Insurgent Empire
Insurgent Empire
Anticolonial Resistance
and British Dissent
Priyamvada Gopal
First published by Verso 2019
© Priyamvada Gopal 2019
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The images reproduced here are in the public domain, with the following exceptions: ‘Shapurji Saklatvala speaking to crowds at Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, September 1933’ © Keystone / Getty Images; ‘The League against Imperialism canvassing at, Trafalgar Square in London in August 1931’ © Fox Photos / Getty Images; ‘Nancy Cunard in her print studio in France’ © Keystone-France / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images; ‘C. L. R. James giving a speech at a rally for Ethiopia in London’ © Keystone-France / Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-412-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-415-7 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-414-0 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gopal, Priyamvada, 1968– author.
Title: Insurgent empire : anticolonial resistance and British dissent / Priyamvada Gopal.
Description: London ; New York : Verso, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019005764 | ISBN 9781784784126 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781784784157 (US ebk.) | ISBN 9781784784140 (UK ebk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Anti-imperialist movements – Great Britain – History. | Great Britain – Colonies – History.
Classification: LCC JV1011 .G66 2019 | DDC 325/.341 – dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005764
Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Enemies of Empire
PART I. CRISES AND CONNECTIONS
1. The Spirit of the Sepoy Host: The 1857 Uprising in India and Early British Critics of Empire
2. A Barbaric Independence: Rebel Voice and Transnational Solidarity, Morant Bay, 1865
3. The Accidental Anticolonialist: Egypt’s ‘Urabi’ Rebellion and Late Victorian Critiques of Imperialism
4. Passages to Internationalism: The ‘New Spirit’ in India and Edwardian Travellers
PART II. AGITATIONS AND ALLIANCES
5. The Interpreter of Insurgencies: Shapurji Saklatvala and Democratic Voice in Britain and India
6. The Revolt of the Oppressed World: British Internationalism from Meerut to the League against Imperialism
7. Black Voices Matter: Race, Resistance and Reverse Pedagogy in the Metropole
8. Internationalizing African Opinion: Race, Writing and Resistance
9. Smash Our Own Imperialism: George Padmore, the New Leader and ‘Colonial Fascism’
10. A Terrible Assertion of Discontent: ‘Mau Mau’ and the Imperial Benevolence
Epilogue: That Wondrous Horse of Freedom
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
In the early summer of 2006, I took part in an episode of Start the Week, the BBC radio show hosted by prominent journalist Andrew Marr. The topic was the British Empire and my fellow guests were the theologian Robert Beckford, the historians Linda Colley and Eric Hobsbawm, and, most significantly in this context, the media face of the case for British imperialism Niall Ferguson. Although I was familiar with the unquestioned celebration of imperial figures such as Winston Churchill and the silence around the more questionable legacies of the empire which Churchill famously didn’t wish to liquidate, this programme was my first close encounter, after moving to Britain in 2001, with bullish assertions about the greatness of Britain’s imperial project and the benevolence of its legacies. In this mythology, a version of which is peddled in Ferguson’s book on the British Empire and accompanying television series, massacres, violence, slavery and famine were acknowledged as passing unfortunate occurrences rather than as constitutive dimensions of imperialism. While both Colley and Hobsbawm demurred from the matey complacency which marked Marr’s and Ferguson’s dialogue on the topic, it was largely left to Beckford and me, the two people of colour on the panel, to raise doubts about the benevolence and munificence which was being attributed to the British Empire. We made rather more of the land grabs, dispossession, racism, enslavement, expropriation, ethnic cleansing and resource theft that had taken place over centuries and continued to have lethal afterlives in those countries which had felt the heavy hand of colonial rule on their backs. That in itself was perhaps unremarkable but more striking was the palpable shock and outrage that Ferguson felt at being denied a free pass on a string of questionable assertions. A vituperative opinion piece from him would follow, and he would reference the episode almost obsessively elsewhere.
That evening the BBC took the unprecedented step of replacing the usual repeat of the morning’s episode with a phone-in programme to discuss the morning’s ‘barny’, the term Marr used to refer to the exchange. Sitting alongside him in what can only be described as an embarrassingly proto-colonial gesture was a young American woman of Indian descent whose main purpose, it would seem, was to reassure the BBC’s listeners that I by no means represented young Indians who, she suggested, were either indifferent to or very positively disposed to the Empire. In a particularly bizarre piece of apparently clinching evidence, she noted that her grandfather, who had grown up in British India, routinely saluted her white husband when they visited him. This incident and the significant amounts of both angry and appreciative mail I received after writing a related piece for the Guardian newspaper heralded what would become for me a somewhat unexpected dozen years of engagement with Britain’s relationship to its imperial past and the manifold silences and lacunae in the British public understanding of that past. My own students at Cambridge, studying what was then coyly referred to as ‘Commonwealth Literature’, came to class with very little knowledge of what the Empire was or how it lived on in the present and were, to their credit, keen to know more. It became clear to me that some form of reparative history was desperately needed in the British public sphere which is still subject to a familiar ritual where politicians of various stripes will periodically announce that Britain has ‘nothing to apologize for’ or call for active ‘pride’ in the legacies of the Empire. These calls often sit alongside the somewhat contradictory claim that to criticize imperial misdeeds, supposedly by ‘the values of our time’, is an anachronistic gesture.
But is it anachronistic to subject the Empire to searching criticism? This book is in part a response to that question and in part a very different take on the history of the British Empire to what is generally available in the British public sphere. In academia, a retrograde strain of making the so-called case for colonialism is now resurgent. As a scholar whose prior work had been on dissident writing in the Indian subcontinent as it transitioned to independence, I was aware that all societies and cultures have radical and liberationist currents woven into thei
r social fabric as well as people who spoke up against what was being done in their name: why would Britain in the centuries of imperial rule be an exception? At the same time, I also wanted to probe the tenacious mythology that ideas of ‘freedom’ are uniquely British in conception and that independence itself was a British ‘gift’ to the colonies along with the railways and the English language. The result is a study which looks at the relationship between British critics of empire and the great movements of resistance to British rule which emerged across colonial contexts. The case against colonialism, it will be seen, was made repeatedly over the last couple of centuries and it emerged through an understanding of resistance to empire.
My first thanks are to those historians whose vital scholarly texts on British critics of empire I have drawn on extensively: Stephen Howe, Gregory Claeys, Nicholas Owen, Mira Matikkala and Bernard Porter. Writing this book through their work in an age where higher education and research are being privatized and monetized, I have been repeatedly reminded of how fundamentally collaborative the production of knowledge is. I have also learned a great deal from the work of pioneering scholars of anticolonialism, such as Hakim Adi, Marika Sherwood, Mimi Sheller, Brent Hayes Edwards, Anthony Bogues, Ken Post, Gelien Matthews and Minkah Makalani. My mistakes, of course, are not theirs. I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for taking a chance on this project and granting to me a two-year research fellowship that enabled substantial amounts of work towards this book. The Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and Churchill College have also generously provided additional research monies. It would be unseemly not to acknowledge both the BBC and Niall Ferguson for setting me off on a road to discovering a trajectory of British thought and political practice so different from the mythologies they routinely and damagingly peddle. I hope Ferguson will forgive the temerity of ‘an obscure Cambridge lecturer’, as he has dubbed me, in daring to venture into terrain where only the mighty may expound.
Many people have encouraged this study and rallied my spirits when I’ve faltered. My thanks to Neil Lazarus, Timothy Brennan and Benita Parry for the support they gave this project at the outset. My intellectual debts to them are numerous, as also to the many great teachers I had in my formative years as a graduate student at Cornell: the late Martin Bernal, Susan Buck-Morss (whose work on Hegel in Haiti has been foundational), Biodun Jeyifo, Hortense Spillers and Satya P. Mohanty. The late Edward Said’s work continues to nourish my mind and the impact of his thought will, hopefully, be evident throughout this book. A number of people have read either all or portions of the manuscript: huge thanks to Sue J. Kim, Shamira Meghani and Joel Fredell for reading an early draft and suggesting revisions, and to Neil Lazarus for going over the near-finished article. Two anonymous readers provided just the kind of challenging and sceptical feedback a project of this scope requires. Christian Høgsbjerg has been the most generous of readers and interlocutors, and I’m very grateful to him and to two other historians, Kim A. Wagner and Kama Maclean, for reading several individual chapters between them. Others who have been generous with suggestions, assistance and materials include John Drew, Paul T. Simpson, Owen Holland, Alaric Hall, Paul Flewers, Joe Shaughnessy and Alf Gunvald Nilsen. Heba Youssef’s translations of Arabic texts are integral to Chapter 3 which is on Wilfrid Blunt’s travels in Egypt.
I’ve been extremely fortunate to have had the support and interest of numerous excellent colleagues at Cambridge. First among them is Christopher Warnes, truly the best of friends and most supportive of colleagues. David Trotter has been a kind and skilful mentor, and his exemplary support in that capacity has meant more than he realizes. Tim Cribb has been the most generous friend and advocate from my rookie days as an ‘assistant lecturer’. My thanks also to Chana Morgenstern, Peter de Bolla, Drew Milne, Deborah Bowman and Andrew Taylor. I also want to thank a wider community of critical scholars at Cambridge, in particular those who are precariously positioned – their commitment to the public university as a space for transformative thought has been inspirational. In the face of the political onslaughts of the last several years, many of my colleagues in the Faculty of English have repeatedly stood up for a democratic ideal of what a university ought to be and it has been an honour to have had their comradeship, particularly that of Jason Scott-Warren. Thanks also to those many colleagues and students across the institution engaging with the complicated question of ‘decolonizing’ the curriculum. Two Cambridge historians, David Washbrook and John Lonsdale, very kindly shared their enormous knowledge in talking through some ideas with me, and Christopher Clark gave me his thoughts on an early project plan. I am particularly grateful to the English Faculty Research Seminar and the South Asia Seminar series for inviting me to present my work and for the enriching discussions both occasions generated. Graduate students for whom I’ve served as supervisor or advisor over the years have also been a great source of intellectual engagement and, since those days, they’ve forged their own brilliant paths: my particular thanks to Anna Bernard, Rachel Bower, Ben Etherington, Mike Perfect, Anouk Lang, Graham Riach, Desha Osborne, Mukti Mangharam and Megan Jones. I’m indebted to the support and good cheer that Sam Dean, Jen Pollard, Anna Fox, Vicky Aldred, Lauren Lalej, Marica Lopez-Diaz and Marina Ballard have provided over the years. To the generations of immensely engaged and bright undergraduates, too numerous to name individually, who have kept me on my toes: this book is for you.
Over the years, I have profited from conversations with audiences at various institutions where I was invited to present work in progress. Many thanks to them and to those who hosted me at the University of Lancaster (Deborah Sutton), the University of Glasgow (Gerard McKeever), the Open University–Institute of English Studies (Alex Tickell), the University of Kent (Ole Birk Laursen, Maria Ridda and Enrique Galvan-Alvarez), the University of Brighton (Bob Brecher, Cathy Bergin and Anita Rupprecht), the University of East Anglia (James Wood), Kings College London (Anna Bernard), Cornell University (Satya Mohanty), the University of Toronto (Kanishka Goonewardena and Ajay Rao), the City University of Dublin (Hari Krishnan, Arpita Chakrabarty, Shruti Neelakantan and Eileen Connolly), Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (Ayesha Kidwai, G. J. V. Prasad and Udaya Kumar), the University of New South Wales (Laetitia Nanquette), and the University of Western Sydney (Ben Etherington). My thanks also to Becky Gardiner and Joseph Harker for giving me space to try out some related ideas in pieces I’ve written for the Guardian.
A project of this scope would have foundered without the uncomplaining assistance of librarians and archivists at the following institutions: the University Library, in particular Rare Books and Manuscripts, Cambridge; the Fitzwilliam Museum (Blunt Papers) and the Churchill Archives Centre (Brockway Papers); the British Library (Saklatvala Papers); the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick; the School of Oriental and African Studies (the Movement for Colonial Freedom Archives), the Bodleian Library and Rhodes House at the University of Oxford (Eyre Defence Fund Papers), Olin Library at Cornell University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (Padmore Papers); the Hull History Centre (Bridgeman Papers); and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas–Austin (Cunard Papers). I would also like to acknowledge research and editorial assistance provided by Duncan Thomas, Max Compton, Anna Nickerson and Roberta Klimt. At Verso, my thanks to Sebastian Budgen, Cian McCourt, Dan O’Connor (who truly went the extra mile), Charles Peyton and Mark Martin for their assistance.
So many people have kept me intellectually, emotionally, politically and literally nourished over the years of writing. My love and lasting gratitude to my parents, Gopal and Kausalya, who have so generously allowed this book to rudely intrude into so many home visits and steal time that was meant to be spent with them. My brother, Anant, has been a huge source of support, insight and good times. My other brother and dearest friend, Jay D’Ercola, has kept my spirits up at the worst of times and leavened numerous missteps with his wisdom, compassion and unique humour. Sue J. Kim has kept ca
ts, dogs and crime drama in my life over nearly twenty years. Kanishka Goonewardena has kept the faith in all the ways that matter. M. Indrani has cooked me very many sustaining meals and shared life wisdom in conversation. To my Ithaca family, I owe the joys of so many working summers: thanks to Roberta Crawford (and Manny, Alma and Kimchi), Franklin Crawford, Tuulikki Tammi, Paul Wilson and Ilmari. Bindia Thapar and Dwijen Rangnekar, both of whom left us far too soon, are sorely missed. Everyone in KPTI (you know who you are) – thanks for the vital doses of bracing silliness. Miss Luna Woodruff has made life in Cambridge that much more fun. Gautam Premnath, Jacqueline Stuhmiller, Shamira Meghani, Antara Dutta, Tanika Sarkar, Keya Ganguly, Gurminder Bhambra, John Meed, Lisa Tilley, Juan Jose Cruz, Gavan Titley, Gyunghee (April) Park, Nadine el-Enany, Vahni Capildeo, Dave Wearing, Kate Tunstall, Dibyesh Anand, Sandeep Parmar, Rashmi Singh, David Shulman, Isobel Urquhart, Asiya Islam and many other comrades across networks real and virtual have kept me going though grim political times. It is to all, past and present, who struggle for better times, building solidarity across borders, that this work is dedicated.
Introduction
Enemies of Empire
Nowhere within the British Empire were black people passive victims. On the contrary, they were everywhere active resisters.
Peter Fryer, Black People in the Empire: An Introduction
On 4 August 1857, some three months after the commencement of the insurgency in India, though it is unlikely he was aware of it at the time, the former slave and American abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave a speech in Rochester, in New York State, felicitating a different revolutionary moment. Nearly twenty-five years before, in ‘one complete transaction of vast and sublime significance’, slaves in the British West Indies had finally been deemed human beings, restored to their rightful stature as free men and women.1 Three decades after the 1807 abolition of the British slave trade, often confused with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, Britain’s human chattel on the vast sugar and cotton plantations of the West Indies had officially ceased to be slaves, though they would remain compulsorily apprenticed to their owners for another five years. In the United States, however, slavery still flourished – as indeed it did in other parts of the world such as Brazil, where it carried on to the end of that century. Douglass was speaking to fellow abolitionists, gathered in Rochester to commemorate the West India Emancipation, and he took pains to contrast Britain’s significant achievement with the ‘devilish brutality’ he saw around him in a formally democratic and republican land. The act of abolition, deriving though it did from ‘the moral sky of Britain’, had universal ramifications since, Douglass insisted, it ‘belongs not exclusively to England and English people, but to lovers of Liberty and mankind everywhere’.2
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