Abstract
The colonial and settler colonial projects of Europe have had dissenters, reformers, and resisters since the first sword was drawn against a Taino. Slave revolts have marked the project of slavery in North and South America—as has Indigenous resistance, which has continued to this day. As Priyamvada Gopal discusses, much of the current “imperial history,” erases the anticolonial resistance by both the colonized and those within the metropole (2020:17). This exclusion not only silences the historically loud resistance to colonization, but it also measures anticolonial struggle as the sum of its conclusion. As we see in Insurgent Empire, reducing anticolonial struggles to their success limits us to that moment in time, casting off the theories, actions, rebellions, and cooperative movements that rose and fell before liberation, and laid the groundwork for it.
Exploring the empire where the sun never set, Gopal brings us through revolts and uprisings in India, Jamaica, and Egypt—each time returning to England for an examination of its impact on the British political system and burgeoning leftist movements. The introduction should be of particular interest of those following the contemporary post-colonial debate. Chapter 1 follows the 1857 “Sepoy Mutiny” as it occurs and then travels as news back to Britain. Most interesting in this chapter is the exploration of Chartist and Positivist movements and their interaction with the Uprising. Laying the groundwork for the rest of the book, we begin to see internationalist sympathies grow as the façade of British paternalism crumbles. Chapter 2 examines the response to brutal repression of the Morant Bay Uprising in 1865, which resulted in the summary execution of a politician and rampant killing of civilians. While the Sepoy Mutiny has made its way into modern British history, it’s remarkable that this uprising has not. We learn a simple answer for the silence: those rising up were the property-less ex-slaves who were often still working the lands on which they or their families had been enslaved. Counter to depictions of the uprising today, the topics of land-reform and liberty were often the subject of contemporary debates.
While the Morant Bay Rebellion heightened the public’s awareness of the contradictions between European (especially British) concepts of freedom and liberty, and the rights held by their colonial subjects, the Urabi Rebellion of 1882 and the 1905 Partition of Bengal brought these contradictions to the forefront. In Chapters 3 and 4, we see socialists and members of the colonial regime like Wilfrid Blunt and Henry Mayers Hyndman finding British paternalism little more than a guise for the “deliberately manufactured famines, impoverishment and the ‘drain’ of Indian wealth” (2020:171-172). Chapter 4 starts introducing anticolonial activists from the colonies themselves who began influencing British thought.
Chapter 5 describes the influence of the Indian anticolonialism movement on the British left—often the group most concerned with colonial struggles. With London becoming a global center of radical theoretical and organizing work, colonial administration of places like India increasingly faced resistance as British workers grew a sense of international solidarity. Such internationalism was built in the early 1900s by Indian activists like Shapurji Saklatvala. Saklatvala became one of the few communists and one of the first from a minority group elected to British parliament by “insistently extending the same arguments he made for democracy and self-determination for India to Britain and the British people” (2020:230).
This internationalism only continued to grow, as we find in Chapter 6. The Meerut Conspiracy Case in India compelled anticolonial movements within the metropole to navigate the colonial regime more seriously, creating groups like the League Against Imperialism, which worked tirelessly to further the anticolonial cause, despite its shortcomings. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 focus on education of those living within the metropole. Newspapers used vast networks to describe atrocities and resistance in colonies. Importantly, educational materials were radicalized heavily by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and after the end of World War II. Finally, Chapter 10 discusses the response to the “Mau Uprising” in Kenya in the 1950s, despite its brutality being compared to that of the 1857 “Sepoy Mutiny,” the crumbling of the British empire and the mature anti-colonial movement at home resulted in a strong resistance.
Throughout this book, I was asking myself one question: “how and when did the internationalism described here collapse?” Despite sporadic anti-war protests and nascent anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in the 1990s, American and British organizing has largely turned inward. Black Lives Matter rarely mentions Palestine, while our labor movements fail to link our worsening labor conditions to the wider neoliberal system that impacts the global south. While Insurgent Empire does not directly answer this question, it is useful for those interested in beginning their examination of how internationalism crumbled and how it can begin to be rebuilt.