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Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

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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 shows how Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation.

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. Insurgent Empire sets the record straight in demonstrating that these people were much more than victims of imperialism or, subsequently, the passive beneficiaries of an enlightened British conscience—they were insurgents whose legacies shaped and benefited the nation that once oppressed them. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. I have to admit I nearly gave up while reading the preface - I'm not used to reading historical works with an academic flavour so some of the language was unfamiliar, and some of the language quoted from other works was pretty opaque.Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. Priyamvada Gopal is University Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and Fellow, Churchill College. There is a retelling of the Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica in 1865, which concentrates less on the chattering classes of Westminster who denounced Governor Eyre’s misrule, and more on the black voices of resistance from the Caribbean: George Gordon and Paul Bogle. From Joseph Chamberlain to Enoch Powell and on to the apologists for Victorian imperialism now lying in wait for a seat at the table of the new Brexit cabinet, empire has had a noisier impact at the Tory end of the political spectrum.

Photograph: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images View image in fullscreen CLR James speaking in Trafalgar Square, London, in 1935. Priyamvada Gopal examines dissenting politics in Britain and shows that it was influenced by rebellions and resistance among the colonies in the West Indies, East Africa, Egypt, and India. This is no alternative A-Z history of Britain’s inglorious empire, of the kind that has become fashionable recently. 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. A superb study of anticolonial resistance in the British Empire from the 1857 Indian uprising to the Kenyan Mau Mau revolt a century later .

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. Here Anglophone empire is neatly bracketed between the successive conquests of territories and peoples from the seventeenth century forward and the “granting” of independence in the mid-twentieth century. The Part II: Agitations and Alliances discusses Shapurji Saklatvala and other voices of dissent in Britain (Chapter 5), British Internationalism from Meerut and the League against Imperialism (Chapter 6), Black figures of dissent in Britain (Chapter 7), internationalizing of African Opinion (Chapter 8), prominent dissenting voices like George Padmore (Chapter 9) and the suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya (chapter 10). Much has been written on how colonial subjects took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination.

For myself this book taught me a great deal about African struggle against British dictatorships in African lands.Priyamvada Gopal is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. She contends that historians should not give as much credit to liberal and progressive voices from the centers of colonial power - as in fact these folk were inspired by resistance figures from among the colonized peoples themselves. Brockway, who lived long enough to attend the unveiling of his own memorial in 1985, took part in almost every anticolonial movement from the 1920s to the 1980s.

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