Statues of great white Englishmen are not very popular these days. Since 2016, campaigners have been trying to “decolonise” Britain’s history by removing memorials to imperialists such as Cecil Rhodes and the Bristol slave-trader Edward Colston, among others. Not everyone deserves such treatment. In a quiet London square, just off Holborn, stands a statue of Fenner Brockway, veteran leftwing MP and scourge of empire. Brockway, who lived long enough to attend the unveiling of his own memorial in 1985, took part in almost every anticolonial movement from the 1920s to the 1980s. He belongs to a long tradition of radical opposition to British imperialism, charted by Priyamvada Gopal’s arresting and insightful book. Using some two dozen case studies, Gopal investigates a century of dissent, from the Indian “mutiny” of 1857 through to the Mau Mau uprising in 1950s Kenya.

This is no alternative A-Z history of Britain’s inglorious empire, of the kind that has become fashionable recently. Nor will readers find here many of the conventional critics of empire, such as JA Hobson or George Orwell. Gopal has little time for their brand of liberal piety, one that believed colonialism to be acceptable, as long as white men shouldered their burdens like responsible gentlemen. Instead, she focuses on a series of writers, travellers, intellectuals, politicians and activists who “unlearned” habits of misguided imperial paternalism and came to see the British empire from the point of view of the victims.

Gopal takes Wilfrid Blunt more seriously than most historians, who seldom get beyond his philandering and his passion for Arabian horses

Her account begins with the Chartist leader Ernest Jones, whose sympathy for the Indians crushed by the British suppression of the 1850s sepoy rebellion so influenced Karl Marx. There is a retelling of the Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica in 1865, which concentrates less on the chattering classes of Westminster who denounced Governor Eyre’s misrule, and more on the black voices of resistance from the Caribbean: George Gordon and Paul Bogle. Gopal then goes on to provide some superb sketches of imperial “troublemakers” (to employ a term used many years ago by AJP Taylor).

There is Wilfrid Blunt who, with his wife Lady Anne, wound up in Cairo in 1882 as the British invaded Egypt. Ostensibly there to negotiate with the Egyptian leader, Ahmad Urabi, Blunt ended up taking his side, immersing himself in reformist strands of Islam. 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. Gopal takes Blunt more seriously than most historians, who seldom get beyond his philandering and passion for Arabian horses.

There is an equally compelling chapter on Shapurji Saklatvala, a Parsi from Bombay, who became only the third Indian to be elected to the House of Commons. The Communist party MP for Battersea, he was in effect the “member for India” as British policy in the 1920s gyrated from velvet fist to iron glove, but rarely engaged with Indian nationalism.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The battle at Cawnpore (Kanpur) where a British garrison was wiped out during the Indian ‘mutiny’ of 1857. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The book really comes into its own in its coverage of the interwar years, when London became the epicentre of an anti-imperial internationalism, drawing together black Americans, West Indians, Africans and a surge of British radicals. Gopal carefully considers several long-forgotten pressure groups – including the League Against Imperialism and the International African Service Bureau – alongside a further series of exemplary figures, such as the enigmatic Reginald Bridgeman, and the incredibly resourceful Nancy Cunard, whose printing presses and magazines supported the cause of black liberation. Here Gopal tracks an arc of anticolonialism, stretching from the Harlem renaissance to the Ethiopian struggle, from West Africa to the West Indies. Black voices of anticolonialism and revolution, such as CLR James, Claude McKay and George Padmore, now instructed their British comrades on what being on the receiving end of empire really meant.

Drawing attention to this new wave of organised opposition to empire – not only Britain’s, but also the colonialism of all the European powers – is an important addition and corrective to that all that has been written recently about the rise and fall of liberal internationalism in the two decades after the Treaty of Versailles of 1919. In many ways, the League of Nations, and then later the Commonwealth, were established to prop up the old European empires, not dismantle them. Gopal shows how this was challenged and contested at every turn. As her final chapter on the British endgame in Africa demonstrates, decolonisation (as the British withdrawal from empire euphemistically used to be known) was as brutal and illiberal in its final stages as it was at the outset. Yet even then voices of dissent could be heard, as her vignette describing the Movement for Colonial Freedom, led by Brockway, brings out vividly. 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. Significantly, in the 1960s Perham went on to help set up some of the first universities of the new African nations, supporting degree programmes that broke with the old convention of exporting textbooks from the mother country, replacing colonial curricula with courses better suited to African needs.

This is an important book. Some narratives are told for the first time, others are retold in a different register. Gopal is particularly astute at specifying links between calls for colonial independence overseas and workers’ movements back in Britain, connections that older studies have struggled to show. Polemic there is, but her battles with the empire denial lobby come in the opening pages and towards the close, and do not detract from a rigorous, persuasive revisionist history.

But did anti-imperialism really shape British dissent, as she suggests? For all their outrage, her “troublemakers” sit on the margins of radicalism, never quite converting the rest of the left to a comprehensive rejection of empire. It is hard to recall a leading British radical who has staked a reputation on repudiating empire, in the same way as William Jennings Bryan did in 1900, for example, when he lashed out at the Spanish-American war in his pursuit of the White House. What’s more, empire has never split the British left as it did the German SPD before 1914, or the French Communist party in the 1960s. Deeply rooted in the pacifist traditions of Protestant dissent, British radicals have always been more comfortable opposing war than empire. 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. From Joseph Chamberlain to Enoch Powell and on to the apologists for Victorian imperialism now lying in wait for a seat at the table of the new Brexit cabinet, empire has had a noisier impact at the Tory end of the political spectrum.

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It need not remain that way. As Gopal argues, there is much that the radical left can bring to debates about empire, without automatically reaching for Orwell or Hobson. They just need to rediscover some traditions of their own. And maybe put up a few more statues.

• Miles Taylor’s Empress: Queen Victoria and India is published by Yale. Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent is published by Verso (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.