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Episode 3: Insurgent Empire and the Lost Voices in Colonialism with Dr. Priyamvada Gopal
711 Plays5 years ago
n this episode of Modern Myth, we begin to unravel the lesser known history of colony and the nuacned ways in which people occupied the British Imperial space. Talking with Cambridge Reader, Dr. Priyamvada Gopal about her new book Insurgent Empire, Tristan asks what voices are unaccounted for in traditional retellings of the British Empire and why does that have an effect on the modern narrative. The many modern myths of colony are outlined and discussed as well as what the future holds in terms of solidarity with the world.
Links
Insurgent Empire - Verso Books
Twitter : @priyamvadagopal
@anarchaeologist
Recommended
Transcript
Invocation and Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast now. I call upon my ancestors to judge me and my clan.
00:00:22
Speaker
But I'm taking up a story for the knowledge that we seek, broadening horizons into me. It's a modern myth, oh yeah. In this age of darkness, we will fight for truth and light. In this age of lies, we will rise.
00:00:44
Speaker
Now it's clear, misconception too healthy They told you what you want to hear Why can't you say that the truth or the search are free Expose this modern bill for me
Colonial Legacy and Untold Stories
00:01:32
Speaker
The subject of colonialism is a hot topic for pundits, historians and nationalists. Who can forget what the Romans did for us? Or the Victorians? But the legacy of empire is not a cheery tale. But nor is it an inevitable part of history.
00:01:55
Speaker
In fact, there are histories within the British Empire that, up until now, have remained untold. In this episode of Modern Myth, I speak with Dr. Prem Vada Gopal about her new book, Insurgent Empire, which examines the forgotten voices of resistance in the colonial project and how those voices influenced anti-imperial sentiment in the UK
Dr. Priyamvada Gopal on Colonialism and Resistance
00:02:29
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Modern Myth with me, the anarchologist Tristan. And today's show, I've got a very special guest, Dr. Prima Vada Gopal, who's a reader at the Faculty of English at Cambridge University. Her book, Insurgent Empire, is out now and it talks about colonialism and it talks about the histories and the resistances within colonialism.
00:02:55
Speaker
So I kind of wanted to talk today kind of about what decolonialism is as a broader project, but also talk about things like post-colonialism and what are the ways in which resistance during the time of British imperialism, how did that kind of feed into a broader narrative within countries that were under
00:03:23
Speaker
British rule, but also in the UK as well. So thank you again for coming on and speaking. Thank you for having me. I think a lot of people might know you from your online presence and you've written in several different magazines, you're a writer for several different magazines and columns and papers. How would you describe your kind of online presence?
00:03:55
Speaker
I suppose I tend to comment on current affairs of different kinds of things, but I try and bring the sensibility of
00:04:10
Speaker
a literary critic and a historian to those. So I try to situate things that I see in the present in relation to things that have happened in the past. So I've never really thought about my online presence as such, but I guess that is, I try to do in short form what I would do in long form writing otherwise.
00:04:37
Speaker
you've made certainly the right kind of enemies. I have a Daily Mail article that has dug through your online Twitter and revealed you to be a professor at Cambridge calling people odious and it's quite amusing. Why do you think
00:05:01
Speaker
Why do you think people have this? Why do you think you've encouraged that reaction from like the papers, like the Daily Mail? What do you think makes you an easy target?
Dr. Gopal's Online Presence and Challenges
00:05:11
Speaker
I think, to be honest, what makes me an easy target is a combination of the thing that I talk about that upsets them the most.
00:05:21
Speaker
or rather the things that I talk about, empire and race. And I think the fact that I am a woman and I am not white and I'm from a former colonial possession adds to the outrage. I mean, there are very few occasions on which I have to be odious or problematic. Sometimes I do talk about people who are racist or imperialist or white supremacist as
00:05:51
Speaker
let us say, odious. But I think that the issue isn't the fact that I used a particular pejorative term. I think what really bothers certain outlets, including the Daily Mail,
00:06:06
Speaker
is that you have someone who they expect ought to be grateful to Britain asking maybe difficult questions and saying critical things. And I think that that is what they find to be
00:06:25
Speaker
as they described me, trolling. So they've reduced everything that I've said and written to trolling. And they've charged me with not being civil. And that is a charge that is frequently made of women, people of color, working class people who I guess are seen as getting too big for their boots as being uppity and as speaking out of turn. And I think that's what really bothers them.
Civility and Silencing Discourse
00:06:54
Speaker
Civility is definitely weaponized in today's day and age to kind of silence people. It's quite shocking because there are people who say the most awful racist white supremacist things, but they do say it in a civil fashion and they just want a civil discourse, but they're questioning people's intelligence. They're literally saying that some people are inherently superior to others, but they're doing it in such a way
00:07:21
Speaker
then it's civil discourse. And I think this is fundamentally, as you pointed out, it's to do with maintaining this kind of power structure, which actually speaks to the wider problems that we encounter when we do talk about empire.
00:07:38
Speaker
Now, one of the parts of your wheelhouse is what can be referred to as decolonizing the academia, the institution.
00:07:53
Speaker
Decolonizing is something that, when I've read things by people, it's not something that you can make into a checklist of, if you do this, this, this, and this, done, you're decolonized. It's more about systemic changes. Would you mind explaining why decolonization isn't just something that can be just written out in a piece of paper, and if we do these, then that's it done? What's the problem?
00:08:24
Speaker
Well, for one thing, as you very rightly just pointed out, it's not a checklist. I think there is a larger tendency to collapse decolonization and diversity. And it sometimes is assumed that if you just sort of diversify your offerings and you offer women writers or gay writers or black writers, then you've decolonized your curriculum. Diversity is important. We live in our heterogeneous world. We live in plural societies.
00:08:54
Speaker
and multiple voices should be heard, whether it's in the public sphere or whether it's in the curriculum.
Understanding Decolonization
00:09:02
Speaker
But it's not the same thing as decolonization. The short answer to your question is that decolonization is about accepting that empire, the modern empire's European empires were a very big part of what shaped the globe
00:09:22
Speaker
as well.
00:09:35
Speaker
big colonial projects of the great European empires, the British Empire, which was the largest, the French Empire, and then on a smaller scale, the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Belgian empires, and German empires. So the world as we know it today is shaped by that imperial moment which unfolded from the 17th century onwards.
00:10:02
Speaker
And decolonization is, A, accepting that empire and colonialism were shaping forces in the world. The second is understanding that it had multifarious consequences for the world as we know it. And the third is to assess what consequences were damaging because they were very damaging. They involved a great deal of
00:10:27
Speaker
expropriation of land, displacement of people, ethnic cleansing, cultural, what some people would refer to as cultural genocide, certainly cultural violation, loss of traditions and customs and languages. So it's basically taking a reckoning of what the imperial project across the world entailed.
00:10:50
Speaker
I'm saying, okay, how are we shaped by this project? How have we become who we are? How does that shape our relationship to the world? How does that shape what we think we know? And how does that account for what we don't know? So it's a very challenging project of understanding our own formation, our own intellectual, personal and political formation as individuals, but also as a society.
00:11:20
Speaker
So the way I see it, decolonization isn't just about getting white people to feel bad. Often it's presented in the media as a kind of guilt project. It has nothing to do with guilt. Decolonization is something everyone has to be involved in. So whether you're in Britain, for instance, where I live and work right now, whether you're
00:11:40
Speaker
white British or whether you're Black or Asian British, you all have a relationship to the project of empire and we all have to undertake the project of understanding how we became who we are in part, in large part, as a consequence of the empire. So in the academic context, for instance, decolonization will involve not just diversity,
00:12:05
Speaker
but thinking about how universities got their money, how they were established, how the imperial project shaped certain kinds of disciplines. My own discipline, English literature, was directly a result of the colonial project. It was used to train colonial administrators who were going out to India to rule in the first instance.
00:12:28
Speaker
So thinking about that, thinking about how certain kinds of knowledge have been presented as Western or European when in fact they're not, so that even the sciences, which are often presented as a kind of European contribution to the world, that is simply not true. And we need to think about kind of different ways in which empire is not just in the past, but persists in the present and continues to shape knowledge and how we engage with knowledge.
00:12:58
Speaker
It's interesting you mentioned as well that it's not just about diversity, because that's something that I find the political class and its performance of political correctness almost uses as diversity is our strength. But what you're saying is decolonization is not this arbitrary definition of we just need to make more diversity and then that's okay. It's actually fundamentally changing those systems. Because many of these
00:13:27
Speaker
institutions, they are hundreds of years old. And I mean, yourself, you, you operate at Cambridge, Cambridge and Oxford are some of the oldest universities in the world. And a lot of their wealth comes from empire.
Global Reactions and Mixed Feedback
00:13:47
Speaker
So yeah,
00:13:48
Speaker
The thing is that when discussing this, a lot of the time, it's very much fodder for media outlets to kind of hook on to. How do you, because you're not just talked about in British media or Western media, you're actually, when I was doing my research, I actually found your name popping up all over the world.
00:14:14
Speaker
and I actually find some Indian newspapers that have quite a few articles on you. Just generally, what do you think the difference is in the reporting around the world? Have you ever noticed something different in how different places report on what you've said?
00:14:33
Speaker
Well, it's interesting that you mention India because when I said a few minutes ago that the consequences of empire are not just for white people to think about, but also Africans, Asians and others to think about, India is a very good example. In India, I've had two kinds of responses. One,
00:14:56
Speaker
very hostile, not so much directly from the media as from the online sphere, a great deal of hostility. And this is because in the Indian media and in the British media, I have written about Hindu fundamentalism. I have written about Indian Hindu nationalism and what is essentially a form of incipient Indian fascism.
00:15:25
Speaker
And this has annoyed, if you like, the equivalent of white supremacists in India. And ironically, of course, in certain strands of Indian nationalism, Hindu nationalism also draws on a sense of itself as being Aryan, also draws on roots that are not all that dissimilar from European Nazism or white supremacism.
00:15:49
Speaker
So often I get exactly the same levels of hostility in India as I get from white supremacists and polite racists in Britain or America, for instance. But my point here, what is interesting here is that in a sense, Hindu nationalism in India is another direct legacy and consequence of empire. One of the things that empire did was to introduce ideas of racial purity
00:16:19
Speaker
religious majoritarianism and present these as tied up with the project of being a nation. And Indian nationalism, ironically, in its most virulent form, which is the Hindu majoritarian form, is directly a consequence of the divide and rule project of empire in India. It is directly dependent on
00:16:47
Speaker
the same racial, religious, majoritarian ideas that empire put into play in South Asia, in Africa. And it, ironically, it conceives of itself as being
00:16:59
Speaker
indigenous, it conceives of itself as being anti-colonial, but it is in fact very much the child of empire in India. So it's not actually particularly surprising to me that I elicit great hostility from Hindu nationalists and white supremacists, because in some sense, they're drawing on the same resources, the same ideologies.
Defending the British Empire
00:17:25
Speaker
These kind of resources, one could lump together as almost like empire apologia and kind of cases for maybe why empire wasn't so bad. What are the main kind of arguments that people are making? Why do people feel a sin? What kind of things do people say when they talk about, well, the British Empire wasn't, it wasn't, imperialism wasn't that bad. What are people mostly saying?
00:17:52
Speaker
Well, there's a kind of well-traveled set of ideas that are peddled. Certainly in Britain, there is an obsession with the railways, an almost comic obsession with the railways, particularly, of course, in India. And so the railways are offered quite routinely as one of the great legacies of empire. And if you look at British television, nearly every week
00:18:22
Speaker
there is a program on the railways in one of the former colonies. Just last night, there was a program with Trevor Phillips, who has gone to India and is kind of doing a kind of a kind of a large nostalgia tour of Indian railways. But the railways, of course, standing in for what is often presented as the great legacy of empire, which is modernity technology,
00:18:50
Speaker
industry and development. And alongside these, we are told that the English language was a gift to the former colonies and the rule of law was a gift to the former colonies. And of course, most importantly, in a very, very curious convolution, we are told that the very freedom of colonies, the very fact that they became independent nations,
00:19:17
Speaker
was itself a British gift and that the whole point of colonialism was ultimately to free and to best own nationhood on colonies. So even the resistance to empire is presented as a great gift of empire. No, I find that very funny that it's almost like it's co-opted its own resistance.
00:19:40
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's very deliberate and it's a very long tradition in Britain, but also in other countries of the elites picking up energies from popular resistance and popular revolt and then presenting it as an initiative from above. So it's not unusual and it's not restricted to colonialism, but it's very noticeable in relation to the empire in particular.
00:20:06
Speaker
which is why when there was a rather controversial, if I put it in a mildest terms possible, there was a mildly controversial piece written called The Case for Colonialism. I'm sure you're familiar with it. Where at one of the discussion points or near the conclusion was the kind of idea of recolonization of countries.
00:20:34
Speaker
and I find it, I do not know how anybody could have that aspiration. What is going on? What is in the mind of somebody saying that?
00:20:47
Speaker
Look, in part, this is controversial list. I think that there is a sense of being able to get attention and media attention and shock value in making what are clearly off the wall claims and clearly not in any sense feasible. However, the underlying
00:21:10
Speaker
ideology there is to say that the status quo in the globe is actually desirable, where we have essentially countries that do much of the sweated labor, and then you have countries which are benefiting from the profit of that labor. So in a sense, to say we want to recolonize the world actually
00:21:34
Speaker
overrides the fact that much of the world is still in a colonial status quo, despite
00:21:41
Speaker
of formal independence, there is still a relationship where Western Europe and Northern America rule the roost, both culturally and economically, although that is, of course, slowly starting to change. And that we still have a situation where there is a global division of labor, where there are very large numbers of very poor people in labor, very poorly paid labor, provides the well-being
00:22:10
Speaker
of the populations of other countries. So in a way, this case for colonialism is really doing two things. One, it's sort of saying that the status quo is good and that we need more of it. And it's also saying that, in a sense, the racial hierarchy, which still structures the world,
00:22:32
Speaker
is desirable and we need more of it. So it's a kind of curious combination of clock value and actually endorsing the status quo and in a way pretending that we don't already have a situation where the empires of the 19th and 20th centuries haven't quite gone away and the world order that they put in place have never quite gone away either.
00:22:57
Speaker
It's quite interesting you say that because in one of my previous episodes when I talked about repatriation, I argued very heavily that despite things like independence, despite kind of the freedom that certain countries have been given, a lot of the material conquest has never been redressed. And for me personally, a part of that has to be the return of material culture.
00:23:23
Speaker
But like you said, there's actually still this big divide between the global north and the global south. And it's very, very disconcerting that people really want to keep it that way. Now, we've mentioned your book at the start there. This is not your first book. You've written a couple before.
00:23:46
Speaker
So could you tell us a little bit about why were you wanting to write Insurgent Empire? That is Luna there screaming in the background to go out. She has strong views on Empire.
00:24:03
Speaker
So I wrote it partly to challenge this narrative of bestowing gifts on the colonized. So yes, the railways, English language, etc. These were all, of course, incidentalists as Walter Rodney, the famous Diana.
00:24:20
Speaker
a campaigner once said the British didn't build railways so that Africans could go visit their friends. We know the railways were about ease of administration and also for carrying goods out of the country and transporting the colonial apparatus. But I specifically in the book wanted to
00:24:43
Speaker
challenge the idea that freedom was a fundamentally British idea or British value, as people might say today, and that it was then disseminated into colonial contexts by the benevolent imperial presence. What I show in the book is that, A, there was fierce resistance to empire at all times in many contexts,
00:25:10
Speaker
And secondly, that resistance impacted Britain. So in fact, the direction of giving was quite frequently in the other direction, so that it was the resistance of the colonies that impacted British dissenters on the question of empire. So to break this down again, I'm saying two or three things, related things. One, that there was always resistance.
00:25:38
Speaker
Secondly, this resistance is a very important part of the story of how colonies became free.
Colonial Resistance and British Dissenters
00:25:46
Speaker
But I'm also saying that in Britain, there was a dissenting tradition of criticising empire and that this dissenting tradition, which young people in Britain should have access to, so that they're not just given one story, that dissident tradition
00:26:03
Speaker
was inspired by resistance to and revolt against the British Empire. I think it's funny that it's almost like in addition to all the material things that were exported or extracted from empire, it seems that the concept of dissension and freedom was also kind of imported, like, you know, a little bit of, it seems it's quite interesting that that cultural mix also was happening.
00:26:33
Speaker
You talk a lot about, when you've been talking about this book, you've been talking about kind of some of the missing voices that are in, when talking about colonial history, what do you see as the missing voices specifically? Yeah, there are several missing voices. So I'm going to talk mainly about the British context, but this would not be untrue in other contexts as well.
00:26:59
Speaker
In Britain, there is almost no public critical discourse on empire. I mean, there's a lot of whining about how post-colonial guilt is everywhere, how no one is allowed to say anything. But in fact, there are very few voices that are publicly and prominently critical of empire.
00:27:21
Speaker
One of the arguments that is often made when people do criticize the empire or want to do what you were referring to earlier in terms of kind of reparative gestures, it is often said that that's anachronistic, that back in the day, everybody was pro-slavery or pro-empire. That's simply not true. So one of the things that I try to point out in the book is that just as we today don't agree on everything,
00:27:49
Speaker
Not everybody in the 19th or the 18th centuries agreed on everything. So there were dissident strands in Britain, just as there are just dissident strands in Britain today. So I think that it's quite important to recall those voices that not everybody back in the day was all about cheering the empire on. There is quite a distinct and important tradition of criticising empire, or certainly
00:28:17
Speaker
of criticizing aspects of empire or things that were done in the name of Britain in other parts of the globe. And I wanted to recover those voices.
00:28:28
Speaker
But I also wanted to recover the voices of those who influenced British dissidents. So that is the other line in the book. So there were people, many of whom are unknown or minor players who nonetheless whose voices come back to Britain in the form of counterinsurgency reports or in the form of newspaper reports or in pamphlets.
00:28:53
Speaker
And then there are major figures like C.L.R. James, Chaputu Saklatvala, George Patmore, who
00:29:03
Speaker
come to Britain and become what I call interpreters of insurgency. They let the wider British public know about the ways in which the empire is being resisted. And so these are voices that I also bring to the table. And what I'm trying to do there is to show the interaction between these voices and the voices of British dissidents.
00:29:29
Speaker
But it's very important to say that because I looked at certain kinds of written texts and I looked at certain kinds of documents, even in my book, there are missing voices. We don't really hear from bit players. We don't really hear from black women who very often were involved in insurgent movements, but they were not the people
00:29:56
Speaker
who were fronting the big campaigns. And so even in terms of the work that I've done, there are gaps. And I very much hope that people will join the wider project of recovering these voices and the interactions between these voices and dissident traditions in Britain and in other countries. But these are the two sets of voices and their interactions that I've tried to recover in the book.
00:30:23
Speaker
going to a specific
00:30:40
Speaker
what many people consider freedom to be just as like we talked about before where even though places gained independence they were still almost in a kind of colonial position. Your example that you've talked about Jamaica late 18th century could you expand a little bit about what you mean about different types of freedom?
00:31:02
Speaker
Yeah, so this is Jamaica 1865, so mid to late 19th century. But this is a very good example. And historians of Jamaica have have written about it. So it's not a new discovery as such. But it's a very important moment in talking about the relationship between rebellion in the colonies and British descent. So what happens in the post emancipation period is that when slaves are
00:31:32
Speaker
so-called, given their freedom, they are then expected to continue to work on the plantations as waged laborers.
00:31:46
Speaker
So the expectation is not that they are quote unquote freed and then left to their own devices to make their own life. I mean, scandalously, we know that all those slave owners who are compensated, slaves themselves were never given any form of compensation.
00:32:04
Speaker
reparations. So there they were freed, but with no means of making a living because the expectation was quite likely that they would continue to work for their former masters, except that they would now be given minimal wages. What is very interesting, when you look at the documents of the 1865 rebellion, which is a rebellion of freed slaves and their descendants, is that
00:32:30
Speaker
Very clearly, they do not wish to be waged laborers. Their understanding of freedom is not the freedom to sell your labor power to a capitalist and then become an employee and live like that for the rest of your life. Their understanding of freedom is that they would have their small plots of land
00:32:52
Speaker
which they would work and where they would become self-sustaining and independent. And the whole uprising in some sense is about this clash. So when you look at British counterinsurgency documents, you've got people in Britain saying, these people must be made to work.
00:33:15
Speaker
They're lazy, they're shiftless, they're rebellious, and they must be brought into the mercantile and capitalist economy. The rebellion has to be put down and the lesson taught. Whereas the rebels themselves are saying, sorry, we don't want to be wage laborers.
00:33:34
Speaker
in part because for them there isn't a sufficient distinction between their conditions when they were slaves and the conditions that they can expect when they become waged laborers. And in fact, we know that slavery was replaced by indenture, where Chinese and Indian laborers were brought to the former slave colonies. Work on the plantations in pretty abysmal conditions, though they were technically free.
00:34:00
Speaker
So I think what is interesting there for me is that there is a clash of ideas of freedom and it's very explicit even in the British debates on what should be done with the insurgents of Jamaica and what should be done in the aftermath of the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865. But there is a recognition in Britain that this is precisely about a clash of freedoms. One is the capitalist understanding that people are free to become wage laborers and they're free to consume
00:34:30
Speaker
with whatever money they do have. And the other is the understanding that working for planters or industrialists is not really a meaningful form of freedom. And it's very interesting to see British working class meetings, British working class newspapers repeat this, that the people in Jamaica who have rebelled, they are our brothers. And they are our brothers, even though they are black, because we share
00:34:59
Speaker
a cause. We share resistance to the same parties who are trying to get us to labor for their medics on exploitative terms. It's like international solidarity.
00:35:13
Speaker
It is. I talk about it as an early form of solidarity. The word that is used in this point in the 19th century is sympathy, but they use sympathy differently from the way in which we might use it today. It's not about pity or feeling bad for somebody, but it's about identifying a cause and feeling the same feelings as someone very far away from you.
00:35:38
Speaker
That's really such a fascinating part of history because it's lovely to be able to kind of get into that depth and detail with these kind of situations where in a normal sense, a lot of people like to kind of boil things down to a very kind of reduced state. They want just the basic facts. They want something they can figure out on a sheet of paper. I mean,
00:36:06
Speaker
we what a lot of people sometimes talk about is the kind of the death tallies of certain parts of empire and i think we need to i think i personally think that's not the best way to talk about uh empire and control because empire is not just britain there are there have been so many different uh forms of imperialism throughout history it's not just britain and um i think that
00:36:33
Speaker
It's almost like the end justifies the means when we get down to the numbers thing. So what do you think when people talk about the balance sheet, why do you think it's so
Critique of Empire's 'Balance Sheet' Approach
00:36:46
Speaker
appealing? And what can we do to kind of start undermining the use of that balance sheet to kind of say, well, I know it did some wrong, but it did some right as well.
00:36:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, the balance sheet is a model that doesn't really make sense in terms of how historical events took place. It's not as though people were saying, oh, fine, famine, three million die, but look railway. It gives a false impression of a planned economic project, which it was not. I mean, Empire was very much the search for resources, for labor, and for market.
00:37:28
Speaker
One thing I would say that although there have been empires throughout history, we shouldn't confuse different kinds of empires. One of the reasons that the modern empires, the modern European empires, and since the empires that are emerging are important, is that they're very tied up to capitalism.
00:37:54
Speaker
The empires of the 18th and 19th centuries have a certain presence in our lives today in ways that, for instance, the Mughal Empire or the Roman Empire don't or the Ottoman Empire don't really, to that extent. With the great European empires, including the British Empire, we are talking about empires that have an afterlife.
00:38:16
Speaker
that the system that they put into place, which is capitalism, is very much the system under which we all live today. So I would make one distinction between what we call empires very loosely and what we're looking at today in terms of colonialism, which is the present capitalism and the ways in which
00:38:37
Speaker
slavery, indenture and colonialism were tied up to capitalism. But this is exactly why a balance sheet doesn't make sense. A balance sheet is a very capitalist thing to do, right? So you at the end of the year, you take accounts and then you say, OK, you know, this was losses, this was profits.
00:38:53
Speaker
the overall balances this much. Now, first of all, it's not how empire was conducted. There was no kind of 100-year plan. But the other thing is that this is, in a way, an immoral exercise. I mean, how can you weigh up famines or genocide or land grabs or extermination against the railways and the English language? We're not comparing like
00:39:18
Speaker
And we're not saying, you know, oh, well, people were prepared to pay this price in order to get the railways. And anyway, things like the railways in the English language or the parliamentary system, these are side effects. You know, nobody set out to colonize in order to give people the English language or the railways. These were things that happened as a consequence of the search for profits, the search for markets.
00:39:44
Speaker
the search for cheap labor. And the thing is that the search for markets for cheap labor for profits is still very much with us today. So we haven't really broken.
00:39:54
Speaker
from the imperial dynamic. What has happened is that we have countries like India, Brazil, China now picking up that imperial gauntlet and in a way running with it. But the main logic of empire has never gone away. And I don't think that we can do balance sheets any more than we can say, well, you know, there was a fire in a clothing factory, but look,
00:40:18
Speaker
British fashion did really well this year. You're simply not comparing like with like and it doesn't make sense to compare them in this way. Yeah, definitely. I completely agree with that. I think it's, I mean, like I don't like balance sheets and tallies and everything, but Wikipedia does have a page on list of the famines in India under British colonial rule, and it's definitely more than one.
00:40:45
Speaker
which it's a horrendous list. And I'm just like, you know, somebody, you know, somebody who glosses over that for the sake of a railway, it's very glib, you know? But I don't... Well, one thing I wanted to say in relation to your comment about death tallies, you're quite right that, you know, we can't have death tallies as part of a balance sheet. At the same time, as you just pointed out, there has been no reckoning
00:41:13
Speaker
in Britain with the damage that Empire did. So we bang on all the time about the railways and the English language. But there is actually very, very little discussion about the massacres.
00:41:24
Speaker
the band grabs, the dispossession, the famines closer to home in Ireland. There has been an apology, but nothing more. There's been no kind of understanding of the consequences for countries and the relationship between Britain and Ireland today of that relationship. And you can see it's coming back to haunt us.
00:41:44
Speaker
in the form of Brexit. So I think that the lack of historical understanding, whether that takes the form of looking at death tollies or whether that takes a more sustained engagement, that lack of engagement is a real problem and it really afflicts the way in which everything from foreign policy to self-understanding is enacted today.
Northern Ireland's History Post-Brexit
00:42:05
Speaker
And it's just going to get, I mean, as I grew up in Northern Ireland, so I have discovered that people in England mostly have just discovered that Northern Ireland is a place, you know? They had no concept of it before.
00:42:23
Speaker
And coming to terms with that concept has actually spawned a lot of anger and viciousness and violence in the social and political realms. And I know that the future is going to be quite a difficult one when it comes to making that reckoning, but it's something that does need to happen.
00:42:44
Speaker
However, I'd like to focus now on what we can do in the future and what are the good ways that we can go forward? How can we support people like yourself writing about post-colonialism, writing about decolonialism? How best are we to kind of like help that along? What can we do? I wouldn't
00:43:10
Speaker
think about it in terms of help so much as saying, I think that a lot of us have to join cause. One historian wrote to me, and she said, this is the eminent historian Yasmin Khan at Oxford, and she said to me, your book is curiously hopeful. And I hadn't thought about it that way, but I think she's right. I mean, I think that I end the book with a call for all of us
00:43:39
Speaker
to do the work that it takes to think about our relationship to empire, to think about our relationship to each other, to understand whether one is thinking about, well, how did Northern Ireland come to be a separate entity from the Republic of Ireland? Which, as you say, many people in Britain have no idea how that happened. Whether we're thinking about India versus Pakistan, whether we're thinking about Nigerian politics,
00:44:08
Speaker
If we all start to think about how we became the way we are and how we relate to other people, and we understand that decolonization is a shared project, then I think that there is some hope for saying we are all going to make our reckoning with history.
Building Community in Decolonization Efforts
00:44:26
Speaker
And that reckoning with history is something that can influence how we think and act and vote today.
00:44:35
Speaker
So I would say that the best support is a sense of a community of people who are going to do the work of decolonization and engaging with the legacies of empire. And as I said, I'm very, very clear that this is work that has to be done by people across communities and across
00:44:56
Speaker
racial boundaries. Once we understand that there's a shared project of critical historical understanding, then I think we automatically have a community of support for work like I and others are doing, but also a community of support for activists on the ground, for journalists, for teachers, for progressive politicians. I think ultimately the work has got to be
00:45:24
Speaker
about community building and exactly what the people in the 19th century that I just mentioned were trying to do, which is create fellow feeling and solidarity. And I think that that would be a very, very good start.
00:45:37
Speaker
that's a fantastic place I think to end this and I really really think it's fantastic that we're talking here about expanding history, about reaching into those depths and bringing out the information that is there and just making available people and letting people then
00:45:56
Speaker
use that to kind of build connection and sympathy and, well, solidarity with people around the world. I think that's such an important message. So thank you again for coming and sitting, talking. If people want to find your book, Insurgent Empire, where can they go to find that?
Supporting Literature and Local Booksellers
00:46:20
Speaker
Well, it is available on the Verso website, V-E-R-S-O, and I believe it's on 40% discount at this exact moment. But I would also encourage people to support their local booksellers, to support independent bookshops, to support independent platforms, and show their solidarity with the book trade and booksellers in that way. So it is available in multiple books.
00:46:50
Speaker
now and certainly from the Verso website. And people interested in maybe actually following you online on Twitter, how can they find you? I am at Priyam Vada Gopal. I guess, yeah. Is that how it works? That's at Priyam Vada Gopal, that's right. They can find me and my trolls there. Oh, that's wonderful. That's such a great message to end on. Thank you so much again.
00:47:20
Speaker
Thank you Tristan, pleasure.
00:47:46
Speaker
Why can't you say that the truth wasn't afraid? Expose this honor, build for me!
00:48:20
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.