Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

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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.

Equally, young white Britons could draw on a history that was largely lost to them, one in which British dissidents and working-class Britons were inspired by anticolonial resistance and sought to actively create solidarities and links with the subjects of British rule in various corners of the Empire. Gopal’s Global South does not include the Antipodes; Indigenous people under settler colonial regimes do not figure here. Priyamvada Gopal is University Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and Fellow, Churchill College.In many ways, the League of Nations, and then later the Commonwealth, were established to prop up the old European empires, not dismantle them. 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. Our case is more complex given the Indigenous nations within, as well as the intermarriage and assimilation and acculturation (in many directions) that has been going on since before Columbus’s voyage.

Gopal's reputation - this is an excellent study into the resistance movements against the British Empire. Deeply rooted in the pacifist traditions of Protestant dissent, British radicals have always been more comfortable opposing war than empire. 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.

Her account begins with the Chartist leader Ernest Jones, whose sympathy for the Indians crushed by the British suppression of the 1850s sepoy rebellion so influenced Karl Marx.