Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent by Priyamvada Gopal (Review)
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Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial resistance and British dissent by Priyamvada Gopal (review) Zak Leonard Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Volume 21, Number 1, Spring 2020, (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2020.0001 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/754568 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial resistance and British dissent By Priyamvada Gopal. London: Verso, 2019. Reflecting an astonishing breadth of knowledge, this study offers a provocative, epistemological reassessment of anticolonial agitation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the outset, Gopal invites her reader to reconsider the foundational mythologies that continue to inform British perceptions of the empire. Decolonization, she asserts, did not proceed from any benevolent “imperial initiative”; paternalist policymakers did not simply bestow rights and privileges on colonized populations who had supposedly matured under their political tutelage (3). Rather, those freedoms were won through the vigorous “self-assertion” of dissidents in India, Africa and the Caribbean. During periods of colonial crisis, their violent resistance further radicalized liberal imperialists who had previously demanded a more ethical system of governance. In others cases, interracial collaborations within Britain sustained oppositional movements and produced transgressive literature that questioned the efficacy of gradual reform. A rebuke of global capitalism often underlaid these critiques, as agitators sought to foster solidarity between the exploited British working classes and subordinated colonial populations. Gopal’s interventions are most incisive when she is constructing clear “conversion” narratives, charting the operations of internationalist organizations like the League against Imperialism (LAI) and the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF), and explicating the dynamics behind dialogical, collaborative ventures in England. In Chapter Three, Gopal introduces us to Wilfred Scawen Blunt, a colorful aristocrat who experienced a “Cairene conversion to anticolonialism” during his residence in Egypt (153). While Blunt’s early work had asserted the possibility of Muslim-Christian coexistence under British rule, his participation in the defense of nationalist leader Colonel Ahmad Urabi and his exposure to the teachings of Muslim scholar Jamal-ud-din al-Afghani prompted him to “unlearn a habitual paternalism” (135). A similar instance of “reverse tutelage” occurs in Chapter Ten. There, Gopal argues that a searching inquiry into the Mau Mau Revolt led Fenner Brockway of the MCF and Oxford don Margery Perham to reassess their faith in © 2020 Zak Leonard and The Johns Hopkins University Press gradualism, denounce White settlerism, and publicly recognize that decolonization was a demand that Britain could not refuse. In Chapter Five, Gopal deftly probes the career of Communist MP Shapurji Saklatvala, an understudied figure who engaged in a particularly strident agitation against colonial capitalism. As a representative for North Battersea, he urged British laborers to agitate for the uplift of their fellow toilers in the Indian factories who were similarly oppressed by a master class. Like many characters in Insurgent Empire, Saklatvala was profoundly distrustful of petition-based reformism that mired Indians in a liminal state “between slavery and freedom” (228). Yet he also took issue with the Indian bourgeois nationalists who, in his estimation, wished to retain their plutocratic power after their foreign overlords were ejected (243). Regarding modern trade unionism as an ideal, egalitarian form of labor organization, Saklatvala expressed his dissatisfaction with Gandhi’s traditionalism and notably took issue with the “cult of worship” that had emerged around him (239). As Gopal later notes in her treatment of the 1929‒33 Meerut Conspiracy Case, British prosecutors exploited this latent tension between nationalist and internationalist anticolonialism to throw the book at thirty-one trade unionists whom they suspected of Bolshevist leanings. By her understanding, this strategy backfired. The colonial judiciary’s repressive tactics “paradoxically provided internationalists with a real opportunity to organize and proselytize in the cause of making cross-border alliances against imperialism” (249). The British Meerut Defence Committee disseminated the voluminous protests of the accused; with offices in London and Berlin, the LAI contributed to these efforts and boldly enlisted “colonial subjects… as partners in a struggle that was necessarily collective” (269). Chapter Six offers a redemptive account of this short-lived League, which eschewed paternalism and set itself up as a “conscious counterpoint to the League of Nations” (265). Ideological fractures in the internationalist left-wing edifice do emerge in this section, but they are not a focal point. Gopal’s account of the Conspiracy Case should therefore be read alongside works by Carolien Stolte and Michelle Louro that respectively clarify how the debacle splintered the Indian trade unionist community and © 2020 Zak Leonard and The Johns Hopkins University Press soured the relationship between globally oriented nationalists and the Comintern- dominated Berlin branch of the LAI.1 Chapters Seven, Eight and Nine are object lessons in network reconstruction, as Gopal lucidly reveals how anticolonial alliances formed in the metropole. In the interwar years, Jamaican-born journalist Claude McKay teamed up with Sylvia Pankhurst and encouraged her Workers’ Dreadnought paper to interrogate colonial issues. McKay was also in communication with Communist-leaning aristocrat Nancy Cunard, whose Negro anthology foregrounded “the raced voices of the colonized-in-struggle” (298). One contributor to this project, George Padmore, later wrote for the Independent Labor Party’s New Leader newspaper and served as the nexus for a global network of anticolonial dissidents. Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the outbreak of violent strikes in Jamaica in 1937 further evidenced the need for these link-ups. In this period, radicals like Padmore and C.L.R. James participated in the International African Service Bureau, asserted the necessity of self-emancipation, and impugned colonialism as an inherently fascist enterprise. While Gopal is clearly engaging with issues of contemporary import, her “enthusiastically generalist” methodology can result in a somewhat uneven scholarly product (37). Some chapters ably explore actors’ backgrounds and motivations, but others are hampered by a lack of historical context or limited engagement with recent historiography. In Chapter One, which focuses on British reactions to the calamitous Indian Uprising of 1857, Gopal delves into the journalistic output of Chartist luminary Ernest Jones. As this event unfolded, he came to identify “the rebel as a speaking subject” and recognize the existence of an autochthonous “insurgent consciousness” (64). Gopal also suggests that Jones brought a “non-European and more strenuously anticolonial dimension to Chartist internationalism” (60), yet scholars such as Gregory Vargo have argued that the Chartist press was routinely “drawn to moments when colonial people became shapers of their own history.”2 Articles published in the Northern Star and Chartist Circular in the 1840s and 1850s consistently “asserted a common humanity” with enslaved and colonized peoples “while avoiding the condescension often present in © 2020 Zak Leonard and The Johns Hopkins University Press philanthropy.” In advocating for the overthrow of colonial rule, Chartists were also inspired by “universal values of a democratic humanitarian brotherhood” espoused by Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, who himself contributed to the Northern Star and the People’s Journal. According to Eugenio Biagini, the Chartist Reynolds’s Newspaper adopted the stance of the Mazzinian L’Italia del Popolo paper and “imposed on the Indian rebels the democratic ideas and values which had recently inflamed Paris, Berlin, and Rome.”3 Given that Jones also likened the Indian revolt to these nationalist movements, Chapter One might have benefitted from a further examination of ideological cross- pollination within the Chartist ranks. Tracing the evolution of an individual’s political thought can be a fraught affair in the absence of ample archival sources. This difficulty comes to the fore in Chapter Four, which analyzes a genre of literature produced by liberal Britons who “travelled to colonial contexts, witnessed unrest on the ground, and engaged with the militantly disposed” (174). Gopal occasionally relies on an interpretation of a single text to evidence the reverse tutelage that resulted from these interactions. Scottish MP Keir Hardie, for instance, ventured to India in 1907, consulted with nationalist B.G. Tilak, and commented upon the systemic failings of colonial rule in a politicized travelogue. But given his prior engagement with Indian issues, it is unclear why this journey was so influential. Indeed, Hardie’s observation that “the people of India are but so many seeds in an oil mill” (183) is reminiscent of an oft-cited text from 1837 that likened India to an “apple in a cider-press” being squeezed by avaricious revenue collectors.4 When Tilak was tried for sedition in 1908, he denied there was anything novel in his criticisms,