Insurgent Empire Quotes

“we explored the possibility that Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were not merely victims of this nation’s imperial history and subsequent beneficiaries of its crises of conscience, but rather agents whose resistance not only contributed to their own liberation but also put pressure on and reshaped some British ideas about freedom and who could be free?”
― Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

“whereas the maintenance of imperial rule in fact required constant vigilance and frequently forceful responses to resistance.13”
― Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

“the history of the British Empire is also the history of resistance to it, and – importantly, from both beyond and within Britain – such resistance is still not central to the writing of British imperial history.”
― Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

“Douglass to make his famous pronouncement: ‘The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle … Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will.”
― Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent