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Ed Webb

First rule of fight club: power concedes nothing without a struggle - The Correspondent - 0 views

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UK Britain colonialism history book empire movement dissidents

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Feb 20 - Cached
  • Priyamvada Gopal teaches in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, but this India-born academic is also so much more. A leading left-wing thinker, and public commentator in the United Kingdom, and a force to be reckoned with on Twitter, Gopal has spent years digging through old books and dusty papers in libraries and archives all over the world to produce Insurgent Empire: Anti-colonial Resistance and British Dissent, a book that, page after page, takes apart the idea that Britain “granted” freedom to the people enslaved by its empire. In it, she looks deeply into the historical record for examples of how people living under the most extreme forms of domination imagined freedom for themselves, how they fought for it, and how they won.
  • Immigration, race relations, global hotspots like Palestine, Kashmir and Iraq, and concepts such as free trade and foreign aid all emerged out of the crucible of empire. And they continue to shape so many lives both within and outside Britain.
  • As long as we live with capitalism as a global economic system, we haven’t left the age of empire behind us. Colonialism’s first and most important driving force was the search for profit, resources, and markets. That dynamic remains with us.
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  • Freedom was always contextual – never an absolute. That is the most striking discovery, really, that people defined freedom based on fairly specific local requirements.
  • For the Pan-African movements of the early 20th century,
  • the age of empire was not, in fact, all that long ago, despite public perception that it sits in the hoary past. Given that the end of formal colonisation for the most part wasn’t until the 1980s, we do actually live with the empire much closer to our present than we often assume.
  • I’ve never thought Britain’s radical traditions are anything but remarkable and inspiring, despite some of their occasional myopia around race, gender or sexuality. It also became clear to me while researching this book that while Britain’s liberal traditions are a mixed bag, some liberals were radicalised by witnessing or learning from anti-colonial struggle and became important allies. Learning how to make these alliances without necessarily gliding over differences was a task they had to undertake and that faces us as well today.
  • There’s this facile idea that “back in the day” people didn’t really have problems with, say, slavery or dispossession or massacres. That is simply untrue. It is an enormous retrospective condescension on our part. People both in and outside Britain challenged what they saw at the very moment as ethically dubious and politically suspect.
  • Colonialism’s damage was not restricted to the famines or the dispossession. It worked happily with native tyrants and indigenous structures of oppression in order to consolidate itself. When it left, it not only continued to work profitably with post-colonial elites but also left behind strong colonial states with repressive legislation put in place precisely to deal with dissent.
  • I also understand now that peaceful resistance is going to be very difficult. Because what is being marshalled against dissidents – that’s true in the US and also Britain – is immensely violent. You see that already in terms of how certain sections of Extinction Rebellion have been treated – criminalised, seen as extremists
  • The point is to start where you are, but build alliances and links internationally. That was the ultimate lesson of anti-colonial struggle.
  • power concedes nothing without a struggle.
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