The British Empire, once the sun set on it, did not softly and suddenly vanish away like Lewis Carroll's Snark. Transmogrified into a million myths of heroism, decency and, among many of its former subjects and their descendants, of racism and brutality, it occupies more of our attention in Britain today than, arguably, it did during its actual existence. And yet, the average Briton remains quite uninformed on the history of the empire and particularly so on why and how it came to an end. Little of the academic research on imperial history travels beyond university campuses and the field, in Britain at least, seems less interested in sifting the arguments of anticolonial discourse than in establishing the incoherence of the imperial project or the irrelevance and self-interest of its critics.

Fortunately, however, historical research is not confined to departments of history, and Priyamvada Gopal, a literary scholar, has given us a deeply researched and politically sensitive study of anticolonial resistance across the British Empire that more than makes up for historians’ neglect. A massive book, ranging from the 1857 Indian “mutiny” to the recent Rhodes Must Fall movement and arguing that metropolitan critics of empire were influenced, often very significantly, by those who led, supported or were merely sympathetic to the anticolonial movements across the empire, Insurgent Empire is a notable contribution not only to imperial history but to the history of British political discourse. Take, for instance, Ernest Jones (1819–1869), the Chartist leader of the 1850s, whose attempt to resurrect British radicalism drew upon the “mutiny” of 1857 in India. Jones asserted that the afflictions of both the Indian and the British masses were caused by the same corrupt oligarchy and instead of condemning the Indian insurrection, British radicals should turn to it for inspiration. Soon, Jones was even calling for the “thorough, uncontrolled and unshackled independence of India” (69), declaring that the Indian people's struggle for freedom from British rule was every bit as justified as Poland's quest for freedom from Russia or Hungary's from Austria. That Jones regarded Indians to be as deserving of liberty as Europeans was astonishing in an age when even the staunchest liberal—Macaulay, for instance—was convinced that Indians would need years of British imperial tutelage before they could govern themselves. (Indeed, Jones was far in advance of Woodrow Wilson whose much-vaunted principle of self-determination applied only to European nations.)

Similar metropolitan-colonial connections were formed after the 1865 Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica and its brutal repression by Governor John Eyre. Although the all-star cast of Governor Eyre's British critics and supporters is familiar enough to historians, Gopal shows that there was a “third force”—represented, for example, by the Reynolds Newspaper—that insisted that the rebellion had been caused by the many injustices former slaves continued to suffer after emancipation and emphasized that the British working classes would face the same kind of repression if they rose in revolt against their ruling elites (114). Race, in short, did not trump class.

The story of British radical dissent from empire becomes more complex as the nineteenth century nears its end. In this part of Gopal's study, the most intriguing figure, without a doubt, is Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922), a member of the Tory gentry who turned, not least because of his friendly relations with Egyptian and Indian nationalists, into a radical critic of empire. Continuing into the twentieth century, Gopal explores how the ranks of anti-imperialists became ever more diverse and unpredictable. Instead of focusing on the usual suspects, she concentrates on the communist Shapurji Saklatvala (1874–1936, briefly MP for Battersea) and his effort to persuade the British people of what, in essence, the Reynolds Newspaper had argued in the 1860s: the British masses were not immune to the injustices perpetrated by their elites on dark-skinned foreigners. At the same time, Saklatvala warned Indians not to overgeneralize: their oppressors represented only one section of the West. The larger portion of Western populations, however, was every bit as dominated and dispossessed as colonial Indians.

The final chapters of the book revolve around some fascinating people—Nancy Cunard, Claude McKay, George Padmore, and Fenner Brockway—who learned from one another to transcend racial barriers and challenge the self-congratulatory idea that British imperialism, whatever its shortcomings, was poles apart from fascism. Gopal's argument is not about the moral or political superiority of these individuals but about the impact upon them of colonial events and personalities. This is not a book about stout, good-hearted British champions of liberty schooling colonials on the ineffable virtues of freedom; it is a study of the influence of colonial radicals on metropolitan debates, especially on the Left. That influence might have been limited, but it was far from insignificant, and Gopal's meticulously researched study is a major contribution to the historiography of the British Empire, as notable for its research as it is for its lucid, forceful prose.