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asimqureshi 's review for:
Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent
by Priyamvada Gopal
If you could turn Priyamvada Gopal’s excellent ‘Insurgent Empire’ into a pill, it would serve as a very strong antidote to liberal-saviour narratives that we are consistently ‘treated’ to by apologists for the British empire.
Largely concentrating the early sections of the book on key moments of insurgency or insurrection within the wider British imagination in the mid to late 1800s, we come to understand through Gopal’s work that these were not unique, but rather sit on a longer continuum of anticolonial resistance.
Although the work of other scholars makes the point well about moments like the 1857 Indian Uprising not being unique prior to their action, what is incredible about this book, is the way in which Gopal charts how intellectual movements within India, the Caribbean and Egypt, were educating those in the West in what Gopal terms an “act of reverse tutelage”. This is not a story of how western thinkers became enlightened by virtue of their own beneficence, but rather how both individuals and movements were intellectually enriched by anticolonial insurgent movements to become critics of Empire. If there was no other reason to appreciate the existence of this work, this would be enough. As Gopal writes:
“My own argument here turns away from the hypostatizing pieties of personal national conscience towards an examination of rebel agency as a catalyst for serious criticism of the imperial project.”
I honestly can’t remember the last time I read a book that so fundamentally shifted some of my own assumptions about the way in which some in Britain (England) interacted and indeed counteracted empire with its colonial subjects. There is so much to learn, not just to correct historical record, but to understand the roles we play in the world we inhabit today. Gopal leaves us with no thought except that reassessing this whole history is utterly necessary for debates that are currently ranging around what it means to be citizens/subjects of the state today.
Largely concentrating the early sections of the book on key moments of insurgency or insurrection within the wider British imagination in the mid to late 1800s, we come to understand through Gopal’s work that these were not unique, but rather sit on a longer continuum of anticolonial resistance.
Although the work of other scholars makes the point well about moments like the 1857 Indian Uprising not being unique prior to their action, what is incredible about this book, is the way in which Gopal charts how intellectual movements within India, the Caribbean and Egypt, were educating those in the West in what Gopal terms an “act of reverse tutelage”. This is not a story of how western thinkers became enlightened by virtue of their own beneficence, but rather how both individuals and movements were intellectually enriched by anticolonial insurgent movements to become critics of Empire. If there was no other reason to appreciate the existence of this work, this would be enough. As Gopal writes:
“My own argument here turns away from the hypostatizing pieties of personal national conscience towards an examination of rebel agency as a catalyst for serious criticism of the imperial project.”
I honestly can’t remember the last time I read a book that so fundamentally shifted some of my own assumptions about the way in which some in Britain (England) interacted and indeed counteracted empire with its colonial subjects. There is so much to learn, not just to correct historical record, but to understand the roles we play in the world we inhabit today. Gopal leaves us with no thought except that reassessing this whole history is utterly necessary for debates that are currently ranging around what it means to be citizens/subjects of the state today.