Those grand narratives also share a conviction that the story of imperialism starts in Whitehall and follows a rise-and-fall arc. Gopal then goes on to provide some superb sketches of imperial “troublemakers” (to employ a term used many years ago by AJP Taylor). From Joseph Chamberlain to Enoch Powell and on to the apologists for Victorian imperialism now lying in wait for a seat at the table of the new Brexit cabinet, empire has had a noisier impact at the Tory end of the political spectrum. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

Regardless to what far right racists might say about this book, it is a refreshing read into the history behind the British empire. Nor will readers find here many of the conventional critics of empire, such as JA Hobson or George Orwell.This is no alternative A-Z history of Britain’s inglorious empire, of the kind that has become fashionable recently. Insurgent Empire ] sets out to celebrate the political agency of colonised peoples, its importance in bringing an end to empire and the impact it had on metropolitan liberal and radical thinking. Gopal’s Global South does not include the Antipodes; Indigenous people under settler colonial regimes do not figure here.

Rather than treat colonized humanity as victims or reactionaries, Gopal s narrative discloses a cast of resisters that shaped the idea of freedom across Britain and its possessions. Ignore the one star evaluations that demonstrate how colonisers hate the people they colonised even while claiming they did it all with the best of intentions. Blunt, for his part, became a tireless popularizer of the story of Ahmed Urabi’s rebellion on the streets of Cairo, seeking directly to influence Prime Minister William Gladstone’s policy in the region. It argues convincingly that, when it did occur, British anti-colonialism in the metropole was forged through exposure to imperial insurgency.

sets out to celebrate the political agency of colonised peoples, its importance in bringing an end to empire and the impact it had on metropolitan liberal and radical thinking. Sudhir Hazareesingh, TLS Books of the Year, 2019 Gopal has a sharp eye for forgotten characters and lost histories. Drawing attention to this new wave of organised opposition to empire – not only Britain’s, but also the colonialism of all the European powers – is an important addition and corrective to that all that has been written recently about the rise and fall of liberal internationalism in the two decades after the Treaty of Versailles of 1919. An assessment of ‘their’ colonialism must go hand-in-hand with an unflinching scrutiny of ‘our’ own tyrannies. Insurgent Empire shows how Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation.