Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent
by Priyamvada Gopal
(Verso, £25)

AS BORIS JOHNSON sets out on his self-defined mission to make Britain feel “great” once more, we shall no doubt hear a lot more about the record of the days when Britannia ruled the waves. Right-wing historians like Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts will doubtless be on hand to assist.

So this book by Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal could not be more timely. She reminds us of the reality of empire, of resistance to it by the peoples it oppressed and how that impacted on politics in Britain itself.

Gopal’s focus is on the interaction of that resistance with political attitudes, initiatives and movements in the metropolis. She seeks to dissolve the “over here” and “over there” binary of anti-imperialism into a mutually stimulating and reinforcing dialectic.

Her treatment starts with that great turning point in the history of empire, the uprising in India in 1857. Usually misdescribed as a “mutiny,” implying a rising against lawfully constituted authority, it was actually an insurrection against a lawless external regime of pillage and oppression. She also recovers the less well-known rebellion and imperial massacre in Jamaica in 1865.

Both of these episodes engendered stirrings of an anti-colonial outlook in the British Parliament and elsewhere, although it was generally confined to criticism of abuses and individual imperial officials, rather than being systemic.

Wilfrid Blunt, a Tory turned anti-imperialist largely through his experiences of Egypt and the Arab world, was one of the first to deepen the critique and question the logic of empire and the platitudes which justified it.

Gopal gives generous space to the development of his views and rightly so — Blunt is an indication as to how repugnance at colonialism could and did emerge across a broad spectrum of British politics.

One of his targets, William Gladstone, was at one time a Liberal critic of imperialism yet a pseudo-reluctant proponent of it when in office. His reputation for high morality has somehow survived his bombardment of Alexandria in order to bring the government of Egypt to heel at a time when he was himself a bondholder in Egypt’s parlous finances.

The automatic equation of metropolitan liberalism with human progress was an error then, as it is today.

When Gopal moves her story into the 20th century, she has perhaps inevitably to be more selective in the movements and struggles she addresses and those she leaves out. India of course is covered, as is the Mau Mau movement in Kenya, yet Malaya and Cyprus hardly feature.

She rightly covers the unceasing agitation against empire of Shapurji Saklatvala, the communist MP of Indian origin within and outside the House of Commons and rescues the inter-war League Against Imperialism — a united front movement established under communist influence and doing more or less what it said on the tin — from historical obscurity.

Black campaigners and writers like Claude McKay and George Padmore are also featured. They waged an often lonely struggle against not just the complacent and chauvinist assumptions of the wider society concerning the colonies but also the marginalisation of such issues within the left and the labour movement.

Here perhaps Gopal neglects important dimensions. The work of the Communist Party is despatched rather too briskly and it is certainly true that the CPGB often subordinated anti-imperialist campaigning to the exigencies of domestic political strategies and that it reflected Eurocentric assumptions for much of its history.

But it was nevertheless the main locus of resistance to the empire within the labour movement throughout.

And the work of Rajani Palme Dutt, the British communist leader of Indian and Swedish heritage, is almost entirely neglected. Yet his works India Today and The Crisis of Britain and the British Empire exemplified exactly that intertwining of imperial and metropolitan struggle which Gopal seeks to elucidate.

The Labour Party is, of course, a different matter. Broadly pro-imperialist views, of the reforming type, were hegemonic throughout the period of the empire and formed a key part of the whole ideological apparatus of reformism.

The visits of Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald to India before the first world war are covered, together with their ambivalent conclusions, as is more substantively the campaigning work of Fenner Brockway and the Movement for Colonial Freedom — today Liberation — which he founded after the second world war.

Yet more, perhaps, could have been said about oppositional currents and their links with the mass movements across the empire — the rise of anti-imperialist sentiment coinciding with the growth of working-class militancy after 1918, culminating in the 1925 Trades Union Congress and its anti-colonial decisions.

The omission of Ireland from the scope of consideration is stark. The struggle for Irish unity and independence of course had such a palpable impact on imperial politics that it may not need enlarging upon in this context.

But it nevertheless highlights a difference between those colonies, where the subject people were well represented among the population of the metropolis, and those larger number which were not.

These reservations notwithstanding, this book is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the struggles against the British empire, one of the greatest engines of oppression and exploitation in human history.

That remains a necessary project, since attempts to prettify the record of pillage and slaughter persist amongst historians in the service of power.

Gopal brings the right mixture of scholarship and indignation to her work and the central message, that our struggles are entwined the world over without any political privileges of civilisational, economic or geographical hierarchy, is essential.