Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

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It argues convincingly that, when it did occur, British anti-colonialism in the metropole was forged through exposure to imperial insurgency. Combining an expertly delivered narrative with a study of prior interpretations of these encounters, this is an invaluable work which quotes extensively from both colonisers and colonised. Cultures of dissent were also transimperial, crisscrossing and zigzagging wherever criticism and censure arose. 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.

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.Insurgent Empire demonstrates how often critics have hacked at the pedestals of imperial pieties, and how consistently voices outside Britain have inspired them. ACT Contact / FAQ About Events / Videos Merch / Subs Sign in/up Insurgent Empire : Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent Gopal, Priyamvada More by this author. Here Gopal tracks an arc of anticolonialism, stretching from the Harlem renaissance to the Ethiopian struggle, from West Africa to the West Indies. 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.

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.

Since 2016, campaigners have been trying to “decolonise” Britain’s history by removing memorials to imperialists such as Cecil Rhodes and the Bristol slave-trader Edward Colston, among others. Ignore the one star evaluations that demonstrate how colonisers hate the people they colonised even while claiming they did it all with the best of intentions. In outlining the agency of the colonised in resisting the incursions of imperialism and the influence this resistance had on British dissidents, the book hoped to enable present-day descendants of the colonised, Britain’s Black and Asian denizens, to find a way to reposition themselves as contributors to the making of Britain and not simply as beneficiaries of historical white benevolence who must learn to ‘integrate’ with an unchanging British ‘norm’.