Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

"Gopal starts the book with a row she had with a very famous Scottish historian —I won’t mention his name—who confronted her on a radio program and told her, more or less, that the British Empire did a lot of good in the world. Writing against this way of thinking, Gopal chooses key moments in the history of anti-colonial struggles of the world—her examples include the Indian Mutiny in 1857 and the much later Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya—to show how the impulse towards decolonisation was advanced by resistance within the colonies. One part of the book’s project is to establish that change came because people among the colonised put their lives on the line for it. The other lies in exploring the extent to which the resistance in the various parts of the Empire she’s describing found echoes and also amplification within Britain itself. She’s interested in tracking the history of anti-colonial advocacy in the imperial centres, individuals and campaigners who took up the cause of opposing the Empire or supporting movements struggling towards independence, or trying to reduce or challenge the Empire’s excesses and violence. So the book pays a lot of attention to the people in Britain who were on the resistors’ side. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The book is really a study of this interlacing, through which resistance on the one side is amplified and taken into the heart of the imperial power by often quite marginal figures. Some of the people who did this were Chartists or Quakers and, as Gopal notes, many of them were women, who were themselves not confined to the male roles of being the exploiter or the enforcer. In the mid-20th century, quite a lot were Communists, who saw resistance to the Empire as part of the struggle of the international working class. This is what I found most interesting about the book, the way she brings those two worlds together. Yes, I am afraid she has no time at all for the suggestion that ‘Liberty’ was Britain’s last gift to the departing colonies! As an example of this attitude, she quotes a post-war British politician who went so far as to suggest that decolonization had always been the original aim of the British Empire. The people who advance this argument tend to talk a lot about the Magna Carta and the unchanging virtue which is liberty in England. We may wish that was true, but Gopal is having none of it. What she shows instead—and she does use some theoretical language —is a kind of dialectic, a coming and going between the two sides, which paves the way for a transformation. She cites the work of Susan Buck-Morss, who has explored the ways in which the German philosopher Hegel was influenced by the Haitian Revolution of the late eighteenth century. The master-slave dialectic is one of Hegel’s classic concepts, from which Marx would later derive his idea of the class struggle. The master has all the power, but the slave is the one who works on the world and thereby gains the power to transform it. That’s the sort of interaction between colony and imperial centre that interests Gopal. She sees liberty as a term that is almost grabbed, it’s repossessed, it’s taken over by the resistors in various places and redefined, potentially for everyone. When I was reading the book, I felt quite sad because a lot of the people who were these great anti-imperialist objectors in the West have since slipped out of view because of their association with Soviet communism. I too had not thought very seriously about some of them because you think, ‘Well anybody who can believe in that, how can you trust any other judgment they made?’ There are some truly deluded fools, like Hewlett Johnson, the Red Dean of Canterbury, who revered Stalin and thought everything was wonderful in Mao’s China just as it was about to turn into a cemetery. But Gopal asks us to think again about why the name of Fenner Brockway, the British campaigner and MP, is only dimly remembered here in the UK, along with others, including, say, Dadabhai Naoroji, the Indian anti-imperialist who served as a Liberal MP in Westminster in the 1890s. This book feels like the beginning of an enquiry that is going to be interesting to watch. I don’t think of it as a complete work, but books don’t have to be that. They join and sometimes create conversations, and this is surely one we need to have."