Brandon R Byrd, an Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt, may well be of slave descent. He is certainly justified in believing that his ancestors contributed much to every aspect of the development of his Nation- including its political and juristic ideas. Priyamvada Gopal is not of slave descent. She only recently immigrated to the West. Her ancestors contributed to Hindu, not Western, culture. But she has repudiated that ancestral culture of hers. Ludicrously, she is trying to make out that her own deep deracination and antaganomia somehow created or contributed to its own entirely Western genesis. This is on a par with Idi Amin claiming to be the King of Scotland on the grounds that he had pissed off the Queen by deporting British Asians and thus must be greatly loved by the Scots who, I need hardly say, were being beaten and raped by the Duke of Edinburgh.
I believe Amin got some of his soldiers to play the bagpipes and march around in kilts so as to assert his claim to the Stone of Destiny. Gopal isn't yet claiming that the gown of the Oxford don is actually a type of Kanjeevaram Sari, or that God Save the King was originally a composition of M.S Subbalaxmi ,but, like Idi Amin, she has made herself obnoxious to a large cross-section of British people. Yet, in the BBC Comedy Series, 'Goodness Gracious Me', which aired before Gopal arrived in the UK, the stereotype of the elderly, uneducated. British Asian who claims that everything in the West was actually invented in India had already been squeezed dry of comic potential. On the other hand, it must be admitted that another South Indian 'scholar'- Gauri Vishvanathan- had made a career for herself in America, while Gopal was still an undergraduate in India, by egregiously claiming that English literature was first invented as an academic subject in India and then exported to the UK for some fell reason. This was cool because back in the Eighties, a lot of American tourists were under the impression that the Indians in the UK were the aboriginal inhabitants. They must live on Reservations and thus have the right to set up Casinos. Sadly, this meant that me and my friends- who had found that some London Casinos were the cheapest places to drink after hours and, what's more, provided a free buffet- were constantly being accosted by angry Mid-Westerners who thought we'd fixed the slot machines.
Byrd is unlikely to be quite so naive. Yet he writes of the Gopal's 'Insurgent Empire'-
The mythmaking began in 1808.
There was no myth. The Slave Trade was actually abolished.
Soon after the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson published the first history of the movement that had led to the ban on the trafficking of enslaved Africans within the British Empire. It was a testament to British benevolence. A tribute to Christian virtue. “The abolition of the Slave-trade took its rise, not from persons, who set up a cry for liberty when they were oppressors themselves,
African potentates who sold slaves did not demand the end of this cruel trade. Indeed, they were vocal in their opposition to the new Law. By contrast China and Japan had taken grave exception to Europeans shipping slaves from their territories across the seas even though they continued to practice slavery themselves. One reason both China and Japan became insular and sought to greatly restrict contact with European fleets was because, though oppressors themselves, they didn't want their people to be a permanent slave class in far off parts of the globe.
It is a fact that some people who were engaged in this loathsome trade became abolitionists purely because of the influence of the Christian religion. Some were indeed British. Moreover, apart from Christian principles, they also appealed to national notions of benevolence and fair play. Clarkson was not lying. He may have over-egged the cake somewhat, but there is no 'myth-making' here whatsoever. It is a fact that African communities which enslaved and sold Africans continued to do so into the Twentieth Century.
nor from persons who were led to it by ambition or a love of reputation among men,
Again, this is true. Wilberforce, though a good orator had not sought any high office. Arguably, his eccentricities and essentially conservative instincts would not have fitted him for any other role than the one he in fact occupied- viz. an evangelical Christian retaining a place in a political sphere whose morality and legitimacy he gravely doubted.
but where it was most desirable, namely, from the teachers of Christianity in those times,” Clarkson proclaimed.
Clarkson knew whereof he spoke. He had recruited Wilberforce for the good cause. His contemporaries considered Clarkson to have given an accurate enough account in this respect.
In his telling, the inspiration for abolitionism had risen naturally from the same people who had dominated the transatlantic slave trade during the preceding century and would maintain colonial slavery for another three decades.
It is a fact that some who regretted their involvement in this despicable trade turned to evangelical Christianity and thus, sometimes through the intervention of more erudite divines, like Clarkson, they gained abolitionist champions like Wilberforce.
As historian Christopher Leslie Brown argues, the value of a narrative of abolitionism that celebrated British virtue and ignored enslaved resistance was crystal clear to Britons of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras.
Because Africans wanted to sell Africans to White men or Arabs or anyone else who would pay. That's why the only narrative possible was that the British, for some reason of their own, would use their very powerful Navy to fuck you up if you tried to get into this line of work.
While colonial subjects in Great Britain's global empire and their allies in the metropole condemned the many manifestations of the violence and exploitation foundational to colonial rule,
Colonial subjects did no such thing unless they wanted to go to jail. One or two- like Dadhabhai Naoroji- could get away with it because they had plenty of money and could even get into Parliament.
Violence is foundational to any rule whatsoever. That's why it isn't safe to try to rape the Post Man or the clerk at the DMV. As for exploitation, babies exploit the fuck out of us. Condemning this sort of stuff is stoooopid.
British intellectuals recast imperialism as the natural outgrowth of their antislavery heritage.
No. Imperialism already existed. As part of 'the scramble for Africa', suppressing the slave trade was mentioned. But that was a late nineteenth century development and Britain's East African possessions were never particularly profitable. Germany certainly lost money on Tanganyika.
They insisted that the British Empire had once undermined its own economic self-interest by acting so charitably on behalf of enslaved and trafficked Africans in 1808 and declared that it now delivered civilization to the world's backward races. They wrote in the service of nation and empire, “almost,” as the Trinidadian scholar Eric Williams would note wryly, “as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.”
Williams was from the Caribbean and was reflecting on the sort of shite he was taught at school. But the Caribbean was a very small part of the British Empire though, no doubt, it had once been the most profitable part. However, by the time another brilliant Trinidadian scholar- V.S Naipaul- began publishing, it was clear that William's fundamental thesis was wrong. Empire existed because different tribes or ethnicities didn't get along with each other. For a slave trade to exist, it was enough for there to be no naval hegemon capable of suppressing the atrocious thing.
I should point out that Britain had not 'introduced Negro slavery'. Africans did that. Britain got involved in the slave trade so as to gain revenue to pay for the Navy that was vital to its own defense. Unlike Portugal, Britain had not brought 'negro' or Chinese or Indian or other slaves back to their own islands. But then Portugal itself had abolished slavery within its European territories during the second half of the eighteenth century.
By the mid-twentieth century, a teleology of slavery and empire was well established.
Nonsense! It could be argued that Empires turn warring tribes into nations and thus there is a teleology whereby Empires dissolve into Nation States. Similarly, it could be argued that slavery has a teleology whereby the descendants of slaves become a mobile working class with some differentiation in terms of work specialization. However the only 'teleology' linking slavery and empire would be the one whereby 'Slave dynasties' displace the Emperors who can no longer afford to pay off their Praetorian guard of barbarians.
Even as British politicians including Prime Minister Harold Macmillan recognized the inexorable tide of decolonization, they characterized that phenomenon as a mere repetition of “the processes which gave birth to the nation states of Europe.”
Which had to do with the collapse of Empires after they had fulfilled their historical mission of wielding warring tribes into Nations.
The British had stirred “national consciousness in peoples who have for centuries lived in dependence upon some other power.”
Because they were tribal or clannish or- like the Indians- hopelessly divided by Religion.
It was colonial rule that allowed Africans, an inferior people capable of imitation but not innovation, to catch up to a much earlier stage of European political development.
Sadly, the European view at that time was that Africans were capable of innovation- of a mischievous sort- but not Japanese style imitation. Indeed, that view may well persist to this day.
In this telling, decolonization was conservative rather than radical; a continuation, not a departure.
The fact is, a lot of such polities- Guyana, Zanzibar etc- lurched to the Left before slowly repenting 'innovations' of a wholly mischievous type. Communist China aint sponsoring that type of shit anymore though no doubt Venezuela is welcome to stew in its own juice.
It was the natural end of a natural process whose inevitable outcome—the postcolonial nation-state—was a European invention.
Because Nigeria was actually an African invention? Believe me, Africans aint stupid. They laugh heartily at academics who make foolish claims.
In her most recent book, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (2019), Priyamvada Gopal, professor of postcolonial studies in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, illuminates two intertwined aspects of British imperial history: colonial rebellion and metropolitan dissent.
Gopal is wholly ignorant. Her work is funny- at least for fellow South Indian Brahmins- precisely for that reason.
Building on the foundational work of black radical scholars such as Williams
who wasn't radical at all as Trinidad's Premier. Even VS Naipaul- a relative of whose had supported Williams at a crucial point- couldn't be too acerbic about him. Still, the fact is, Trinidad and Guyana would have been better off backing policies favorable to the conservative, rural, East Indian rather than pursue the chimera of 'Black Power' in some 'Socialist' format to gull an urban proletariat who soon turned to the drug cartels as being less essentially fucked in the head.
and C. L. R. James,
another West Indian Leftist from a wholly insignificant part of the world. These were 'Mimic Men' with a vengeance.
in conversation with contemporaries including Antoinette Burton,
a nice white lady who knows shit about shit
Gopal refuses that narrative in which colonialism is characterized as a self-correcting device and emancipation and decolonization are represented as gifts given to enslaved and colonized people or even as the ends of slavery and empire.
Gopal is Indian. The fact is Indian people paid the East India Company to provide public goods- Defense and Law and Order- but, being Indian, occasionally suggested that they should themselves receive money for letting Whitey do the heavy lifting. This culminated in the Nehruvian begging-bowl. India, despite being an agricultural country, demanded America feed it and- after the Chinese invasion- also defend it and wipe its bottom on a regular basis. It was only when the Americans tried to get India's support for their Vietnamese misadventure, that India did a defense deal with the Soviets (which involved paying cash for armaments) and permitted its farmers to grow more food. But this also sealed the doom of the Indian Leftist because whining about Whitey won't magically produce either food or pay for S-400 missiles. Thus Gopal has had to emigrate.
She recognizes subaltern resistance as constant and consequential—as central to self-liberation and the history of anticolonial politics and thought.
But everybody knew that the Indians could always have thrown out the Whites at any time from any region of the sub-continent. The only reason this did not happen was that the alternative was worse. The British Umpire didn't come cheap but, so long as the Indians were lazy and divided by Religion, they did represent value for money- at least while Britannica ruled the waves.
Part I of Insurgent Empire begins by reinterpreting the impact of what Gopal considers two exemplary crises of British empire: the Sepoy War of 1857
which Muslim aristocrats, like the Pataudis, referred to as 'Ghaddar'- treachery- and which they lamented as a disaster for Delhi
and the Morant Bay Rebellion.
Which had no effect whatsoever on India. Gandhi said Ruskin and Carlyle were his Gurus even though both, along with Dickens, were for the racist Governor Eyre. This was despite the fact that the foundations of the Indian National Congress were laid in London during the 1860's and Naoroji, Bonnerjee etc were very much au fait with the business.
In the spring of 1857, the British press published lurid accounts of the uprising of Indian rebels, including peasants and native soldiers (sepoys) in the army of the British East India Company. Those reports not only emphasized the “barbarism” of the rebels but also presented a gruesome picture of the nature and scale of British repression. Many Britons soon read eyewitness accounts of British troops binding accused Indian insurgents to the mouths of cannons and then blowing them to bits. For some Britons, the violently suppressed rebellion “presented itself as a text that necessarily asked for a different kind of reading” (44). Focusing on the Chartist leader Ernest Jones,
who influenced Marx. However, the Indians preferred his original view that such Mutinies (e.g Vellore) were retrograde. Why? The two main elements in it were Salafi Islam and Chitpavan type Hindutva- both of which are anathema to the Left.
Gopal argues that some white Britons identified the insurgency as a model for a resurgent, democratic struggle of English workers,
Jones did indeed do so. It is claimed that he wrote a poem urging the Sepoys to revolt, using his own blood as ink, while in prison. However, 'English workers'- for some strange reason- were not enthused by dusky mutineers who killed White women and children. Gopal's argument is utter shit.
whose socioeconomic needs were denied by the same capitalist interests that demanded the violence of imperial rule.
The Mutiny was crushed- mainly by Indian troops of various descriptions. Gopal argues that English workers wanted to emulate the Sepoys by killing the wives and kids of the Boss Class because...urm... they wanted to be blown out of the mouths of canons? The truth is Gen. Napier- conqueror of Sindh- had shown the 'physical force' Chartists his canons and told them bluntly that they didn't have any fucking physical force whatsoever.
She offers an important reframing of the development of solidarity.
There was no fucking solidarity! When the working man got the vote he'd prop up the Conservatives or the Liberal Unionists- who eventually merged with the Tories- because he had no fucking solidarity with the Irish- let alone the Indians or the Africans. Indeed, the second Indian to get into Parliament voted to keep out East European Jews. Why babble nonsense about solidarity at this late hour? Which British or American Trade Unionist is praising the Ayatollahs or demanding an alliance with North Korea?
For Gopal, the resistance of Indian insurgents was the catalyst for a praxis of solidarity in which
Meo tribesmen raided the insurgents who were soon divided along confessional lines. Then Scottish highlanders and jubilant Sikhs entered Delhi and killed and looted to their heart's content. The Nehrus had to flee Delhi though they had been vakils of John Company.
“the political and the affective were mutually constitutive”—where “common human feeling” bound together a political community that recognized difference but identified and based its struggle on points of shared concern (22, 79).
If this didn't happen in Delhi itself, how the fuck was it supposed to happen in London? The truth is, as Mayhew says, those beggars who previously disguised themselves as Indian 'lascars' got the shit kicked out of them and thus that species of beggar or crossing sweeper disappeared completely.
As Gopal notes, the Sepoy War did not, could not, produce anything close to an anti-imperial consensus in Britain,
or Delhi itself! Gopal did her first two degrees there. But they were in English- not Urdu- so she remained as ignorant as shit.
but subsequent, similar colonial uprisings ensured that questions about the imperial project remained at the forefront of British public consciousness. From India, Gopal turns to Morant Bay, Jamaica, where in October 1865 hundreds of men and women of African descent marched into the town square, initiating a conflict with the local militia.
They killed some White peeps. That was a really bad idea.
She explores how Britons understood the uprising, which spread across the parish of St Thomas-in-the-East before John Edward Eyre, the governor of Jamaica, declared martial law and British troops burned down the houses of peasants, flogged and summarily shot hundreds of presumed rebels, and executed many others.
Which is why Jamaica aint now as horrible a shithole as Haiti.
The execution of George William Gordon, a colored member of Jamaica's House of Assembly, takes center stage. Gopal shows how the execution of Gordon on charges of conspiracy and the investigation of the Jamaica Royal Commission into the causes of the Morant Bay Rebellion created opportunities for Afro-Jamaicans to air their grievances.
Those 'opportunities' already existed. What Gopal means is that the illegality of the rendition and summary execution of a landowner gave the Jamaicans a pretext for drawing attention to their grievances.
British newspapers printed the final letter from Gordon to his wife, in which he decried his undeserved death sentence and defended his recommendation that aggrieved Jamaican peasants “seek redress in a legitimate way” (96). The Jamaica Commission received letters from those peasants—from self-proclaimed “disobedient subjects,” who assured their would-be rulers that “it must be life or death between us before we should live in such a miserable life” (102).
This was happening just as Naoroji, Bonnerjee etc were setting up the London India Society. Why did it have zero impact on them? How is it that they didn't ensure that the kids back home got the message that Ruskin and Carlyle- who were raising money for Eyre's defense- were the bad guys here? Gandhi, it is true, was pretty stupid. But even he respected the shibboleths of the INC and tried to read a little Mazzini etc.
The answer, of course, is that the founders of the INC felt that Eyre had been sufficiently punished by dismissal. The Indians would continue to believe in Gladstone's benevolence for another twenty years. Indeed, they revered Morley (or, in Maharashtra, Harbhat Pendse) because they wanted Home Rule without any Labor code limiting working hours etc. The other point is that Indians know that the 'common law' is neither common knowledge nor commonly acknowledged in their own country. Martial Law must always be wholly unrestricted- i.e. extra-judicial killing is the final guarantee of the existence of a Judiciary. Thus Mill's reputation declined while Ruskin and Carlyle were vindicated.
Britons such as the labor activist Frederic Harrison took note.
Harrison was a barrister and a Positivist- a bit like Herbert Spenser- and did have an influence over Indian Law students. He too had previously been influenced by Ruskin and Carlyle.
A member of the Jamaica Committee, a group founded in opposition to Eyre's declaration of martial law in Jamaica, Harrison wrote in Martial Law: Six Letters to ‘The Daily News’, “We cannot make rules for negroes without baiting them like traps for Europeans.” He asked, “Whose turn, be it colony or citizen, might not come next?” He insisted, “Every citizen in the empire, black or white, is periled by the sanction of outrage on any other” (122–3).
Dadhabhai Naoroji certainly came to see Harrison as an ally and wanted him to come to Madras in 1903 to preside over an INC convention. However, Naoroji was also open to a more 'Socialist' avenue of progress as opposed to the old 'Self rule under British Paramountcy' banner. One reason for this was that Naoroji had been Dewan of Baroda at a time when the Resident had been poisoned and the Gaikwad deposed. In other words, the stark reality of the benighted hinterland moderated Naoroji's belief in Courts and Parliaments. Thus, he was prepared to countenance a thoroughgoing change in the 'mode of production'- i.e. land to the tiller, etc- and thus attended the Second International along with Rosa Luxemburg and so forth.
Gopal argues convincingly that Harrison's dissent transcended the mere recognition that colonial subjects were also people and should not suffer the extreme violence of the colonial state.
It was Chief Justice Cockburn, not Harrison, who had salience here. But what the Eyre controversy showed was that the Common Law was a House divided by the quid juris quid factum distinction. Essentially, the facts of the matter could be judged in consonance with whatever legal, or wholly illegal, principle was expedient. In other words, the Law can always says it forbids extra-judicial killing while actually inflicting extreme violence simply so as to remain the Law of the land.
Harrison was understood as drawing a parallel between combinations in restraint of trade- more particularly labor unions- and the grievances ventilated by the half-black planter, Gordon, and the Native Baptist preacher, Paul Borg, both of whom Eyre illegally executed. However, the fact remained that poor Blacks had killed some White people. Those who had instigated them had been illegally executed but no Jury would convict on that basis. The truth is Mill looked a fool. He had wasted political capital in what appeared a vindictive prosecution of a fucking Ozzie.
It is instead suggestive of a broader process in which the protests of Afro-Jamaicans helped radicalize British liberalism, encouraging among some British liberals more “racially inclusive and egalitarian conceptions of rights” (88).
The reverse happened. Chief Justice Cockburn and John Stuart Mill emerged with damaged reputations. The rough and ready Australian was vindicated. Liberals, it seemed, might get very excited about their own abstractions but Juries and Electorates would bring them back to earth with a bump. Embracing radical notions of 'inclusivity' would end up excluding them not just from power and influence but also any practical or intellectual skill or ability. They might as well become Professors of worthless shite for any good they might do.
In Chapters 3 and 4, Gopal gives special attention to the English writer Wilfrid Blunt
who, falling under Sir Richard Burton's influence, took to a priapic type of Orientalism and ended up dressing in Bedouin robes and fucking a lot of high society women. Apparently he left the horse-breeding side of things to his wife- a descendant of Byron. Believing himself destined to do for the Arabs what Byron had done for the Greeks, he certainly did play a part in undermining the Ottoman Caliphate and laying the groundwork for the Arab Revolt. But this was because he was a useful idiot of the India Office. Cromer depicts him as a romantic poetaster whose enthusiasm for Islam causes him to fan up the flames of Arab delusion in a manner precisely calculated to bring Egypt into bondage.
while analyzing how travel accelerated the development of a culture of British anti-imperialism.
though it unquestionably first accelerated the reverse and only became associated with the second after Brits decided that package holidays to Spain were preferable to National Service in the Tropics.
In 1881, Blunt went to Egypt, tasked with convincing the popular Egyptian leader Colonel Ahmad Urabi of the legitimacy of European rule over Egypt.
This is nonsense. Blunt had a horse breeding property in Egypt and knew Malet, the Consul General, from his own time as a diplomat. Malet and Colvin briefly used Blunt, who appeared on the spot by accident, in their negotiations with the Colonels. But it was not the case that any official in London had sent Blunt to Egypt. On the other hand, Blunt had social relationships with some influential Liberals, like John Morley. Furthermore, he was influenced by his wife's Arabic tutor, Sabunji- a Christian journalist who, quite understandably was opposed to the Caliphate though, later on, for financial reasons, he became its supporter- and thus Blunt, who was wholly ignorant of Arabs and Arabic, but who had some sort of Byronic fantasy of himself as a virile Bedouin liberator, had adopted Sabunji's anti-Ottoman cause as his own. It is also true that Gladstone-who was posing as an anti-Imperialist on his Midlothian campaign- was a correspondent of his. However, Blunt had been losing interest in Egypt and had been thinking of going to Yemen or the Hejaz. He wrote, "in... an [exalted] spirit I left London for Suez" in the autumn of 1881 persuaded... that 1 had at last a real mission in the East connected with the Arabian Caliphate" & it was more or less an accident that I found my sphere of activity at Cairo instead of Arabia itself as I had planned it." Thus it simply isn't true that 'Blunt went to Egypt, tasked with' anything at all by anybody at all. Rather he was making an annual trip to a warm climate (he had only one working lung) and had no plan or mission or task with respect to Urabi in his mind. Then his ship ran aground in the Canal and so Blunt decided to spend a few days seeing his friends in Cairo rather than waiting at Suez. Thus it is wholly false to say that Blunt was tasked to see Urabi. Gopal and Byrd are simply lying. The fact is European rule did not exist in Egypt. Blunt could not convince anybody of the legitimacy of something which did not exist. After the Anglo-Egyptian War, Blunt was banned from that country for a few years. Thus, he was not seen by the Arabs as a cunning British agent rather than a crazy English fool.
What was Blunt's actual role? The answer is that, as a result of a comical mix-up such that he accidentally came in touch with Sheikh Hajrasi of al-Azhar who was close to the Colonels (his own mentor Abduh was keeping a distance from the Army)- he became a 'useful idiot'- the pawn of two ambitious officials who were determined to increase British influence in Egypt and who would do so once Gambetta was out of office and the French were preoccupied, by using and then getting rid of Urabi who was himself a representative of the native Felaheen whose great enemy was the Turko-Circassian military caste. Blunt himself was under the influence of, Afghani's acolyte, Abduh while it was Sabunji who was putting Arabic words in his mouth and who was translating what he was being told with the result that Blunt continued to write utter nonsense about a future Islam so wholly under British tutelage such that the profit from the Hajj trade would accrue to England!
Blunt, having unwittingly led Urabi down the garden path did, to his credit, help him financially to fight a legal battle- but the fellow was still exiled because, after all, some Europeans were killed on his watch. Once again the message was clear. Don't kill Whitey if Whitey can really fuck you up seven times from Sunday coz u r shit at fighting.
It is thought that this supposed perfidy on the part of the British establishment towards the Egyptian Nationalists pushed Blunt down the road of sympathy with Irish and Indian and Arab revolutionaries.
On the other hand, since the French were facing problems with Islamists in their North African possessions and blaming Cairo, it was inevitable that Gladstone would intervene- and not just to keep a Trade deal with France in place. Indeed, England's initial alliance with Egypt had arisen out of fears of a Pan-Islamic 'Wahhabi' revolt.
He returned to London in the spring of 1882 convinced of the very cause he was meant to suppress.
This is sheer nonsense. Nobody expected him to suppress shit because he was just a horse-breeder with an aristocratic wife. On the other hand, his stupidity made him a 'useful idiot'. Blunt says that Malet and Colvin pretended to have Nationalist sympathies and used him to manipulate Urabi- whom they wanted out of the picture so as to increase their own power over the Khedive. Nobody in London thought of Blunt as a diplomat- he had left the service more than a decade previously after contracting an advantageous marriage.
As Gopal demonstrates, seeing the resistance to the beginning stages of the British occupation of Egypt
which was the direct result of Egypt's abject failure to conquer Ethiopia despite its superior armaments and plethora of European, and some American, mercenaries. The defeated Egyptian army officers revolted against the Khedive because ...urm... obviously, if Blacks, or Jews, beat you fair and square then it must be the Monarch's fault- right? Still, the new Khedive (his father having been deposed by the country's European creditors) tried to get Urabi on side. Thanks to the silly billy, Blunt, Malet and Colvin were able to get Urabi to revolt again after which, because the Egyptians were shit at fighting- the British occupation and 'veiled Protectorate' began
sparked in Blunt a sympathy with the cause of Egyptian anticolonialism. He came to “see himself as an Egyptian nationalist” at the height of the age of British high imperialism (153).
He says that, in 1881, Malet and Colvin were pretending to him that they too were exactly the same sort of 'Nationalists'. They just wanted Col. Urabi to agree to a smaller sum to bring the Army up to strength. But that strength was meager indeed. Only a fucking poet could have been stupid enough not to see through the chicanery.
While Insurgent Empire is concerned with how crises at the colonial margins sparked dissent at the metropolitan center
There was no fucking dissent whatsoever in London over either the Mutiny or Morant Bay or Urabi Pasha. Why? They were quickly and profitably dealt with in a manner which increased British security and prosperity. One or two poets or pedants may have had their noses put out of joint- but nobody gave a fuck about them.
and, in doing so, closed the imagined distance between the two, the book offers tantalizing glimpses into the politics of the colonized themselves.
No it doesn't. Gopal is as stupid as shit. The politics of the colonized is transparent to themselves because they can read Urdu or Arabic or whatever and a lot of the primary material is available on the web.
The plain fact is that the native Egyptians wanted the Turko-Circassians and Greeks and Italians and Armenians and other foreigners to just fuck the fuck off. That's what Nasser delivered. That's why Urabi is a hero. European Imperialism, like Ottoman Imperialism, was hated because it meant foreigners, Muslims or otherwise, making money in Egypt whereas the felaheen wanted to keep that money for themselves.
We don't need no 'tantalizing glimpses' into the mind-set of indigenous people anywhere who resent richer 'outsiders' and who fantasize about grabbing all their nice shiny things while kicking them in the pants and telling them to get lost.
It raises—even if its goal is not to answer—important questions about subaltern politics, which were as diverse as their origins.
No it does not. 'Subaltern politics' just means guys who burned down a police station or who ran amok because of high meat prices. Some stupid Marxists pretended that shit like that mattered coz there was gonna be a really big Revolution some day soon and then it would be discovered that those guys in Nicaragua who burned down a police station were actually, albeit in an occult manner, in solidarity with those other guys in Nova Scotia who protested against high meat prices. Anyway, what would happen next is that all the Capitalists would be punitively sodomized and then the World Revolution would take concrete shape as a big breasted woman who would titty wank all and sundry without regard to color and creed.
How do the political concerns of the mutineers of Chapter 1 compare to those of the Swadeshi movement, which, as covered in Chapter 4, emerged after the formation of the Indian National Congress and advocated for boycotts of British goods and the development of local industries in response to the British partition of Bengal?
The mutineers wanted lots of money. So did the guys who manufactured Indian textiles. The mutineers wanted to kill Whitey so as to get Whitey's money. The 'Swadesi' nutters wanted to displace goods made by Whitey with indigenous products so as to get money which previously went to Whitey.
Incidentally, the British partition of Bengal was a good thing. The Hindus realized this in 1947. That's why Bangladesh is now a separate country while Hindus remain, for the time being, the majority in West Bengal.
How do both compare and contrast with the politics of Jamaica's African and Afro-descendant populations?
They don't. Indians paid Whitey to stay. Whitey paid money to bring Africans to Jamaica.
Gopal references sources in which Jamaican estate owners complained of tenants who refused to pay rent because “the Queen had given them the place when she gave them freedom” (106). She refers to rebels who had held mass meetings where they implored their peers to petition the queen for land, on which they were prepared to pay their share of taxes. These rich sources offer profound insights into the ideas about subjecthood and governance held by Jamaica's African and Afro-descendant people.
Why would rebels implore 'their peers' to petition for stuff? Either there really is a rebellion, in which case the rebel demands that everybody in a similar situation to himself joins the rebellion, or else there is only a situation where some are wrongly labeled as rebels and they humbly beseech their own people to draft petitions showing they are no such thing by drawing attention to common, easily remediable, grievances.
They warrant further attention and additional readings as transcripts of rebellion and grassroots politics in which the colonial state appears as a site of belonging and an object of struggle.
Nonsense! We all understand that what was written then was written with a strategic motive. Poor people want land and money. They may pretend they will pay tax on that land or provide a service for that money. But this is merely pretense unless they get valuable public services in return for that tax payment or acknowledgment of paramountcy.
The voices of a later generation of black and Asian political actors possessed of a more definitive anticolonial politics are more pronounced in Part II of Insurgent Empire, where Gopal adeptly reinterprets the anticolonial internationalism that flourished between World War I and World War II. In Chapters 5 and 6, Gopal focuses on Shapurji Saklatvala, a native of Bombay who moved to London and became an MP, first for the Labour Party, then as a Communist.
He was related to the Tatas. However, he was elected as a Communist with Labor endorsement. However, there was an opportunistic aspect to this.
He was only the third Indian politician seated in the House of Commons.
All three were Parsis. Hindus weren't interested in getting into Parliament. They were not enthused by Sinha getting a seat in the House of Lords and wouldn't lift a finger to help get his son his hereditary right to sit there. The Lords claimed that Sinha's marriage was not valid because his parents weren't married in a Church. Thus his son was a bastard. Hindus thought this hilarious coz the guy was a very pious and scrupulous Brahmo.
In his own telling, Saklatvala was “one of the conquered and enslaved subject races” and the voice of the “British electors who sent me” to Parliament. He amplified growing, global critiques of empire as enslavement and promoted alliances between British labor and Indian nationalist movements, including as a member of the British section of the League against Imperialism.
This is stupid shit. The fact is, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff had told the War College that the British Army could not hold Ireland or Egypt or India. Indeed, it would be hard pressed to defeat a Bolshevik insurrection in England itself. That's why Afghanistan, Egypt and Ireland got independence in 1922. Turkey defeated the Allies. But Gandhi's unconditional surrender gave the Raj a twenty five year reprieve. The plain fact is that the Empire offered cheap defense and law & order- albeit at the price of some racial nastiness. But that nastiness only affected some Brown Sahibs whom everybody else hated. Incidentally, Sir John Simon's wife- an alcoholic- was a remorseless warrior against racism and oppression of any sort. But this wasn't why the Indians told Simon to fuck off back to Blighty.
He embraced a “dual but intertwined representational responsibility,” attempting as the House's unofficial “Member for India” to “forge a language of opposition to empire that would at once undo the pretences and prevarications of gradualist reformism and make clear that resistance to empire was in the interests of both the Indian and British working classes”
Indians considered him a nutcase. Sant Nihal Singh has left a compassionate portrait of a deeply silly man who, however, was shrewd enough to see that the Communist party would do more for him than the Liberals had done for Naoroji or the Tories had done for Bhownagree- i.e. give him a safe seat. The price he had to pay was to insist that Indian labor be paid at the same rate as British labor- i.e. prevent low wage competition- and thus protect White standards of living. Bhownagree, it will be remembered, similarly helped bar the door to poor Jewish refugees.
British Communists, of Indian heritage, like Saklatvala and the Palme Dutt brothers were no great threat to the Indian bourgeoisie. Clemens Dutt sent Phillip Spratt to India- this was the farcical Meerut conspiracy. But Spratt married a South Indian lady and later became quite Right Wing. My memory is that a son of his was a senior IPS officer.
Other “interpreters of insurgency” took similar actions (35). In a period of global anticolonial ferment, numerous activists and intellectuals from Africa, Asia, and the West Indies took up residence in London, where they pressed the anticolonial cause. Along with Saklatvala,
who had zero influence in India and was a sort of pensioner of the Tatas who, however, don't seem to have taken a snobbish attitude to his working class English wife
these outspoken radicals included Claude McKay, George Padmore, and C. L. R. James.
who had slave ancestry and thus had a genuine grievance. The Indians didn't. They paid Whitey to rule over them because their own people could not be trusted.
Taking advantage of democratic conventions that were offered in the metropole but routinely suppressed in the colonies, these men, along with equally influential female comrades like Amy Ashwood Garvey, who receive less attention in Insurgent Empire, introduced more incisive critiques of British nationalism and imperialism.
The trouble with 'incisive critiques' during periods when it is perfectly legal to be addressed as a fucking nignog is that they tend to fall rather flat. Things may have changed in that respect, but they may quite easily change back if Gopal type nutters keep running their mouths off.
In the years of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and the Spanish Civil War, as World War II loomed on the horizon, they would, for instance, hold a mirror up to the hypocrisies of Great Britain, which practiced its own form of “colonial fascism.”
Hilarious! We are speaking of a time when it was not considered impolite to refer to a colored man as a nigger to his face. If you wished to be courteous, you might address the chap as 'Professor' precisely because of the low status of pedagogues. At any rate, such was the import of a typical after-dinner anecdote I myself heard when young- from the lips of an emeritus Professor.
Their words and actions had a demonstrable effect.
No. Hitler and then Stalin's words and actions had a demonstrable effect. Suddenly, Whitey needed Blacks and Wogs and Kikes and so forth to secure their own military survival.
As Gopal establishes in Chapters 7–9, black radicals forged formidable ties with British leftists.
With the result that the leftists went to the wall rather like Corbynistas being sunk by their ties with 'woke' nutters like Gopal. BTW, is she a Chinese agent or merely a useful idiot? Her dad must have been RAW and the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
In turn, those British allies amplified the voices of black radicals, which clarified the intimate relationship between race and class.
Though nothing of the sort exists.
McKay published his work in the Workers’ Dreadnought, the leftist paper edited by the British suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst. Padmore appeared alongside other pan-Africanists in Negro, the anthology edited by Nancy Cunard. These works were evidence of a robust praxis of solidarity, Gopal shows.
But that praxis was a pissing in the wind. Why not mention Sir John Simon's alcoholic wife?
They emerged from the process of reverse tutelage and seeded collaborations to come.
Pedagogues may believe 'tutelage' matters. Everybody else thinks 'Professor' is a less offensive way of saying 'Nigger' or 'kike' or 'white trash' or whatever.
Pankhurst and Cunard were among the British leftists who would join James, Padmore, and their comrades in the International African Friends of Abyssinia.
Even after they discovered Haile Selassie owned plenty of slaves? Incidentally, Selassie got on great with the Dukes of Aosta- as did, his rival, Gugsa. Sadly, the genuine Commies got rid of the one and kept the other under house arrest.
The New Leader, the official newspaper of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), would amplify the anticolonial and anticapitalist politics of radicals such as Padmore and Jomo Kenyetta,
Kenyatta a 'radical'! Young Uhuru had plenty of Capitalist Aunties but nobody told him his daddy was anti-capitalist! Why? Because it simply wasn't true.
the activist who would become Kenya's first head of state.
And the daddy of its current head of state. His family is the richest in Kenya. Their net assets are estimated to be at the half billion mark. But they are patriots who won't take foreign money to sell out the country.
The ILP's politics were radicalized by the same demands for national independence later aired at the Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, England in 1945. Just before that historic event, the ILP showed that it had arrived at a dissenting position on the question of Britain's imperial nationalism; in a resolution passed by its National Council, it pledged “to establish social justice in Britain and national liberation in the Empire” (372).
The ILP disappeared from Parliament by 1948. Whatever its 'dissenting position' may have been, everybody agreed it was shit.
Insurgent Empire ends in the years after World War II, with an inexorable wave of decolonization precipitated by
Europe not having a pot to piss in and America and the Soviet Union rubbing this in their faces.
colonial rebellion but also supported by a small but influential cohort of British anti-imperialists.
Anti-imperialists only became influential when Imperialism ceased to be a paying proposition. Anyway, it was pricelessly funny to watch them pretend that some newly independent shithole wouldn't become a very much more horrible shithole within a decade though, no doubt, 'the great Liberator' would become a billionaire.
It brings the reader full circle, returning to two initial themes: the significance of travel from the metropole to the ostensible colonial margins and the “crises of conscience” caused by reports of counterinsurgency.
This sounds like the plot of 'Apocalypse Now'. What does it have to do with the end of Imperialism which was associated with a decline in the terms of trade for primary producers- i.e. the impossibility of the thing every paying for itself?
The fact is that we have always had travelers who write stupid shite. Nobody cares.
In Chapter 10, Gopal focuses on the “Mau Mau rebellion,” the uprising, primarily of Kikuyu people, that helped move Kenya towards independence from Great Britain.
National Service ended in 1960, though the thing had become politically untenable after Suez. Britain saw it was cheaper to just pay off the white farmers in Kenya. On the other hand, after independence, Kenyatta needed the British Army to fight the Somalis and put down mutineers etc. That's why Kenya became a paradise for the MNC.
She shows through the case of Fenner Brockway how the uprising helped radicalize some British observers.
Brockway was charged with sedition in 1915 and later spent a couple of months in jail. He was plenty radical before he got involved in 'Colonial' politics.
As Gopal elucidates through a close reading of Brockway's travel memoir African Journeys, the MP and member of the ILP
He had returned to Labor, after 20 years without a seat, in 1950. He'd later lose his Slough constituency because he was blamed for colored immigration.
arrived in Kenya amid the anticolonial insurgency “convinced of the need for both moderation and gradualism.” He witnessed the visceral forms of violence characteristic of colonial rule. He returned to London sympathetic to the oppositional use of violence in the cause of freedom, at the start of “his transformation … into a full-time British anticolonialist” (406).
Brockway was active in the India League from after the First war. He had always been an anti-colonialist. In 1947, he took the lead in organizing a Conference supporting independence for non sub-continental colonies
In 1954, Brockway became the founding president of the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF). His reports on British atrocities in Kenya earned him the nickname “Member for Africa” and helped transform the MCF into a “mass movement against imperialism” in Brockway's somewhat hyperbolic telling, that would, in fact, enjoy the support of almost a hundred MPs and about twenty British trade unions (423).
I think Suez was the game-changer. America's pulling the rug concentrated minds. Anyway, National Service had to go. Britain had no tradition of peace-time conscription. That's one reason old conshies like Fenner were tolerated.
Spanning the century from the Sepoy mutiny to the Mau Mau rebellion, Insurgent Empire succeeds in showing that Britain's colonized subjects not only struck for their own rights and freedoms
if that were really true, they could not have been colonized in the first place. The existence of an insurgency in an Empire shows that subjects had previously surrendered, they had not 'struck for', their rights and freedoms. Furthermore, if there is a peaceful handover of power both to territories were there was some small insurgency and those where there was nothing of the sort, then it must be the case that insurgency didn't matter in the slightest. Economic or geopolitical factors had made Imperialism unviable. Sadly, the political potential of 'insurgency' turned out to be wholly mischievous. Either the thing was suppressed and everything remained shitty or the thing prevailed and things got shittier yet.
but, through their resistance, also reshaped British intellectual and political culture.
Though genuine Brits deny we have any such thing. It was the Germans who drooled on about 'kultur'. We have pubs and clubs and football teams. True, times have changed. It is no longer cool to call a chap a nigger or to drive while blind drunk or to bathe only once a week. On the other hand, you can sodomize each other on the Northern Line without anybody raising an eyebrow.
Reading a robust “archive of dissidence, opposition and criticism in relation to the British Empire,” Gopal's work reverses the traditional pathways of imperial and intellectual history, in which ideas radiate from the metropole outwards, from Europe's colleges and cathedrals to the “non-Western” world (454).
Kenyatta's ideas, like those of Gandhi, radiated back to their homelands after their London sojourn. Gopal can show no evidence of the reverse happening. I can. Islam in Europe and America arose from the 'non-Western' world. Something similar could be said of Voodoo and Kung Fu and Yoga and Ayahuasca and Sushi and so forth.
It disrupts the most essential and essentialized categories of the post-Enlightenment world, including the very notions of “Western” and “European.”
It disrupts the distinction between truth and commonsense as opposed to stupid lies and paranoid fantasies.
As Gopal reveals, the values and ideals often acclaimed as the invention and inheritance of people who imagined themselves as white
as opposed to purple
truly emerge fully realized among the colonized and oppressed.
Very true. English is a Bantu language. Prince Charles does not understand that his Top Hat and Tail Coat were invented by Andaman Islanders. Westminster is modelled on the traditional legislatures of the Australian aborigines. Merchant Banking was invented by coolies. The Stock Exchange was first started by Mauritanian slaves. Cambridge University is but a pale shadow of an institution of higher learning set up by Cambodian rent-boys.
The language of colonial insurgents is baked into modern discourses of liberalism, liberty, and justice.
No it isn't. Critics of BoJo don't utter war-cries deriving from the Maji Maji rebellion.
Current understandings of freedom and equality owe as much to the peasants in Morant Bay as they do to the philosophers of the Enlightenment.
Thinks nobody at all. Why not suggest that Liberalism aspires to the condition of the peoples of Haiti? Come to think of it, Dr. Robert Love- a Bahamian educated in America- had to flee Haiti for Jamaica. He was an influence on Marcus Garvey and played a role in getting Black voters registered etc. But he owed nothing to Morant Bay. Bedwardism, it is true, did find a hero in Bogle, but Bedward ended in a lunatic asylum. No doubt, Gopal's 'current understanding of freedom and equality' is equally insane but it really has nothing to do with stuff that happened over a century ago in rural Jamaica.
In writing these truths, Gopal reminds us of what today's apologists for empire would have us forget: that, as Frantz Fanon argued, it was the task of the enslaved, the colonized, and their descendants to create the new man—to “invent a man in full”—whom Europe was wholly incapable of “achieving” or even imagining
But Fanon was mouthing stupid French shite while batting for the goons who ruined Algeria. What 'man in full' did he create? Anyway, Gopal is incapable of writing truths. Her genius is for uniting Hindus and Jews and the White Working Class against her own kind- i.e. elitist immigrants who teach worthless shite because they are stupid and paranoid.
