Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

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She is the author of Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence; The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration and Insurgent Empire – Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent. Insurgent Empire shows how Britain's enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation. 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.

View image in fullscreen The battle at Cawnpore (Kanpur) where a British garrison was wiped out during the Indian ‘mutiny’ of 1857. 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. That leaves the author free to dig into the details of each incident and its impact at "home" in Britain.This includes self-understanding where individuals and communities think about their own historical relationship to the world-shaping legacies and afterlife of empire. If Simon Schama and Niall Ferguson get lavish illustrations with their publications so too should Professor Gopal.

I appreciated the close reading of speeches delivered by these dissenters - especially those from the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when they’d clearly be going against the overwhelming consensus of the time.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 The Part I: Crises and Connections discusses the 1857 Uprising in India (Chapter 1), the Jamaican uprising in 1865 (chapter 2), the Urabi revolt in Egypt (chapter 3) and the experiences of many Edwardian travellers (chapter 4). Priyamvada Gopal is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge.

She demonstrates how these liberal or radical thinkers and politicians reconsidered their acceptance of Empire through visits to the colonies, coverage of atrocities or encounters with the few colonials who made it to the Britain. 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. 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.

Against attempts to portray empire as something distant and past, or as something benevolent and enlightened, approaches such as this one are essential. 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. Drawing attention to this new wave of organised opposition to empire – not only Britain’s, but also the colonialism of all the European powers – is an important addition and corrective to that all that has been written recently about the rise and fall of liberal internationalism in the two decades after the Treaty of Versailles of 1919. Professor Gopal traces the dynamic relationship between anti-colonial resistance (from the Indian Mutiny in 1857 to the Mau Mau in Kenya in the late 1950s) and the few, often isolated individuals and groups in Britain who broke ranks and challenged the idea of Empire.

Gopal’s Global South does not include the Antipodes; Indigenous people under settler colonial regimes do not figure here. Gopal] mounts a powerful challenge to the notion that anticolonial resistance was born of an education in British notions of liberty. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. 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.

Deeply rooted in the pacifist traditions of Protestant dissent, British radicals have always been more comfortable opposing war than empire.