Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

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The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. A superb study of anticolonial resistance in the British Empire from the 1857 Indian uprising to the Kenyan Mau Mau revolt a century later . Gopal] mounts a powerful challenge to the notion that anticolonial resistance was born of an education in British notions of liberty.

A superb study of anticolonial resistance in the British Empire from the 1857 Indian uprising to the Kenyan Mau Mau revolt a century later. 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 (2005) and The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration (2009). Rather than a necessarily divisive process (although it is always a demanding one), decolonisation requires, precisely, ‘understanding’ – historical and cultural – in a global frame.Packed with information about those who had the courage and vision to stand up against militarists and imperialists. It also shows how a pivotal role in fomenting dissent was played by anti-colonial campaigners based in London at the heart of the empire. 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. Conversely, many historians would point to another dissenting tradition – the radical right – that has weaponised imperialism and given it a home in the modern Conservative party.

It is with the multifarious forms assumed by this internal tradition of dissent that Priyamvada Gopal concerns herself in this extraordinarily valuable and brilliantly readable book. Gopal's exploration of the interplay between anti-colonial resistance in India, the West Indies and Britain deploys biography, history and cultural studies to support her persuasive argument that the colonies were not just the passive recipient of Britain's 'civilising mission' but also the sources of a more refined understanding of key principles like equality and freedom.Blunt, for his part, became a tireless popularizer of the story of Ahmed Urabi’s rebellion on the streets of Cairo, seeking directly to influence Prime Minister William Gladstone’s policy in the region. For all their outrage, her “troublemakers” sit on the margins of radicalism, never quite converting the rest of the left to a comprehensive rejection of empire. There is Wilfrid Blunt who, with his wife Lady Anne, wound up in Cairo in 1882 as the British invaded Egypt.

Insurgent Empire interrogated the familiar claim that criticism of the British Empire was anachronistic by tracking some dissident strands on the question of colonialism in Britain through the latter half of the nineteenth century into the twentieth.Gopal argues that colonised people always resisted their masters but, importantly, some white colonialists, a number of whom she follows in detail, were able to learn from their thinking and experience. Insurgent Empire 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.