Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent - Hardcover

Priyamvada Gopal

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1784784125 ISBN 13: 9781784784126

Publisher: Verso, 2019

Synopsis

Upsets received views to show how rebellious colonies changed British attitudes to empire

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. The possibility of reverse influence has been largely overlooked. Insurgent Empire shows how Britain's enslaved and colonial subjects were not merely victims of empire and subsequent beneficiaries of its crises of conscience but also agents whose resistance both contributed to their own liberation and shaped British ideas about freedom and who could be free. This book 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. 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.

About this title

Review:

It is widely recognised and understood today that colonial dictatorship was resisted from the moment of its imposition. Much less widely known, however, is the record of active dissension from the imperial project within the metropole itself. 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. Insurgent Empire covers a vast geographical range (sub-Saharan and north Africa, Afghanistan and India, the Caribbean and the Americas) and tracks historically from the 1857 uprising in North India through to the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya a century later. 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.
Professor Neil Lazarus, University of Warwick

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

Priyamvada 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. We all owe her a debt.
--Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish)

An audacious, expansive and rigorously researched counter-history of empire. 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.
--Robbie Shilliam, Johns Hopkins

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

[Insurgent Empire] sets out to celebrate the political agency of colonised peoples, its importance in bringing an end to empire and the impact it had on metropolitan liberal and radical thinking.
--Matthew Reisz, Times Higher Education

Priyamvada s book has transformative potential
--gal-dem

An important first step in the telling of a history that has been for too long overlooked.
--ArtReview

An outstanding contribution to our understanding of the struggles against the British empire
--Andrew Murray, Morning Star

Scintillating
--Red Pepper

A tour de force likely to shape the debate on empire for years to come.
--Peace News

An important and original contribution...Insurgent Empire deserves to be widely read.
--Christopher Hale, History Today

A superb study of anticolonial resistance in the British Empire from the 1857 Indian uprising to the Kenyan Mau Mau revolt a century later. . . As it weaves together these intellectual and geographical strands, this wonderful book brings back to life a glo- rious cast of characters
--Sudhir Hazareesingh, TLS Books of the Year, 2019

About the Author:

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 (2005) and The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration (2009).

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1784784125
• ISBN 13: 9781784784126
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 624