Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

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ACT Contact / FAQ About Events / Videos Merch / Subs Sign in/up Insurgent Empire : Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent Gopal, Priyamvada More by this author. 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.

Anticolonialism put a range of issues on the table that were not reducible to national sovereignty, important as that concept was for self-determination in the face of colonial rule.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. In outlining the agency of the colonised in resisting the incursions of imperialism and the influence this resistance had on British dissidents, the book hoped to enable present-day descendants of the colonised, Britain’s Black and Asian denizens, to find a way to reposition themselves as contributors to the making of Britain and not simply as beneficiaries of historical white benevolence who must learn to ‘integrate’ with an unchanging British ‘norm’. Gopal argues that colonised people always resisted their masters but, importantly, some white colonialists, a number of whom she follows in detail, were able to learn from their thinking and experience.

I would strongly recommend this to any general reader such as myself with a strong interest in the subject, willing to look up a few unfamiliar words in the dictionary.

This book is a must read if you want to know the history of dissent in Britain during the days of the 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 This is perhaps one consequence of casting a wide net and tacking between disparate figures and locations.