain where we are now. Her work is essential to showing how empire and colonialism pervades every nook and cranny of the British establishment today and why we should all continue to speak truth to power, like she does every damn day.”
—Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant
“This impressive book challenges the assumptions that underpin many academic and journalistic understandings of the British empire; it restores the idea of resistance and dissent, placing anti-colonial struggle from the 1857 uprising in India, to Mau Mau in Kenya, at the heart of historical change. It argues convincingly that, when it did occur, British anti-colonialism in the metropole was forged through exposure to imperial insurgency. By doing so, it tackles the whole premise of British liberal imperial progress and benevolence which remains so pervasive to this day. It’s also a hopeful book, indicating ways out of mythological cul-de-sacs. Erudite, but highly readable, this book will be definitely be on my reading lists for students.”
—Yasmin Khan, Associate Professor of History at Kellogg College, Oxford
“A tremendous book that deserves the widest possible readership … one of the most important books on the British Empire of the last Decade.”
—Race & Class
Insurgent Empire covers a vast geographical range (sub-Saharan and north Africa, Afghanistan and India, the Caribbean and the Americas) It begins it history from the 1857 uprising in North India (in which she largely bebunks the as taught in school idea of it being caused by "greased bullets" and proceeds to
through to the ‘Mau Mau’ insurgency in Kenya a century later in the 1950s.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. 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.”
She details the work of writers and philosophers residents in the colonies of the Empire and their influence on those in England opposed to colonial rule. The main stream idea in England was that by establishing colonies " natives", not capable of ruling themselves were being prepared for the day when the benevolent Empire gives them their freedom. (In India millions died during British rule and more after independence in 1947. I highly reccomend Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis for details.)
Here is a central tenant of the book:
"Confronting Gladstone’s argument that the mode of acquisition of India mattered less now than the ‘obligations … contracted towards the nearly 200 millions of people under our rule in India’, Congreve noted that the rebellion had made one thing abundantly clear in relation to the former’s claim that the ‘the condition of trustees’ between God and the Indians: this ‘trusteeship has not hitherto been recognised’.176 Rebellion is thus a forceful reminder that the colonized share the right to recognize and be recognized – but also, crucially, to refuse recognition. Given the importance of the act of ‘recognition’ to international law, to which Congreve explicitly alludes in his questioning of the British right to hold India down by force, his insistence on the right of Indians to recognize or refuse recognition of the colonial presence is of no small import: ‘Is there in the East Indies a different international law from what exists in England?’177 Thus, rather than call for reforms, ‘solutions which to me are incoherent and immoral’, his questioning of the British right to hold India down by force, his insistence on the right of Indians to recognize or refuse recognition of the colonial presence is of no small import: ‘Is there in the East Indies a different international law from what exists in England?’177 Thus, rather than call for reforms, ‘solutions which to me are incoherent and immoral’, he preferred to pose the question that he believed the revolt itself was posing of England: ‘Shall we set to work to re-conquer India?’178 It is the basis on which he offers his resounding negative that is most significant: the ruled did not wish to be ruled."
I will give her the last words
"My hope is that this study, along with others, will be able to contribute towards what will have to be a sustained unlearning, a monumental process but a necessary one in a heterogeneous twenty-first-century Britain. In the wake of Brexit, the imperial myth, ‘whenever it is torn apart’, shows itself to rest on deep foundations and is repeatedly mended,confusion, catastrophes and disasters.’29 As the sociologist and cultural historian Paul Gilroy puts it, despite the ‘continued citation of the anti-Nazi war’, it is in fact colonial history that provides a better explanatory context for contemporary British culture and its preoccupations – race, identity, multiculturalism, patriotism, religion, social cohesion, migration – providing ‘a store of unlikely connections’ and shaping political life.30 Yet, he points out, that story remains ‘marginal and largely unacknowledged, surfacing only in the interests of nostalgia and melancholia’ in inflated imperial myths which then further entrench ‘deluded patterns of historical reflection and self- understanding"
Priyamvada Gopal is University Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and Fellow Churchill College. She is the author of Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence and The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration
Mel Ulm
