How rebellious colonies changed British attitudes to empire
Priyamvada Gopal is University Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and Fellow, Churchill College. She is the author of Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (2005) and The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration (2009).
Gopal has calmly and authoritatively produced this impressive study
of resistance against Empire, in the face of the kind of constant
hostility that only serves to reminds us why her work is so urgent
in the first place. We all owe her a debt.
*Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish)*
an astonishing writer and thinker, one who is fearless in how she
uses history to explain where we are now. Her work is essential to
showing how empire and colonialism pervades every nook and cranny
of the British establishment today and why we should all continue
to speak truth to power, like she does every damn day.
*Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant*
A superb study of anticolonial resistance
*Guardian*
This impressive book challenges the assumptions that underpin many
academic and journalistic understandings of the British empire; it
restores the idea of resistance and dissent, placing anti-colonial
struggle from the 1857 uprising in India, to Mau Mau in Kenya, at
the heart of historical change. It argues convincingly that, when
it did occur, British anti-colonialism in the metropole was forged
through exposure to imperial insurgency. By doing so, it tackles
the whole premise of British liberal imperial progress and
benevolence which remains so pervasive to this day. It's also a
hopeful book, indicating ways out of mythological cul-de-sacs.
Erudite, but highly readable, this book will be definitely be on my
reading lists for students.
*Yasmin Khan, Associate Professor of History at Kellogg College,
Oxford*
An outstanding contribution to our understanding of the struggles
against the British empire
*Morning Star*
sets out to celebrate the political agency of colonised peoples,
its importance in bringing an end to empire and the impact it had
on metropolitan liberal and radical thinking.
*Times Higher Education*
A tremendous book that deserves the widest possible readership ...
one of the most important books on the British Empire of the last
Decade.
*Race & Class*
Punchy
*Prospect*
Impressive in its scope and rigour...Insurgent Empire is an
important challenge to those that would rather uncritically accept
the myth of a benevolent imperial power than work to celebrate
radicalism and resistance as part of a national history.
*Hong Kong Review of Books*
[Gopal] mounts a powerful challenge to the notion that anticolonial
resistance was born of an education in British notions of
liberty.
*London Review of Books*
Gopal's meticulously researched study is a major contribution to
the historiography of the British Empire, as notable for its
research as it is for its lucid, forceful prose.
*Journal of British Studies*
Incisive ... Insurgent Empire demonstrates how often critics have
hacked at the pedestals of imperial pieties, and how consistently
voices outside Britain have inspired them.
*New Yorker*
A compelling account of how anti-colonial ideas were repeatedly
re-litigated in the face of fierce opposition and shows the
tireless work of these groups and individuals in slowly
constructing and deconstructing concepts of liberty and
equality.
*LSE Review of Books: Best Books of 2020*
Excellent ... Gopal's exploration of the interplaybetween
anti-colonial resistance in India, the West Indies and Britain
deploys biography, history and cultural studies to support her
persuasive argument that the colonies were not just the passive
recipient of Britain's "civilising mission" but also the sources of
a more refined understanding of key principles like equality and
freedom.
*Big Issue*
Few academics are doing so much, and so boldly, to expose how the
legacy of empire continues to warp our thinking and
institutions.
*Prospect: The world’s top 50 thinkers 2021*
Wonderful ... turn[s] upside down the cliched and self-serving
argument that British imperialism brought 'western' ideas of
democracy and freedom to their poor benighted black and brown
subjects in the colonies
*rs21*
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