Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial resistance and British dissent by Priyamvada Gopal (review)

Reflecting an astonishing breadth of knowledge, this study offers a provocative, epistemological reassessment of anticolonial agitation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the outset, Gopal invites her reader to reconsider the foundational mythologies that continue to inform British perceptions of the empire. Decolonization, she asserts, did not proceed from any benevolent "imperial initiative"; paternalist policymakers did not simply bestow rights and privileges on colonized populations who had supposedly matured under their political tutelage (3). Rather, those freedoms were won through the vigorous "self-assertion" of dissidents in India, Africa and the Caribbean. During periods of colonial crisis, their violent resistance further radicalized liberal imperialists who had previously demanded a more ethical system of governance. In others cases, interracial collaborations within Britain sustained oppositional movements and produced transgressive literature that questioned the efficacy of gradual reform. A rebuke of global capitalism often underlaid these critiques, as agitators sought to foster solidarity between the exploited British working classes and subordinated colonial populations.

Gopal's interventions are most incisive when she is constructing clear "conversion" narratives, charting the operations of internationalist organizations like the League against Imperialism (LAI) and the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF), and explicating the dynamics behind dialogical, collaborative ventures in England. In Chapter Three, Gopal introduces us to Wilfred Scawen Blunt, a colorful aristocrat who experienced a "Cairene conversion to anticolonialism" during his residence in Egypt (153). While Blunt's early work had asserted the possibility of Muslim-Christian coexistence under British rule, his participation in the defense of nationalist leader Colonel Ahmad Urabi and his exposure to the teachings of Muslim scholar Jamal-ud-din al-Afghani prompted him to "unlearn a habitual paternalism" (135). A similar instance of "reverse tutelage" occurs in Chapter Ten. There, Gopal argues that a searching inquiry into the Mau Mau Revolt led Fenner Brockway of the MCF and Oxford don Margery Perham to reassess their faith in gradualism, denounce White settlerism, and publicly recognize that decolonization was a demand that Britain could not refuse.

In Chapter Five, Gopal deftly probes the career of Communist MP Shapurji Saklatvala, an understudied figure who engaged in a particularly strident agitation against colonial capitalism. As a representative for North Battersea, he urged British laborers to agitate for the uplift of their fellow toilers in the Indian factories who were similarly oppressed by a master class. Like many characters in Insurgent Empire, Saklatvala was profoundly distrustful of petition-based reformism that mired Indians in a liminal state "between slavery and freedom" (228). Yet he also took issue with the Indian bourgeois nationalists who, in his estimation, wished to retain their plutocratic power after their foreign overlords were ejected (243). Regarding modern trade unionism as an ideal, egalitarian form of labor organization, Saklatvala expressed his dissatisfaction with Gandhi's traditionalism and notably took issue with the "cult of worship" that had emerged around him (239).

As Gopal later notes in her treatment of the 1929‒33 Meerut Conspiracy Case, British prosecutors exploited this latent tension between nationalist and internationalist anticolonialism to throw the book at thirty-one trade unionists whom they suspected of Bolshevist leanings. By her understanding, this strategy backfired. The colonial judiciary's repressive tactics "paradoxically provided internationalists with a real opportunity to organize and proselytize in the cause of making cross-border alliances against imperialism" (249). The British Meerut Defence Committee disseminated the voluminous protests of the accused; with offices in London and Berlin, the LAI contributed to these efforts and boldly enlisted "colonial subjects… as partners in a struggle that was necessarily collective" (269). Chapter Six offers a redemptive account of this short-lived League, which eschewed paternalism and set itself up as a "conscious counterpoint to the League of Nations" (265). Ideological fractures in the internationalist left-wing edifice do emerge in this section, but they are not a focal point. Gopal's account of the Conspiracy Case should therefore be read alongside works by Carolien Stolte and Michelle Louro that respectively clarify how the debacle splintered the Indian trade unionist community and soured the...