INSURGENT EMPIRE, anticolonial resistance and British dissent

607pp., illus., paperback, Reprint, London, (2019) 2020

“[Gopa] mounts a powerful challenge to the notion that anticolonial resistance was born of an education in British notions of liberty.” Adom Getachew, London Review of Books

“It is widely recognised and understood today that colonial dictatorship was resisted from the moment of its imposition. Much less widely known, however, is the record of active dissension from the imperial project within the metropole itself. It is with the multifarious forms assumed by this ‘internal’ tradition of dissent that Priyamvada Gopal concerns herself in this extraordinarily valuable and brilliantly readable book. Insurgent Empire covers a vast geographical range (sub-Saharan and north Africa, Afghanistan and India, the Caribbean and the Americas) and tracks historically from the 1857 uprising in North India through to the ‘Mau Mau’ insurgency in Kenya a century later. The book contributes something altogether new and exciting to the existing critical literature in its suggestion that the ‘internal’ opposition to imperial policies and polities was from the outset a dialogical exercise, premised on an active learning from the anti-colonial movements. 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.” Neil Lazarus, University of Warwick

Priyamvada Gopal is University Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures in the Faculty of English and Fellow, Churchill College, University of Cambridge. She is the author of Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, nation and the transition to independence and The Indian English Novel: Nation, history and narration.