Abstract
This is a tremendous book that deserves the widest possible readership. In its pages, Priyamvada Gopal confronts ‘the colonial mythologies’ that still ‘have a tenacious hold on the British imagination’. This is probably something of an understatement at the present time. She writes, in particular, of ‘the myth of a unique, liberal, salvific and benign empire’ and identifies ‘the idea that freedom was “given to” or “bestowed upon” former colonies’ as a key part of the myth of liberal Imperialism. She hopes to contribute to ‘a sustained unlearning, a monumental process, but a necessary one’. This is a monumental process indeed, but one to which she has made a powerful contribution with Insurgent Empire. How many academic books are there that are 600 pages long, but that the reader is left wishing were longer? We can only be grateful to Niall Ferguson and to the BBC for having, as she puts it, provoked her into taking up the challenge.
What the book sets out to do is to examine ‘the texts of British imperial dissidents and critics of empire in relation to the texts of anticolonial resistance’. Once she gets by a somewhat ritualistic genuflection towards postcolonial theory and begins engaging with a massive body of evidence and argument, Insurgent Empire really takes off. It quickly establishes itself as one of the most important books on the British Empire of the last decade. One of the classic defences of the Empire and its agents is that its critics judge it by the standards obtaining today, whereas it has to be judged (and found innocent) by the standards obtaining at the time. At the very least, Gopal demonstrates that there were always contemporary domestic critics and opponents of Empire, condemning Imperialism and its crimes from a variety of standpoints. This is, of course, a worthwhile exercise in itself, but her concern is with exploring the influence of ‘the texts of anticolonial resistance’ on these domestic critics. Among those she discusses are Ernest Jones, Frederic Harrison, Wilfred Blunt, Claude McKay, Sylvia Pankhurst, Shapurji Saklatvala, George Padmore, Nancy Cunard, Fenner Brockway and many more.
She focuses her attention on the great Indian rebellion of 1857, on the Morant Bay episode of 1865, on the invasion of Egypt in 1882, on the later resistance to British rule in India and finally on the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Even though Insurgent Empire is already a long book, such is her scholarship and such are the quality of her insights that one can only wish she had expanded her investigation to include Palestine and the Middle East. One can only hope.
There is only space here to briefly consider some aspects of her work. Let us begin with Gladstone’s invasion of Egypt. Gopal provides an excellent discussion of Wilfred Blunt, of the development of his thinking and of his defence of the Urabi movement. She insists that Blunt’s Eurocentric liberal preconceptions had been undermined by his first-hand encounter with the Middle East, ‘first, undone by his study of Islam, and then reconfigured by a milieu of revolutionary ferment’. Blunt found himself ‘learning new languages’. As she puts it, in words of very contemporary relevance, Blunt’s ‘somewhat theoretical insight into how Islam was not lacking in ideas of liberty and consultative governance was given heft and texture’ by his witnessing ‘a largely Muslim society in historical turmoil around questions of class, nationality and rights’. Gladstone’s invasion was, arguably, the great nineteenth-century demonstration of British liberal hypocrisy, with Imperial self-interest, both financial and strategic, being covered up with a thin veneer of humanitarian concern. The thousands slaughtered in the course of the invasion were, of course, of no account. Indeed, Gladstone actually described himself as having been ‘a labourer in the cause of peace’ while at the very same time gleefully celebrating military success and hoping that Urabi could be speedily hanged. Blunt played an important part in saving Urabi from the hangman and thereafter continued to savage British Imperial rule. In 1884, he hosted a visit to Britain by Mohammed Abdu, who was determined to argue the Egyptian case. Abdu gave an interview to the Pall Mall Gazette that once again has a very contemporary resonance. He called for the withdrawal of British troops and the return home to Egypt of the exiled Urabi and told his British audience that ‘Your liberality we see plainly is only for yourselves, and your sympathy with us is that of the wolf for the lamb which he designs to eat.’ He went on: ‘There is no Mohammedan in Egypt so oppressed as to wish for any more of your help.’ He ended the interview with, as Gopal puts it, ‘a devastating pronouncement: “But do not attempt to do us any more good. Your good has done us too much harm already”.’
Another critic of Empire she discusses is Shapurji Saklatvala, better known as ‘Comrade Sak’, who had been elected to the House of Commons as a Labour MP in 1922 but, from the following year, sat as a Communist. She quite rightly emphasises his importance in raising Imperial questions, both inside and outside the Commons. In his time in the Commons (he lost his seat in November 1929), he made over 500 interventions, many to do with class and class struggle in Britain itself, but ‘the majority were on India and imperial matters, earning him the sobriquet of “Member for India”’. Gopal positively celebrates his contribution to the fight against Empire. Her discussion of the Meerut Conspiracy Trial, almost completely forgotten in this country, is particularly useful. The arrest, protracted detention and trial of over thirty trade union and political activists, including three Britons, on conspiracy charges, became a great international campaign. She highlights Saklatvala’s part in the campaign to defend the Meerut prisoners. It is, of course, worth reminding ourselves that much of this solidarity campaign was fought when Ramsay Macdonald’s Labour government was in power, actually presiding over the Trial, and refusing to do anything to bring it to an end.
There is so much more of value in Insurgent Empire, but let us end with her discussion of the Mau Mau rebellion and of the incredible, indeed, murderous brutality with which it was suppressed. Once again, there is much of interest here, including accounts of how the likes of Fenner Brockway, Margery Perham, Barbara Castle and others responded to the rebellion and to the methods used to repress it. One thing does jar here though. She refers to the contributions ‘the Labour icon, Aneurin Bevan’ made in a Commons debate on 6 June 1956, as ‘stentorian interventions’, condemning the colonial administration in Kenya, the role of the white settlers and ridiculing the offer of piecemeal reforms. The problem with this, of course, is that Bevan had been a member of the 1945–1951 Labour government, a government that had determinedly refused to confront the settler establishment in Kenya and whose actions and inactions had made the Mau Mau rebellion inevitable. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that the methods used to repress the rebellion would have been significantly different if Labour had still been in power when the Emergency was declared in 1952. Bevan had not shown the slightest concern when the Labour government had crushed the Kenyan trade union movement, breaking the 1950 general strike, although to be fair, he had actively participated in the Labour government’s domestic strike-breaking as well. It is always important to remember that what Labour politicians say in opposition often bears little relation to what they do when in power.
Let us end by once again insisting on the riches that Insurgent Empire contains, the breadth of its discussion and the important contribution it has made to the ‘unlearning’ of ‘colonial mythologies’.