Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

Author	Priyamvada Gopal
Language	English
Subjects	colonialism, violence, post-colonialism
Publisher	Verso Books
Publication date	2019
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print
Pages	624
ISBN	9781784784126

Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent is a 2019 book by Priyamvada Gopal.

The book covers the century or so from the Indian Rebellion of 1857 to the Mau Mau Uprising of 1953 (though also touching on later political movements such as Rhodes Must Fall), focusing on key intellectuals and how their role in public debate mediated ideas generated in the colonies to left-wing activists in Britain, a process that Gopal refers to as "reverse tutelage". It argues, in the words of Nuno Domingos and Ricardo Roque, that

rebellions in the British colonies [...] contributed effectively to the political and intellectual making of freedom, equality, and ultimately to decolonization and the end of British imperial rule in the twentieth-century. Through the mediation of critical discourses voiced in the public sphere, local revolts against oppressive colonial regimes could change European self-serving constructs of imperialism; they could act subversively upon the fabrication of empire itself. Across the British Empire [...] insurgencies were fundamental for the development of liberal modernity and global democracy.

The book is divided into two sections, entitled "Crisis and Connections" and "Agitation and Alliances".

"Crisis and Connections" argues that colonialist, British history-writing has under-appreciated the degree to which colonies of the British Empire achieved independence through the struggles of the colonised people rather than from top-down imperial policy-making. In particular, it argues that resistance to colonisation within the colonies was profoundly influential on the anti-colonial thought of British intellectuals and activists.

"Agitations and Alliances" argues that ideas flowed not only from the metropole to the rest of the Empire, as traditional, Eurocentric history-writing has assumed, but also in the other direction, and that thought developed in the Empire encouraged anti-imperial sentiment in the metropole. British thinkers whom Gopal takes as examples of this process include Sylvia Pankhurst, Nancy Cunard, and George Padmore. Gopal particularly traces how networks between individuals facilitated the transmission and development of ideas in the metropole.

The book draws eclectically on literary as well as traditional historical sources.

Summary

Section 1: Crisis and Connections

Chapter 1: The Spirit of the Sepoy Host

This chapter focuses on the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and its reception by such British intellectuals as Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Ernest Jones (who have, Gopal argues, received less attention from historians than they deserve) and the ways in which they came to read the rebellion as evidence for English injustice.

Chapter 2: A Barbaric Independence

This chapter focuses on the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica and the ways in which formerly enslaved Black rebels challenged colonial conceptions of “freedom”, and the ways in which British intellectuals prioritised class solidarity with Black rebels over racist divisions, arguing that British workers would be subjected to as fierce abuses as Jamaican ones unless they resisted oppression.

Chapter 3: The Accidental Anticolonialist

This chapter analyses the English aristocrat Wilfrid Blunt's conversion to Egyptian nationalism by his encounter with the 1882 Urabi revolt in Egypt and with Muslim intellectuals there, particularly Jamal-ud-din al-Afghani.

Chapter 4: Passages to Internationalism

Gopal continues her analysis of Blunt's activism, now focusing on India and the way in which Blunt's reading and writing shaped his understanding of British colonialism.

Section 2: Agitation and Alliances

Chapter 5: The Interpreter of Insurgencies

This chapter focuses on Shapurji Saklatvala (1874–1936), a communist and the first person of Indian heritage to become a British Member of Parliament (MP) for the UK Labour Party, and his promotion in Britain of "democracy and self-determination for India". To his British audiences, Saklatvala argued that British workers would face the same oppression as Indian ones if they did not resist capitalist elites, while arguing to his Indian audiences that the blame for colonial oppression lay with only a minority of British people and the Indian elites too needed to cede power to oppressed Indians.

Chapter 6: The Revolt of the Oppressed World

This chapter focuses on the work of the international League Against Imperialism, and specifically its support for trade unionists imprisoned in British Indian the Meerut conspiracy case (1929–33), arguing the repressive use of colonial law encouraged left-wingers' cross-border and cross-racial class solidarity.

Chapter 7: Black Voices Matter

This chapter focuses on the anthology Negro edited by the British aristocrat Nancy Cunard, characterised by Gopal as a "unique combination of harrowing accounts of oppression and exhilarating portrait of black music, art and literature".

Chapter 8: Internationalizing African Opinion

This chapter focuses on how, in the 1930s, African and Caribbean events (including the Italian invasion of Abyssinia) raised the international profile of African and Caribbean resistance to colonisation.

Chapter 9: Smash Our Own Imperialism

This chapter focuses on the American journalist George Padmore who, in Gazal Khan and Sarbani Banerjee's summary of Gopal's analysis, "worked to make the struggleof the working class and the intertwined relationship of capitalism and imperialism more conspicuous than ever".

Chapter 10: A Terrible Assertion of Discontent

This chapter analyses independence struggles and decolonisation in Africa, focusing the Mau Mau Uprising in 1950s Kenya and the imperial authorities violent response to it, along with similar anti-colonial struggles and counterinsurgency in Malaya. Gopal shows how an enquiry into the Uprising led Fenner Brockway and Margery Perham publicly to promote decolonisation.

Reception

In the view of Chandak Sengoopta, "Priyamvada Gopal, a literary scholar, has given us a deeply researched and politically sensitive study of anticolonial resistance across the British Empire that more than makes up for historians' neglect [...] Gopal's meticulously researched study is a major contribution to the historiography of the British Empire, as notable for its research as it is for its lucid, forceful prose".

Gil Shohat characterised the work as

eine insgesamt gelungene Arbeit [...], in der sie die lange Zeit vernachlässigten Schriften britischer Empire-kritischer Dissidenten in Beziehung zu den sie beeinflussenden Schriften und Akteuren aus den damaligen Kolonien setzt. Das ist deshalb innovativ, weil radikale britische Empire-Kritik bisher überwiegend isoliert von den sie beeinflussenden Stimmen aus den Weiten des Empire betrachtet wurden, während die zahlreichen postkolonialen Forschungen zur Handlungsmacht der Subalternen ebenfalls die wechselseitige Vermittlung von Ideen und Ansichten zwischen Metropole und Kolonie eher kursorisch behandelt haben.

a generally successful work [...], in which she relates the long-neglected writings of British dissidents critical of the Empire to the writings and actors from what were then colonies who influenced them. This is innovative because radical British criticism of the Empire has so far been viewed largely in isolation from the voices that influenced it from the peripheries of the Empire, while the numerous post-colonial studies on the agency of the subaltern have also dealt with the mutual mediation of ideas and views between metropolis and colony rather cursorily.

This view was echoed by Antoinette Burton in The American Historical Review.

Writing in Dialogues in Human Geography, Sarah de Leeuw emphasised the book's methodological value, presenting its eclectic approach to sources, close textual analysis, and deployment of literary theory as a model for geographers seeking to write in an anticolonial mode. Likewise, Nuno Domingos and Ricardo Roque suggested that Gopal's study would be worth replicating for other imperial regimes. Conversely, while arguing that "as a discourse analysis that focuses on the expression of particular anticolonial sentiments, Insurgent Empire is wildly successful", Zak Leonard suggested that Gopal's "'enthusiastically generalist' methodology can result in a somewhat uneven scholarly product. Some chapters [...] are hampered by a lack of historical context or limited engagement with recent historiography".

Gazal Khan and Sarbani Banerjee characterised the work as a "promising monograph" that "actively and abundantly contributes to postcolonial scholarship, and especially to studies of Empire, subaltern historiography, myth-making, and resistance studies", though they noted that it overlooked "popular revolts such as the Munda rebellion, the Wad habuba revolt, and the Irish rebellion". Similarly, Domingos and Roque argued that Insurgent Empire "empirically debunk[s] the vacuous idea that criticizing empire and providing dissident historical accounts of imperialism is 'anachronistic', as some conservative nationalist historians claim today [...] This book is also an important demonstration that 'imperialism', even at home, was never a consensual national undertaking", and they viewed it as an important intervention in European political discourse. At the same time, however, they emphasised that Gopal's emphasis on "broad-scale violent revolts and uprisings" and the metropolitan mediators of anti-colonial ideas should not be allowed to detract from acts of resistance in the colonies, including subtle and unrecorded forms of "everyday resistance". The same criticism was articulated by Gil Shohat.

The book was shortlisted for the 2020 Bread and Roses Award and Books Are My Bag Readers' Award.

External links

• Version on Google Books