Priyamvada Gopal is University Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and Fellow, Churchill College. From there, he made his way to India, witnessing a “white” mutiny as the Europeans of Calcutta vetoed the viceroy’s attempt to open up the courts to native Indian magistrates. My history teacher (back in the days of O-levels in the UK) taught us enough to sow seeds of disquiet about the Empire, and I was intrigued to learn more. It was a revelation to me that many 19th century British intellectuals, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, John Tyndall, Charles Kingsley, Charles Dickens, Tennyson and J. Regardless to what far right racists might say about this book, it is a refreshing read into the history behind the British empire.

Insurgent Empire sets the record straight in demonstrating that these people were much more than victims of imperialism or, subsequently, the passive beneficiaries of an enlightened British conscience—they were insurgents whose legacies shaped and benefited the nation that once oppressed them. The Communist party MP for Battersea, he was in effect the “member for India” as British policy in the 1920s gyrated from velvet fist to iron glove, but rarely engaged with Indian nationalism. Things are never “Black” or “White,” but rather, Mulatto and muddled, including the history of de-colonization, no doubt still underway. Tomes like Niall Ferguson’s Empire (2003) and John Darwin’s The Empire Project (2009) run to hundreds of pages, dominating the shelf when it comes to options for large-scale narrative imperial histories. The book shows that resistance movements were, in fact, always present in those colonised nations, and it was the actions taken by colonised subjects that inspired British criticism of Empire.She is the author of Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence; The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration and Insurgent Empire – Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent.

View image in fullscreen The battle at Cawnpore (Kanpur) where a British garrison was wiped out during the Indian ‘mutiny’ of 1857.There is an equally compelling chapter on Shapurji Saklatvala, a Parsi from Bombay, who became only the third Indian to be elected to the House of Commons. Remarkably, there are very few counterweights to this kind of account, let alone ones with grand narrative ambition. Gopal argues that colonised people always resisted their masters but, importantly, some white colonialists, a number of whom she follows in detail, were able to learn from their thinking and experience. Gopal] mounts a powerful challenge to the notion that anticolonial resistance was born of an education in British notions of liberty. We need an American edition which looks at struggles here against oppression - both past and current.