 The British Empire was at its height at the turn of the 20th century and commanded near universal support domestically. Anti-colonialism as a movement wouldn't gain strength for several decades, while the strongest voices for it, in both Britain and elsewhere, were generally disconnected. Not so says Priya Garapal in her book Insurgent Empire, Anti-colonial Resistance and British Descent. According to her, changing opinion about Britain's colonies at home and far away was far more than simply connected. In fact, it was often mutually constitutive and in dialogue. Priya, welcome to Navarra Media. Thank you, thanks for having me. I always get worried about those introductions saying the complete opposite of what somebody else has written about because then they might get angry. I think that was fine. Good. It was a real pleasure reading this book. I mean, how long did it take you to write? It's 450 pages of extensive, often sort of, you know, the data collection's phenomenal. It must have taken a really long time to compile. It took about six years from, well, five and a half years from start to finish. So, yes, a lot of time. And if you had to explain it to somebody and sort of as an elevator picture of 30 seconds, what would it be? It's a kind of a counter history of empire done through the question of resistance to empire and descent in Britain around the question of empire. So, it's really offering a kind of snapshot of the history of empire, but not from the point of view of agreement and hegemony and consensus, but from the point of view of descent and resistance and opposition to the empire. You start the book off with a few episodes of rebellion effectively. The first is what we call the Indian mutiny, but I think you refer to it a few times as, arguably, India's first war of national liberation. I don't know what the precise words are. No, I don't. I refer to it as having been referred to in India as the first war of independence. In fact, I think that that's an exaggeration and I think that that's probably very retrospective, but it was certainly one of the most significant early uprisings. But your point is it wasn't just purely constitutive of sort of military descent. It was a broader uprising across multiple states, across multiple classes. Can you sort of outline the importance of the Indian mutiny in 1857 and the impact it had on changing attitudes to empire in Britain? So, the most important thing to say about the 1857 uprising, as I would call it, is that it was more than a mutiny. It begins as a sepoy mutiny or a mutiny of foot soldiers in the British Indian Army, but it very quickly spreads into the civilian population and it spreads across large swathes of northern and central India. So, its importance is that it's not just soldierly rebellion as it was presented in Britain, but it actually became something like a white-scale war. And it's important, so I think lies in the fact that it was violent, but it also met with tremendous repression and that with a tremendous counterinsurgency. And it was one of the first major 19th century crises of rule for the British Empire. And as we know, of course, it ended the rule of the East India Company in India and the Crown took over rule and that's the kind of formal inauguration of the British Raj in India. It's important, I think, for dissenters because although there was a great deal of support for the Imperial Administration in India, there was a great deal of condemnation of what was described as the savagery of the rebels. There were also people, most famously, the Chartist Ernest Jones and the positivist Richard Congrief and a few others who actually took the opportunity to offer solidarity to those who were rebelling against the Empire as opposed to throwing their weight behind the Crown, behind the Empire. So I kind of regard it as an early moment of fomenting a degree of dissent in Britain around the question of Empire and you do get people coming out and saying that ordinary British people should identify with the rebelling Indians and not with the Crown and not with the Empire itself. How was that received by the sort of broader British public? The idea that somebody like Ernest Jones could say actually what these people are doing in South Asia is entirely legitimate. Well, what we know, I mean, what we know from the archives is that there were public meetings and there were a broadsheet and pamphlets which were kind of raising the issue of who was doing what in India and for whose benefit the Empire was. People were wrong to suggest that there was widespread dissent in Britain. For me, that moment is important because I think it signals the beginning of a tradition in Britain of dissent around the Empire. So it's not as though Ernest Jones has a huge following, it's not as though Richard Congreve has a huge following, but these are people who are trying to create ideological alternatives and political alternatives in the British public sphere. We know, for instance, that Ernest Jones attended public meetings along with British MPs criticising British rule in India, criticising the actions undertaken during the ferocious insurgency. So for me, the importance is not that it created widespread dissent around the Empire, but that it signals an early moment in a tradition of dissenting around the Empire in Britain. And the reason I think that's important is we're often told, oh, back in the day, everybody thought Empire was in India, back in the day, nobody had a problem with ferocious repression of insurgency. And I'm pointing out that that is simply not true, that for those who were often dissident bent, those who were often critical bent, there were people who were critical of the British Empire and what was being done in the name of British people in India and in other parts of the British Empire. And to what extent did people like Ernest Jones or Congreve try and show lines of continuity between the Indian uprising in 1857 and, for instance, the revolutions of 1848? Obviously, this was a very turbulent, politically volatile moment in Europe as well. Often, as I was reading what you've written, I think, goodness, of course, there's a great deal of kind of shared grievance here, antagonisms, change in media consumption habits and so on, global communications patterns. But I never viewed the Indian mutiny as something which was within a broader context of European uprisings. Was that something that they also tried to articulate? Yes, they did. I mean, as you say, 1848 is an important moment. 1857 is coming really at a time when the Tartist movement is running out of steam. And Ernest Jones is trying to revive the fortunes of dissident working class movements in Britain. And one of the interesting things about how he looks at the Indian uprising is that he looks at it as an inspirational moment. And instead of saying what we often hear people say that, you know, the Indians took inspiration from Britain, he actually reverses the lines of influence. And he kind of tries to, you know, inspire and chide his working class leadership. And look, the Indians are challenging capitalist exploitation. The Indians are challenging the exploitation and unjust taxation on peasants and workers. And we should be learning from them, because let us recall that the same people who are profiting from empire and the same people who are doing the oppression and the bloodshed in India are the same people who are oppressing the working classes in Britain. So he's trying to kind of revive the flagging fortunes. Because by 1857, the radical movements in Europe are on the flagging end. They're kind of running out of steam. They've been co-opted. They've been diffused. The energies are now moving in the direction of kind of liberal individualism and a certain kind of liberal hegemony. And he's trying to use the example of the Indian revolt as a kind of radical resource, a radical alternative, which might inspire people in Britain, you know, rather than the other way around. And speaking of there being an influence of ideas in Europe from, in this instance, India in South Asia, there was a significant influence exerted by Ernest Jones writing on the Indian uprising on Karl Marx and his understanding of colonialism and its relationship to capitalism. Can you briefly explain how that operated? Well, one thing that happens, I mean, there is, I think, some disagreement about the extent to which Marx might have been influenced by Jones. By 1857, Marx and Jones are no longer close. They're no longer friends. That said, the academic theory drapeau has argued that Marx's dispatches on 1857, which were serialized in the New York Tribune, were significantly influenced by Ernest Jones' take on the uprising. I'm not entirely certain that that is the case. What is striking, I think, about Marx's engagement with the uprising, as opposed to Jones. Marx is clearly excited by the possibilities of what is happening in India. He clearly sees it as significant, but he doesn't engage with it with these quite the same sense of the agency of the oppressed in India as Jones does. Jones is extremely clear that what is happening in India is very significant for working class movements in Britain and in Europe, and that it has to have a certain kind of inspirational significance. Marx is a little bit more, I would say, not detached, but he's not necessarily seeing it as having direct implications for working class movements in Europe or in Britain. He is less, I think, engaged with anti-colonialism per se at this moment than he would be later on in his career. That said, we do know that Marx and Engels were both invested in Charterism. They engaged with it. They were reading the people's paper. I think it's a question of speculation. To what extent did Jones in fact influence Marx, but my preliminary sense is that Marx's dispatches on the Indian rebellion are different in tone and tenor from Jones' much more direct and much more enthusiastic engagement. There's a second episode some years after the Indian uprising you talk about which is the Moran Bay rebellion at the centre of that gentleman called George William Gordon. Can you talk a little bit about that rebellion, Mr Gordon himself, what happened to him and the kind of consequence that had politically in Britain? So the 1865 Moran Bay uprising was less than 10 years after the Indian rebellion. The Indian rebellion, let us remember, had traumatic implications for the British public sphere. On the one hand there was the dissidents that I talk about, but there was also a great deal of self-pity, of a sense of empire under attack, a sense of British righteousness in India imperiled. When the Moran Bay rebellion happens in 1865, the British mainstream press is very quick to seize on the resonances between what happens in Moran Bay and what happens in India. But what happens in Moran Bay is of course on a much smaller scale, both geographically and in terms of time. Now this is a very, very different kind of rebellion from what happens in India. The Indian one is still quite inchoate and there are different interests playing and not necessarily all coherent in the Indian scene. In Moran Bay it's a very specific kind of rebellion. What we have are freed slaves. So if you think about emancipation, full emancipation takes place in 1838 and 25 years on, nearly 30 years on, those who are freed slaves and those who are descended from freed slaves find themselves in an economically very shabby and very precarious situation because although they've been emancipated from slavery, they have not been offered any way of really carving out a meaningful freedom for themselves. So in a sense what they're coming to a realization of is that emancipation has been a kind of freedom in name only and you have the planter class continuing of course and also continuing with the help of indentured labor. This is something we don't talk about in Britain very much. When slavery was entered, not only were slave owners compensated, they were given an alternative source of labor from India and China in the form of indentured labor. Freed Black communities were basically left to their own devices. Sorry, were you going to ask a question? Yeah, just for our audience because often they probably hear the term indentured labor so frequently, but can you just briefly explain the difference between indentured labor and slavery? Well indentured labor is technically free labor. Those who come as indentured labor are essentially signing documents which say that they will work off their passage and then they will return once they have made money and worked off their passage and paid their passage back. They will return to India or wherever as they choose, but in point of fact the wages are so pitiful and the living conditions are so bad that almost none of them is really able to earn enough money to pay their passage back let alone make make money from the endeavor. So what you have is technically free labor who have come to the Caribbean on their own device, off their own volition as opposed to slaves, but in fact find themselves in conditions which are not significantly economically different from that of slavery. I mean it is very important to stress that these are not slave. They have come there because they've signed documents saying they will come to the Caribbean and work foundations, but their conditions in fact end up being extremely poor which is why we have large communities of Indian and Chinese descent in the Caribbean islands today because they are the descendants of indentured labor who were not able to go back despite having thought that they would come back, make money, pay off their passage and return to their villages in due course. So you just briefly identified there this kind of what was quite explicitly overtly talked about as a continuation of a kind of not slavery but servitude by people in the West Indies from the 1830s through to the 1860s. They quite explicitly say without land they aren't free in a meaningful sense. This then culminates in this rebellion, the Morant Bay Rebellion and it's led by quite a remarkable gentleman isn't it? He's a mixed businessman, politician. Can you explain a little bit about the story of George William Gordon? I only heard him two days ago and I thought we're having this conversation about statues. My god we should have one to George William Gordon. Yes and of course they have statues to him in Jamaica itself. George William Gordon is an interesting figure. I'm not entirely sure that I would describe him as a leader but he was clearly an inspiration to those who rebelled. Now the short version of the rebellion is that these are descendants of freed slaves or freed slaves themselves in some cases demanding that their freedom be made meaningful and that they have the right to form small plots of land where they can be genuinely free and the most important thing I think about the rebellion is that they do not want to work as wage laborers on plantation. It is a kind of early and unambiguous refusal of mercantile capitalism. It is a refusal of work as a condition of freedom. What these rebels want is the right to just basically be self-sufficient to look after their own plots of land to make enough vegetables or products to sell to feed themselves and to make money for their families. They do not want to work for planters and wage labor is a condition that they explicitly compare to slavery which I think is very very interesting. Having undergone slavery they see nothing emancipatory about becoming wage labor. So the rebellion is really about the conditions in which the so-called freed slaves find themselves. George William Gordon is important because he's a kind of in-between figure. He is what was then known as a colored man. He had a white father and a black mother. He was educated. He had a white wife and he was a politician and a businessman. So this made him a kind of dangerous figure because on the one hand he wasn't a slave or descended directly from slaves. He was not destitute. He was not poor but he was also educated which meant that he had a voice in the Jamaican legislature that the ordinary rebels, the ordinary black peasantry did not. But what was also interesting about him is that where he might have thrown his lot behind the white owning classes because he belonged to the owning classes he in fact threw his lot behind the black peasantry and he practiced a form of Christianity which was practiced largely by black peasantry and he was very very explicit in throwing his political and cultural allegiances behind the black peasantry. So he became a kind of, I would say a kind of figure around whom organizing took place rather than someone who was necessarily a leader although he did address meetings, although he did help write petitions and he did participate in discussions around how the British crown should be petitioned. So he is a kind of very articulate figure who is not white but also not wholly black and therefore deeply threatening to the white colonial regime in Jamaica. And the consequence of this is that when the rebellion does take place and of course it is brutally crushed like every other rebellion he is arrested even though he was nowhere on scene he is at home he is sick with some kind of flu but he is arrested taken to Moranpe and after a very short and shambolic military trial a court martial he is hanged and his hanging when news reaches England of his hanging it creates enormous unease and it creates a huge controversy that came to be known as the Jamaica affair or the governor air controversy and it resulted in governor air being recalled from Jamaica brought back to England put on trial to a private prosecution because he wasn't prosecuted by the government and so we have the the Jamaica committee which consists of kind of various liberal figures of the day who are very uneasy about Gordon's execution were very uneasy about what happens in Jamaica in the name of the British people and decide that they will make an example of air and that controversy I talk about it in the book as an exemplary moment of the emergence of fault lines around empire those who are incredibly uneasy at what is being done in the name of the British people in the name of the empire yeah the people who are involved in the the Jamaica committee is kind of like a who's who at the time of of British liberalism you've got John Bright who I believe was the MP for Birmingham quite a critical figure in the second reform act you've got Charles Darwin John Stuart Mill Thomas Huxley Thomas Hughes Herbert Spencer I mean these are these are huge names in British public life going to bat from mixed race man who was they view as being illegally executed by by a very senior official I mean most people now if you were to say to the average person in the street this happened in the 1860s they probably wouldn't think that happened was that was that a surprise that such big names took that step was it a kind of break with the cultural status quo because these were people with serious cultural capital like I say going to bat for somebody thousands of miles away that they'd never met yes and it created a great deal of upset within the kind of British establishment because it actually broke friendships so on the one hand you have people like John Stuart Mill and John Bright on the side of Gordon who want to see air prosecuted on the other side you have people like Tinson the poet and Ruskin you know regarded as a great public intellectual who form what is known as the air committee who pay for air to defend himself who are furious with their friends with their liberal friends for going to bat for George Gordon one important thing is that it is not just the British establishment that or one side of the British establishment that is going to bat for Gordon what is really interesting and this is talked about I think a lot less in relation to the controversy in Britain there are working class meetings around what has happened to Gordon and you have different working class groups and newspapers like Reynolds newspaper and the beehive which also organize public meetings which are also attended by kind of liberal MPs radical MPs who also condemn what is happening what has happened in Jamaica in relation to George Gordon and what is interesting to me there is that where the liberals are not explicitly necessarily addressing race the working class meetings explicitly address the question of race and you have at various points and I detail this in the chapter you at various points you have people who are addressing the meeting saying you know the black man and the white working class man are oppressed by the same people and don't think that just because something happened to a black man far away in Jamaica they won't do it to you here just because you're white and I find it really interesting that there is a call a very explicit call to transracial solidarity because working people will be oppressed by the same formation whether in Jamaica or whether in Britain so where the liberals are often talking in very mealy-mouthed constitutional terms working class meetings are much more explicit about talking about oppression about talking about the consequences of letting the owning classes in Britain get away with the murder of of of George Gordon and of the consequences of not saying anything just because it was a man of color who was killed and not a white man and I found and I think that what's what's happening here is that with the with people like John Stuart Mill there is a slow process of trying to contain what happened and trying to address it through constitutional means whereas the working class meetings are as you might expect much more agitational and much more angry about what has happened in Jamaica in the name of of British people British working people yeah a lot of the a lot of the material that you sort of engage with in that part of the book for me it's probably the best part of the book because I was sort of multiple times out loud going wow that's incredible that's you know it's just inspiring and there were again quite explicit statements saying well the fact we have these colonies these possessions overseas isn't good for working people here because it means that you know our wages are effectively depressed which was again a quite remarkable thing to be articulating 150 years ago and Reynolds news I mean you've said that in the case of the sort of responses to the Indian mutiny and so on with the chart is that these weren't huge influences but Reynolds news and in the 1860s 1870s that had a a readership of a couple of hundred thousand I mean this was this was a this was now becoming a serious part of the national conversation wasn't it yes it was I mean I think more so than we give credit for I think quite often the literature that I look at in the book it's the kind of thing that's dismissed by mainstream historians as marginal but I think marginal is what you make marginal and I don't think that newspapers like Reynolds in its heyday the people's paper or even the beehive which is a trades union journal are to be dismissed as negligible I think what has happened is that they've been pushed out of frame of national but they are as you just said they're absolutely part of the national discussion and what it teaches us above all else as you just pointed out is that ideas which we would consider very contemporary have actually been around in the British public sphere for well over a century and and in fact things that we might think now were articulated as early as 1857 yeah particularly relevant in a context of Black Lives Matter and caused a transracial solidarity we're going to fast forward well multiple decades and again this is something which is really not well known in British history the first we would say BAME MP in British Parliament was a gentleman called I hope I don't kill his first name here Sapurji Sacklatt-Vala I knew this the second bit now he was not born in Britain he came here a little bit later in life he was elected as an MP for Bassie North I believe the first time in 1922 gets re-elected in 24 and stays till 29 so a reasonably long parliamentary career for somebody who for most of it was a member of the Communist Party can you sort of talk about this gentleman because a bit like you were talking about with George he had the ability to kind of speak to two audiences simultaneously when he said us he wasn't just referring to the British electorate the people that voted him put him into Westminster but also for people in South Asia yeah Sapurji Sacklatt-Vala is in fact believe it or not the third Indian MP there were two before him one was another by Naorogi who was a liberal and sorry he was the second and the first was Baunagri who was a Tory Sacklatt-Vala was the third he was also the third Parsee MP Yes it is interesting that the early sort of Asian politicians are all Indian Parsees the important thing about Sapurji Sacklatt-Vala is that he comes from a wealthy industrialist family in India but he is himself a poor relation so he didn't grow up with a whole lot of money but he has close connections with the Tata family and the interesting thing is that I believe that the descendants some of the descendants of the Sacklatt-Vala family some of Sapurji Sacklatt-Vala's descendants still work for the Tata so there is a kind of an odd connection to the industrialist family but this is if you like the radical and more less wealthy wing of that family Sacklatt-Vala comes to Britain under circumstances we're not entirely clear about we are led to believe that he might have been a bit too agitational for his family's comfort and so he gets shuffled off to Britain but he was also quite not well so he comes to Britain for medical treatment he meets an English woman he marries her they settle down they have a family he initially gets involved with the independent labour party it's a formation not very many people in Britain know about today but it was an independent formation that eventually merged into the labour party as we currently know it Sacklatt-Vala begins as an independent labour party member he gets increasingly involved in trade union activism and workers groups particularly international you know groups for international workers he then I think joins the communist party in 1919 and stands initially as a labour MP and then of course when labour pushes the communists out he then stands separately as a communist candidate now the thing about Sacklatt-Vala that is interesting is and I talk about him largely in these terms is that he's a kind of interpreter between India and Britain but he is an interpreter of kind of radical movements and he's trying to kind of in his own terms get the British working classes and the Indian working classes to forge common cause and it is quite remarkable to read his interventions in parliament they are they are fiery they are incredibly upfront and frank about the workings of the establishment not just in Britain but also the nationalist movement of India which has a very very strong Indian middle class and industrialist base so he's very critical and this is what makes him an interesting figure he's critical both of British colonialism and aspects of Indian nationalism even though he sees himself in one sense an Indian nationalist so I find his kind of his ability to look in two directions and try to make the two sides to each other particularly interesting and did he provoke a particularly reactionary response Sacklatt-Vala because you know this is a this is an Indian man representing primarily you know white seat yeah but it seems I mean it's kind of again it's one of those remarkable things we just talked about you know the the committee that was responding to the Moran Bay rebellion and so on I mean this seems in many ways even more remarkable you know if you told the average person 100 years ago a person born in India was elected as an MP by on almost universally wirelectric they they simply wouldn't have believed you was there was there any sort of racialized kickback or do we have to actually look to more sort of recent decades to find that there is certainly some racialized kickback we certainly have evidence of kind of racialized comments in parliament coming as you might imagine largely from the Tory benches there's this snide remarks there are thinly veiled racist smears I have seen letters in his papers which are preserved in the British Library which we would compare to you know present day hate mail that MPs black MPs and MPs of color get so it's not entirely absent but equally I think we should as you just said note that it is not true that 100 years ago everybody was okay with racism or that everybody was racist he was as you say elected in a award with significant numbers of white people although it you know you did have he was assisted for instance by Arnold Ward who was a black politician so there were also immigrant communities and communities of color in in battle see but what you do see is evidence that it isn't always the case that there was back in the day unrelenting racism which would have made it impossible for a black or Asian person to be an MP in Britain I don't actually see any evidence that's a club Wallace position was significantly different from what MPs of color today have to deal with which is a mixture of a white voter base and you know predictable hate mail you do not get a picture of unrelenting racism I've seen letters from white constituents which are deeply grateful which regard him as a wonderful constituency MP so again I think the picture you know 100 years ago is as complex and and diverse as we see it today I think as well what really presses the home for me is the fact he was a communist yeah you know again it's just a completely sort of dissenting politics the status quo a person of color and and you know the reaction like you say wasn't that different to what we see today for actually quite vanilla social democratic politicians in many ways you think if somebody with that who was that politically conspicuous was on the scene today as an MP you know if anything I think it perhaps get worse treatment or I'm not familiar with the the correspondence he was receiving I mean one thing of course it is worth noting is that we are talking the 1920s when you know the Bolshevik revolutions still has it's it's still covered in in glory and it still has a kind of very profound effect across different political formations but you also start to see of course the Labour Party's anti-communism kick in very quickly Saklat Mala even when he's serving as an as a as a Labour MP will frequently turn around and make critical comments about his own ventures about about his fellow Labour MPs but you do see that the discussion of working class rights the discussion of revolutionary action the discussion of socialism as an idea actually is in a way less tainted and less easily dismissed and sneered at than it is today it still has in a sense the the glory of the heady days of of 1918 1917 1918 and and that I think Saklat Mala is able to parlay in in good ways at least in the early part of his career I'd like to talk a little bit again moving these are many many decades ahead Labour MPs who really situate themselves in opposition to Britain's continued presence in in Kenya in the 1950s I mean the historic one for me is obviously Barbara Castle can you can you talk a little bit about the responses to what was at the time called the MAM uprising after after really 1950 all the way through to 1960 I think Kenya gets independence from 1963 what was that like because obviously it was a very very bloody uprising it wasn't as bad as as the French and Algeria but you know we know perhaps more than a million people were arbitrarily detained perhaps more than a hundred thousand people died the numbers are very uncertain because it turns out a British colonial office destroyed them in 1963 so for a Labour MP to be championing a cause which was as violent I mean there's no other word for it on both sides obviously the repression was far worse from the British that was a very brave decision to make for a Labour MP in the 1950s wasn't it yes I mean you know what we have in Labour and I think we will recognise this formation in the present day as well you have Labour MPs who situate themselves in a critical side in an oppositional side of the Labour Party and the two names that spring out in relation to Kenya are Barbara Castle as you mentioned and Fenna Brockway. Fenna Brockway like Sakalatvala was a member of the independent Labour Party before it merged into the Labour Party and Brockway is very interesting because he's not a communist he is not really what we might regard as a radical he is he's definitely left of centre he's definitely to the left of the Labour Party's centre now Brockway and Barbara Castle along with a number of dissident MPs in the Labour Party situates themselves as critics of what is going on in Kenya. Brockway had long-term ties with different African leaders he was of course close to Nehru and Gandhi but he was also friends with Nukrumah and Kenyatta and what you start to see in the immediate post-war period is after India gains independence in 1947 Brockway turns his attention to what is happening in East Africa or what becomes present day Kenya and Uganda and Tanzania. In the case of the Mao Mao movement what is important I think when it comes to both Brockway and Castle neither of them will ambitiously throw in their lot with the insurgency they will never say for instance that the Mao Mao are justified or that the Mao Mao were not violent they repeatedly will talk about the brutalities and even use the word savagery in relation to Mao Mao but they will really as a consequence of travel in Kenya Brockway makes two visits to Kenya Castle of course is sent there by the mirror newspaper to investigate what is going on in the British detention camps now while neither of them will ambitiously throw in their lot with the insurgency both are very very clear that the ferocious counterinsurgency that takes place during the emergency years in the early 1950s was unacceptable and that what was being done in Britain's name and using Mao Mao as an excuse was unacceptable and this again strikes me as incredibly brave because even today you will get people are talking about Mao Mao but not really saying very much about both the really deeply oppressive nature of the white settler presence in Kenya the fact that Kenyan rebels across the political spectrum whether they were Mao Mao or whether they consider themselves more moderate very few people will say they had just cause and Brockway does say they have just cause that what is being done in Kenya is unacceptable and what was being done in the name of the counterinsurgency was also unacceptable Barbara Castle is quite amazing she goes there not as an as a parliamentary MP but she goes there as a journalist sent there paid for by the mirror and she undertakes a series of investigative reports which come back and cause controversy back in Britain because she does report on the naked racism and the brutal violence of the counterinsurgency the jailing the torture the detentions the punitive tactics and this then results in the Kenya situation becoming a big source of conflict in parliament and reading those parliamentary debates are really fascinating because you do have the emergence of parliamentary criticism of British imperial rule in Kenya and that is coming at the instigation of people like Brockway Castle and their allies in the labour party with Barbara Castle you have quite clear articulations of of Britain's colonial apparatus in Kenya is similar to that of Nazi Germany I mean she says that those are her those are her words a few decades earlier you have again quite explicit comparisons made by people like George Padmore Padmore CLR James and so on about the kind of apparatus that's being used in Ethiopia by the Italians Britain and its colonies what's then used by the Germans in the Second World War that they basically see these as on a on a on a spectrum you know of of colonial kind of settler violence and white supremacist violence what why have we lost that tradition I mean if you were to go out if you were to go on the television or you know good morning Britain and talk to Piers Morgan and you say well actually you know a parliamentarian quite quite senior one actually at the time quite explicitly drew connections between you know Nazi Germany and our behaviour in Kenya 10 15 years later you'd be shouted down why do you think we've lost sight of that yes I mean you don't have to even look at good morning Britain I think on channel four a few weeks ago someone raised I forget who the speaker was but someone raised the relationship between fascism and colonialism very quickly shot down by the presenter it's not something you can say in in the British public sphere at all today that is of course a consequence of the very successful binary between bad fascists that is Germany and Italy and the good allies whose colonial track record we don't talk about in the 1930s and going into the period in the late 1940s early 90s this is not at all unusual on colonial left people like fennel brockway who edits the new leader which is a kind of independent labour party newspaper are regularly hosting writers like clr james and george padmore and george padmore writes I would say probably 10 articles all talking about the links between fascist techniques in europe and colonial techniques in africa and he's you know and he will meticulously draw out comparisons between detention camps punitive regimes racist laws you know etc etc so actually we do have a moment in Britain in the 30s 40s when these comparisons were not outlandish where in fact thinking about colonialism thinking about fascism not making necessarily a stark binary between the good allies and the bad axis was not taken for granted so when Barbara Castle goes to Kenya and sees what is operative there the comparison with concentration camps i think comes quite naturally to her what are you seeing you're seeing a racialized population put into barbed wire camps in terrible conditions and dying in very large numbers either they're executed or they die of starvation or torture so for her that comparison i think was kind of self-evident in a way that for us now because now we are not engaging with the terrain of history we are now squarely in the terrain of mythology and that mythology insists that we keep this kind of good bad binary going and frankly don't talk about the empire so yeah i mean the kind of fascism and colonialism and the relationship between the two would have been something very very natural for critics of the empire to talk about in the in the 40s to what extent do you think that that could change obviously with the kind of political moment which surrounds black lives matter and to what extent do you think it's possible to begin to articulate the connections between colonialism and fascism and how they're constituted historically through hatred of the other but particularly hatred of sort of the non-european or the non-white and it seems like it could be relatively easy to do because you know i was i was reading a little bit about the sort of the extent the attempted extermination of the herero tribe by by imperial Germany in the early 1900s and again it's it's it's just so obviously a sort of an antecedent kind of technological military political moment to what they then try with the final solution in Europe between 1930 and 1945 that it again it's kind of seems kind of implausible to not draw that connection do you do you think we now have an opportunity to do that and i saw you tweet the other day i think you said i want to leave britain and the book is actually sort of like an incomium to the history of british descent and it's actually quite optimistic in its own way so i found that an interesting point point to make what do you think the chances of of of taking the present political moment and injecting it with that historical knowledge okay well there are two separate questions i mean let me just kind of contextualize my tweet i mean it was a moment of exasperation and i i think no but it for me it's quite uh poignant because my home country uh india does have a fascist regime uh in uh in power people don't see the connections but in fact to anybody who has been studying india for the and indian history for the last 70 years understands quite clearly that we have descendants of explicitly fascist formations in power in india today so if i left britain my choice would be to go back to a place where fascists are in power um so yes that that that tweet raises the question of where would one go in in in the present conjuncture which is grim you know whichever direction you look here do we have an opportunity now in britain yes we have an opportunity and yes i wrote the book as an incomium to a different kind of thought tradition a different kind of access but i'm afraid we're going to need a lot more honesty in public discourse in britain which is deeply dishonest we are going to need much more courage across the political spectrum you engage with the complexities of empire and its relationship to fascism i should say here that i i would you know despite having talked about the connections they are uh nazi germany and the british empire are very very specific historical formations that have their own specific operations uh what was interesting to me about people like james and pat morris that they were fiercely anti fascist they gave no quarter to italy or germany um and they were absolutely behind anti fascist organizing but they nonetheless drew the connections between fascism and some of the operations of the phish empire it isn't like they were giving quarter to fascists by making these comparisons i think today there is perhaps more fear that if we talk about the connections then we're somehow giving fascism a free pass and i would say that no one doesn't give fascism a free pass but nor does one allow imperialism and its descendants a free pass i think that that conversation is being opened up by blm um i'm a bit nervous that we will go back to kind of simplistic uh standpoints uh rather than have the difficult discussion and i do i do think that in in in the 1930s and 40s more difficult discussions were happening certainly in progressive and liberal quarters than we seem to be prepared to have now i hope it's an opportunity i think it's been given to us in a sense uh it's that the the door has been opened but i think we have to grab it and we have to grab it in a sustained way um because we are in it for the long haul if we want to change the conversation this is the final question um to what extent do you think colonialism explains a number of aspects of of contemporary british culture uh one example of this is um you know that i remember the whole shoot to kill argument around terrorism and again that was that was a you know that was a sequence of words used in regards to mama uprising or the malayan emergency shoot to kill um are we immersed in terms of british culture we are really still immersed in the legacy of colonialism here in british yeah yeah there's no there's no doubt about that so even our discussions about policing um when you had uh you know lots of brits and lots of kind of very right on britzing where you can't compare us to america uh the point is well actually we can not only because uh you know there are uh there are policing uh there's police violence here in britain in the present day because policing and counterinsurgency as we know it and of course the two things are completely wrapped up in the colonial context policing was counterinsurgency counterinsurgency was policing our british policing is deeply tied up with colonial policing and until we kind of reckon with that legacy in which it is in fact perfectly normal to profile uh black people and brown people and muslims and you know muslims or you know whatever religion uh might might be targeted in in a particular colony um you know profiling surveillance uh shoot to kill detention uh you know versions of torture or physical uh uh you know um violence these are all coming to us very directly from the colonial context and until we engage with that legacy uh there is probably not going to be much uh radical change even with multiculturalism you you raise this in the book you know the idea that you negotiate community relations with particular elevated individuals who are representative of obviously much larger heterogeneous heterogeneous bodies uh you know that's how blair and new labor did you know multicultural um sort of formation social sort of the building of social bonds again that comes out of sort of colonial era as well doesn't it it absolutely does i mean i do think that you know uh one would want to in one sense defend multiculturalism from the right-wing attack of it but on the other hand it is also true that multiculturalism has become a bit of simplistic affair where you appoint chiefs um and then you rush off and you talk to the chiefs uh about you know what a community wants i mean one example of this is that when it comes to dealing with British Indians specifically British Hindus uh successive British governments blair as well as the Tories today engage with the most retrograde uh most uh let us say um hardline Hindu leaders who for instance have stopped caste legislation from coming to the table in on in parliament and what do they say they say well if you allow caste legislation against caste equality to come to the table then you will be hurting the sentiments of British Hindus uh and what that means is that you know power within the communities so for instance caste power within which is very ferocious very powerful within British Indian communities uh that just gets pushed out of the frame because it's been decided that uh these retrograde leaders can speak for the communities and i think we have to be very attentive to that uh when we talk about uh you know colonialism and decolonisation Priya those are fantastic interview i enjoyed your book very much um it's out in all good book shops now they're open again i mean i probably would suggest people buy it on the Verso website that's pretty the best place right that's probably yes yes and no not amazon definitely not definitely not okay thanks for joining us thank you bye