Gopal ends her book where she began, in Oxford, with Margery Perham, the distinguished colonial expert, whose life journey is retold as a passage out of Africa, with Mau Mau as the turning point in her rejection of Britain’s imperial mission. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. Conversely, many historians would point to another dissenting tradition – the radical right – that has weaponised imperialism and given it a home in the modern Conservative party.

I expected a general overview of resistance to British colonialism, but the content is accurately described by the full title of the book: "Insurgent Empire: anticolonial resistance and British dissent" - the reaction of politicians in the British Isles is a major part of the content. From there, he made his way to India, witnessing a “white” mutiny as the Europeans of Calcutta vetoed the viceroy’s attempt to open up the courts to native Indian magistrates. Insurgent Empire shows how Britain's enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation.I would strongly recommend this to any general reader such as myself with a strong interest in the subject, willing to look up a few unfamiliar words in the dictionary. Sudhir Hazareesingh, TLS Books of the Year, 2019 Gopal has a sharp eye for forgotten characters and lost histories. View image in fullscreen The battle at Cawnpore (Kanpur) where a British garrison was wiped out during the Indian ‘mutiny’ of 1857. This is no alternative A-Z history of Britain’s inglorious empire, of the kind that has become fashionable recently.

Nowhere in the world has decolonisation come to fruition: instead, it is often found in an ‘arrested’ condition, a process that was initiated but then diverted, hijacked, or morphed into something else entirely. I have to admit I nearly gave up while reading the preface - I'm not used to reading historical works with an academic flavour so some of the language was unfamiliar, and some of the language quoted from other works was pretty opaque.Here Gopal tracks an arc of anticolonialism, stretching from the Harlem renaissance to the Ethiopian struggle, from West Africa to the West Indies. Gopal then goes on to provide some superb sketches of imperial “troublemakers” (to employ a term used many years ago by AJP Taylor). The Chartist Ernest Jones, for example, was inspired by Indian revolutionary action, seeing in it models for working-class agitation.