Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  The days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over … We should talk, and rightly so, about British values that are enduring, because they stand for some of the greatest ideas in history: tolerance, liberty, civic duty, that grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world.14

  If we can establish and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society then that is in our national interests too. The spread of our values makes us safer.15

  To undo this mythology systematically, then, remains a project of the highest intellectual and political importance. In Insurgent Empire, I have tried to show not only that insurgencies were frequent during British colonial rule, but that resistance to empire and the crises it generated shaped dissent around the imperial project within Britain. Put another way, the resistance of the periphery helped radicalize sections of the metropole. In the process, ideas of freedom that were not reducible to Obama’s ultimate ‘triumph of a system of free enterprise that unleashes the full potential of individual men and women’ did make their claims heard, even if they were not always heeded. Indeed, ‘free enterprise’ as such rarely formed the basis of claims to independence and self-determination, even though, from India and Jamaica to Egypt and Kenya, demands for land and control of labour power formed the basis of insurgencies. More often than not, capitalism was the target of insurgency, not its goal, and socialism in one form or the other, certainly in the twentieth century, was a strong influence. Tracking the lines of dissent and opposition within Britain and the ways in which these frequently emerged as part of a dialogical and transnational process is one way in which Britons today can both interrogate the seamless national mythologies they are routinely invited to consume. It enables Britons to lay claim to a different, more challenging history, and yet one that is more suited to a heterogeneous society which can draw on multiple historical and cultural resources.

  An ‘impudent fraud … upon the British people’16

  Reflecting on the independence struggle in Ghana which led to the formation of the first country on the African continent to be free of British rule, and on Nkrumah’s central role in both the success of that revolution and its eventual tragic unravelling in a series of betrayals, James notes that what happened in the postcolonial period, ‘the African degeneration’, does not invalidate the promise and potential of the earlier moment.17 This is, of course, in contrast to the many apologists for colonial rule, still wheeled out on radio and television programmes in Britain, for whom the blotted copy-book of many independent states is evidence of the inbuilt weaknesses of anticolonialism itself – proof that African countries, and not a few Asian ones, were not ready for independence. Without flinching from those failures – indeed, for him, Nkrumah’s betrayals were very deeply felt – James is clear about the significance of decolonization and the way in which it was fought for, contra ‘the defensive reiteration by the leaders of British public thought that the British government “gave”, “handed over” independence for which (God save us) it had long been training [Africans]’.18 James’s ventriloquized version of the mythologies of empire when it comes to liberation is contemptuously precise:

  Africans are, and always have been, a backward and barbarous people who have never been able to establish any civilised society of their own. Some of the more liberal would qualify this by saying that this backwardness was due not to any natural inferiority but to the circumstances of their environment, the climate or the soil or the forests, or something of the kind. These barbarous people were brought in contact with civilisation by the brutalities of the slave trade. However, the unhappy slave trade is happily behind us, and as a result of their contact with Western European civilisation, primitive Africans became a part of our unified world. The British government has by and large aimed at bringing these peoples to the stage where they would be able to exercise self-government, despite certain lapses from principle to which all nations, all peoples and all individuals are of course subject, human nature being what it is. It was always a principle of the British colonial system, but within recent years with the rise of the colonial peoples, it has been clearly understood and is being carried out.19

  In fact, this account could not ‘stand concrete examination for a single moment’, being ‘a tissue of falsehood, hypocrisy and empiricism, all designed to present disorderly retreat as systematic advance.20 Invoking the example of rebellions in the West Indies, James observes: ‘Unless the Colonial Office claims that it trains the masses of the people to strike and revolt whenever a new stage of fiddling with the Legislature is reached, its elaborate claims for training colonial peoples is an elaborate fiction.’21 Each concession wrested from colonial governments was the result of explosions causing loss of life and property, followed by one step towards self-government being ‘benevolently granted’.22 Full self-government takes place when it becomes too costly to repress the determined resistance that will not be denied.

  Myths matter because, unlike crude propaganda, they often drive action through sincerely held views, and possess a tenacity borne of limiting the horizon of possibilities: ‘the vast majority of the British people having no other views placed before them … have no other choice but to follow along the same lines of thought’.23 Having argued that African polities also need to abjure such colonial mythologies, James goes on to make a point similar to that which has animated this study. In the post-war period, he judged, Britons themselves were ‘now ready for new relations, human relations, with colonial peoples for the first time in four centuries’ but remained ‘choked and stifled by the emanations from the myth’.24 Writing in 1962, with decolonization fully underway, James believed the same ‘powerful current’ of moral protests that animated popular anti-slavery in Britain in the past ‘is now once more emergent under the blows imperialism has been receiving and the discredit which now colours all colonial adventures’.25 ‘Myth-making conceals another virulent poison for the myth-makers’, James observes. ‘It insists that they see themselves always as the givers, and Africans as the takers, themselves as teachers and Africans as the taught’, and never ‘the slightest hint’ that anything which took place in the colonies could, conversely, ‘instruct or inspire the peoples of the advanced countries in their own management of their own affairs’.26 This was as true of those who are friendly towards Ghana, in this instance, as of those who are not. We might recall here Ernest Jones’s exhortations to the British working-classes to learn from the acts of Hindustan’s rebels. Several decades after James deprecated them, it remains the case that colonial mythologies have a tenacious hold on the British imagination – not least the idea that freedom was ‘given to’ or ‘bestowed upon’ former colonies. Generations of indoctrination, as James suggested, mean that such thinking remains ‘an organic part of the thought processes of the nation, and to disgorge it requires a herculean effort’.27

  My hope is that this study, along with others, will be able to contribute towards what will have to be a sustained unlearning, a monumental process but a necessary one in a heterogeneous twenty-first-century Britain. In the wake of Brexit, the imperial myth, ‘whenever it is torn apart’, shows itself to rest on deep foundations and is repeatedly mended, ‘washed, dressed and tied with ribbons’, to be presented to the British public.28 James may well have the best formulation for why the myth of a unique, liberal, salvific and benign empire has been so profoundly damaging for Britain: ‘A myth that has lost all contact with reality is the direct source of immeasurable confusion, catastrophes and disasters.’29 As the sociologist and cultural historian Paul Gilroy puts it, despite the ‘continued citation of the anti-Nazi war’, it is in fact colonial history that provides a better explanatory context for contemporary British culture and its preoccupations – race, identity, multiculturalism, patriotism, religion, social cohesion, migration – providing ‘a store of unlikely connections’ and shaping political life.30 Yet, he points out, that story remains ‘marginal and largely unacknowledged
, surfacing only in the interests of nostalgia and melancholia’ in inflated imperial myths which then further entrench ‘deluded patterns of historical reflection and self-understanding’.31 For Gilroy, it is more than time for a ‘frank exposure to the grim and brutal details of my country’s colonial past’.32 I would add to this the need for Britons, particularly young Britons, to be reminded of a long tradition of antislavery and anticolonialism that illuminates the ways in which those forms of dissent overlapped and intertwined with resistance outside Britain, specifically that asserted by black and Asian peoples. Scholars have begun to undertake the work of excavating similar dissidence and lines of influence in other European imperial metropoles: in France, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Portugal and Spain, among others.33 Exciting work is also being done on the relationships between anticolonial movements across colonial and postcolonial contexts or the global South: Robbie Shilliam’s pioneering account of the ‘deep, global infrastructure of anti-colonial connectivity’ in his study of the relationship between African and Māori anticolonial struggles is exemplary here.34

  Some twenty years ago, the ‘Parekh report’ called for the writing of a new ‘national story’ in order to address difficult issues of national identity, culture, ethnicity and community relations.35 It is a call that has been heeded largely through an emphasis on Britishness as constituted by a ‘tolerance’ and an ‘inclusivity’ which enable minority communities to be welcomed and ‘integrated’ into the larger fold of national life. The majority or ‘host’ community (implicitly figured as white, Christian and English-speaking) is enjoined to affirm its commitment to tolerance; ‘tolerated’ minority communities are called upon to ‘integrate’ with these values while retaining, to the extent that they are not incompatible with ‘British values’ (a concept affirmed by Parekh), their own distinctive identities and beliefs. The story of anticolonialism in Britain as I have attempted to tell it undoes this pernicious binary by offering something like a contrapuntal reading – a reading which, in Edward Said’s words, is undertaken ‘with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts’.36 Such a reading rubs against not just the grain of imperial history but also the sort of unhelpful benign separatist liberalism which argues, ‘It makes far more sense to teach British children of South Asian or Afro-Caribbean background about the parts of the world where their families originated – the history of the Mughal Empire, or of Benin or Oyo, for example – than to teach them about Alfred and the cakes or Drake and the Armada.’37 Far from decentring Britain or enabling British ethnic minority communities to embrace ‘their’ history (why should all British children not know more about the Mughal Empire?), this form of liberal paternalism reinforces an unhelpful, to say the least, us-and-them model of social relations and a pernicious divide between imperial past and multicultural present. In fact, the two histories are profoundly connected, and it is precisely the British imperial project that provides a great deal of shared historical terrain in relation to both oppression and resistance. The pressure on non-white Britons – even those of the third or fourth generation – to ‘constantly have to justify their presence on these islands’ can only be lifted by a history that recognizes the processes of the past – imperialism – that account for their presence here.38

  In her trenchant jeremiad A Small Place, the Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid pauses to ask what her fellow islanders might gain if they opted to undertake a more searching examination of their own history:

  And might not knowing why they are the way they are, why they do the things they do, why they live the way they live and in the place they live, why the things that happened to them happened, lead these people to a different relationship with the world, a more demanding relationship, a relationship in which they are not victims all the time of every bad idea that flits across the mind of the world?39

  In the British Isles, the project of developing a more demanding relationship to history than is offered by prevalent island stories must go beyond the performative largesse of ‘including’ ethnic and cultural minorities in the national. What Adorno calls ‘seriously working upon the past’ is a task that has also to be taken on by Britain’s African, Caribbean and Asian communities.40 What might be the resonances for these communities of reflecting on a history of agency and resistance, of the colonized-in-struggle, in terms of developing a different relationship to both Britain and the world? Could a consideration of the influence of that struggle on British radical traditions and domestic dissent in turn reshape the ways in which those communities are regarded more widely? It could certainly be one way out of the tedious and formulaic position-taking enjoined upon us when imperial apologetics are periodically instigated by professional controversialists who invoke ‘an imagined history of Western endowments and free hand-outs: “Why don’t they appreciate us, after what we did for them?” ’41 What if, rather than discourses of ‘unappreciated magnanimity’, Britons had access to more textured and dialogical but honest stories of ideological and personal encounters in the crucible of empire? Slavery and empire shape Britain’s material and discursive inheritance; so, undoubtedly, do antislavery and anticolonialism.

  Without an understanding of this backstory in which there is, firstly, British dissent on the question of empire, which is, secondly, shaped by anticolonial resistance, it becomes easy for present-day apologists to caricature all critiques of the British imperial project as undertaken by ‘retrospective Jeremiahs denouncing the evils of a past colonialism’.42 The patently false argument that criticism of empire involves judging the past by today’s standards is given a free pass. Said himself suggests that there was ‘very little domestic resistance’ to European empire; but, as we have seen, there was certainly enough to constitute a distinct minority tradition available to those who sought a different form of engagement with non-European peoples.43 It is evident, for instance, that E. M. Forster’s great novel of India, which sought at once to think about the possibilities for friendship between Indian and Briton, and contemplated its impossibility in the face of imperialism, owes something of its dissident consciousness to the insurgent upheavals of its time.44 We need to build an archive of dissidence, opposition and criticism in relation to the British Empire – one which might serve to caution us against levelling and self-serving assumptions about the past in order that we might engage in a more demanding way with the present. In the spring of 2016, controversy erupted over the demand by student campaigners at Oxford that a statue of the buccaneering colonial racist Cecil Rhodes be removed from the frontage of Oriel College, Oxford. The young activists were widely denounced by establishment historians and from other predictable quarters such as the Daily Mail and the Telegraph. They were accused by, among others, the eminent classical historian Mary Beard of wishing to ‘whitewash’ history while still benefiting from its legacies. One of Beard’s charges was that the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaigners were neglectful of history, and that Rhodes was simply of his time. The idea – not being propagated, as it happens – that he was a ‘particularly dreadful lone racist wolf in the late 19th century is completely barking’, she declared.45 Rhodes was, of course, far from being a lone imperial ideologue. But was he so very completely endorsed in his time and by his peers? Here is another distinguished classicist writing in his memoirs about his return to Oxford where he had studied and taught for a number of years: ‘I cannot say that I saw with pleasure my old University made a pedestal for the statue of such a man as Rhodes.’46 Goldwin Smith, who wrote this, was not a revolutionary, but he had been a member of the Jamaica Committee, which had sought unsuccessfully to bring Governor Eyre to book. By the end of the nineteenth century, even a few literary works which had begun to ask troubling questions about the imperial project and white supremacy more broadly were well known: Joseph Conrad’s very different novels Almayer’s Folly, set in Dutch South East Asia, and The Heart
of Darkness, set in the Belgian Congo, and Olive Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, set in southern Africa. In the interwar period emerged Forster’s A Passage to India and George Orwell’s Burmese Days. Dissenters from the imperial status quo may not have carried the day, but they were no lone wolves either, as we have seen. These dissenters – and the insurgencies which inspired them – constitute a lineage that made its presence felt in the post-war period, and remain part of the genealogy towards which anti-war and anticolonial groups in Britain today can look back. Fenner Brockway and the Movement for Colonial Freedom, for instance, became deeply involved with the ultimately successful battle to end apartheid in South Africa, to which boycotts on the part of an international community were essential. Brockway was also the initiator, working together with ethnic-minority groups in Britain, of legislation to end racial discrimination in public places, successful only at the eighth attempt. In the face of disdainful dismissals and active silencing from various quarters of the establishment, it is these lines of resistance and genealogies of dissent that must continue to give heart and hope to those who look towards a more fully decolonized future for both Britain and the postcolonial world.