British free-speech traditions enabled colonial radicals to attack the Empire openly.

Evidence

What was it like to be a black man in the Britain of the 1930s? Certainly we were not rich; far from it. But we were generally happy in our lot—just to know that we were challenging one of the greatest empires in the world. Imagine what it meant to us to go to Hyde Park to speak to a race of people who were considered our masters, and tell them right out what we felt about their empire and about them … write any tract we wanted to; make terrible speeches; all this when you knew very well that back in the colonies even to say “God is love” might get the authorities after you! — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1229

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s framing chapter comparing British vs. colonial liberalism; supplies a first-person vantage on that contrast.