Author(s): Priyamvada Gopal

History | India | Caribbean | Egypt | Kenya

Insurgent Empire recasts the histories of the major anticolonial struggles - the Indian Mutiny, the Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica, the Urabi Rebellion in Egypt, and the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya - and shows that Britain's colonial subjects were not merely victims of empire but also agents whose resistance both contributed to their own liberation and shaped British ideas about freedom. Book jacket.

Review: Gopal has calmly and authoritatively produced this impressive study of resistance against Empire, in the face of the kind of constant hostility that only serves to reminds us why her work is so urgent in the first place. We all owe her a debt. -- Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish)
an astonishing writer and thinker, one who is fearless in how she uses history to explain where we are now. Her work is essential to showing how empire and colonialism pervades every nook and cranny of the British establishment today and why we should all continue to speak truth to power, like she does every damn day. -- Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant
A superb study of anticolonial resistance -- Guardian
This impressive book challenges the assumptions that underpin many academic and journalistic understandings of the British empire; it restores the idea of resistance and dissent, placing anti-colonial struggle from the 1857 uprising in India, to Mau Mau in Kenya, at the heart of historical change. It argues convincingly that, when it did occur, British anti-colonialism in the metropole was forged through exposure to imperial insurgency. By doing so, it tackles the whole premise of British liberal imperial progress and benevolence which remains so pervasive to this day. It's also a hopeful book, indicating ways out of mythological cul-de-sacs. Erudite, but highly readable, this book will be definitely be on my reading lists for students. -- Yasmin Khan, Associate Professor of History at Kellogg College, Oxford
An outstanding contribution to our understanding of the struggles against the British empire -- Andrew Murray * Morning Star *
sets out to celebrate the political agency of colonised peoples, its importance in bringing an end to empire and the impact it had on metropolitan liberal and radical thinking. -- Matthew Reisz * Times Higher Education *
A tremendous book that deserves the widest possible readership ... one of the most important books on the British Empire of the last Decade. * Race & Class *
Punchy * Prospect *
Impressive in its scope and rigour...Insurgent Empire is an important challenge to those that would rather uncritically accept the myth of a benevolent imperial power than work to celebrate radicalism and resistance as part of a national history. * Hong Kong Review of Books *

Author Biography: Priyamvada Gopal is University Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and Fellow, Churchill College. She is the author of Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (2005) and The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration (2009).