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The Great Defiance: How the world took on the British Empire

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The ‘indigenous and non-European peoples’ (Veevers’ preferred formulation, allowing him to include the Irish), meanwhile, are his heroes. Their societies were more equitable, even ‘classless’; their cultures more vibrant; their purses heftier and their castles grander; even their empires less ‘amateur’ than those of the English. That they ‘proved remarkably resilient when challenged’ by these English upstarts was, says Veevers, a ‘good thing, too’. For nine long years from 1593 Ireland was ravaged by one of the largest and most brutal wars that Europe had seen for centuries. Tens of thousands of soldiers died from fighting and disease, while even more civilians died from famines instigated by English attempts to starve the population into submission. As the Elizabethan state poured money and men into Ireland, it seemed to many that the country could never be subdued. As veteran officer Nicholas Dawtry wrote in 1597, a “conquered nation” is “evermore malicious unto those that conquered them, and so will be until the world’s end”’. Published "The Company as their Lords and the Deputy as a Great Rajah": Imperial Expansion and the English East India Company on the West Coast of Sumatra, 1685-1730

Powerfully argues...how a colonial narrative of "they came, they saw, they conquered" erases centuries of indigenous (and enslaved) agency...This wide-ranging book will hopefully shift Britain's toxic public debate about empire Irish Times

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Christopher Kissane is a historian and writer, and host of the Ireland’s Edge podcast. Further Reading

Veevers starts with a bang, claiming that the British Empire, once hailed as the epitome of global domination, was actually a series of epic fails. According to Veevers, the British were like a bunch of kids playing a game of conqueror, constantly tripping over their own shoelaces and stumbling into defeat. It's hard to believe that the same British Empire that once spanned continents and boasted "the sun never sets" was actually a comedy of errors led by the Keystone Cops of colonialism, but Veevers insists on this farcical narrative with a straight face. Veevers shows that for centuries English imperialism generally struggled or failed when it came up against the interests of eastern superpowers whose commercial, political and military power often dwarfed England’s. The Ottomans in the Mediterranean and the near east, the Ming and Qing dynasties in China, the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan, and the Mughal empire in India “only tolerated the presence of the English as far as they were useful”. When they became threatening the English were often defeated or expelled. By focusing on later western hegemony, Veevers persuasively argues, we misunderstand the power politics of the early modern world.Furthermore, unless your historic taste is literally confined to military matters, it is undeniably interesting. As military history enthusiasts, we are accustomed to that focus and there is nothing wrong with that in itself. But the broader causality of military conflict and indeed the tides of history are relevant. However provocative Veevers’ analysis is, it is well argued, thoroughly researched, and engagingly written. In addition to enthusiastic descriptions of Dahomey’s military prowess, expressed through burning down cities and enslaving its inhabitants (Agaja “was able to surround two of his palaces with walls made from skulls”) and his wealth (he gifted 40 slaves to George I and wore a lot of silk), Veevers credits Agaja with forging “a powerful kingdom capable of seizing control of the trade in enslaved people for their own benefit”. Good for him, one supposes. Then there will be those who are outraged, stoked up by the book’s combative style and its direct challenge to an established historic outlook. The methodology and perspective that Veevers has adopted means that the book is not comprehensive. It proceeds through the first 300 years of British (technically English, then British) expansion chronologically, but not exhaustively. Most of these areas have been well researched and documented before, and Veevers gives full credit to the historians concerned.

The book’s historical claims will spark much discussion and debate. But the historical claims are really a secondary concern. What historians ‘ultimately do’, claims Veevers, is ‘reinterpret the past’. This is a book much more concerned with ‘reinterpretation’, with an eye to the present day, than with the past itself – and, in the shadow of the culture wars, such acts of reinterpretation are morally and politically charged. In his own review of the book, Andrew Mulholland rightly frames its ‘central purpose’ as not historical , but historiographical. Throughout the book, Veevers writes with the kind of defiance that he so admires in his protagonists, offering a powerful challenge, stoutly taking up arms against – well, against what, exactly? Veevers admirably tries to render Irish names in their own language, but his linguistic hybrid only serves to highlight elided complexity. “Hugh Ó Néill” was Hugh O’Neill in English and Aodh Ó Néill in Irish, and the great earl’s shifts between those identities were key to his political career. Tyrone’s rebellion is cast as an attempt to “rid his country of every shred of English influence”, but even many contemporaries would have suggested that O’Neill’s conversion to “faith and fatherland” was about ruthless self-interest rather than “resistance”. In Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, for example, we read about the extremely violent series of raids and counter-raids that characterised much of the intercourse between the British, French, and indigenous Kalinago people in the 17th-century Lesser Antilles. Larger-than-life personalities, treachery, and innovative tactics make for a fascinating account. On a much bigger scale, the sophisticated military cultures that developed in Mughal and Maratha India are well described, as are some of the major clashes they produced. Veevers expertly weaves together a tapestry of historical accounts, personal anecdotes, and vivid descriptions, bringing to life the triumphs, struggles, and complexities of this colossal empire. The level of detail and thoroughness of research is truly commendable, underscoring Veevers' commitment to unearthing the untold stories that have shaped the British Empire's legacy.

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Laugh Your Way Through History with 'The Great Defiance' by David Veevers - A Comedy of Errors, Liberal Guilt, and Historical Hilarity!" That distinction between states and people is important. Dahomey’s “independence” from European powers, after all, was built through the brutal conquest of its neighbours, and by “seizing control of the trade in enslaved people for [its] own benefit”. Grouping a huge range of “indigenous and non-European power” together perhaps reinforces British imperial perspectives rather than undermining them: the common thread between the displaced Kalinago and the mighty Mughals is that they encountered the English. Veevers, D.& Pettigrew, W., 2018, The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c.1550 - 1750. Veevers, D. & Pettigrew, W. (eds.). Brill, Vol. 16. p. 1-42 42 p. Very interesting. It casts a spotlight on some of the lesser-told narratives of British colonial history. It is quite surprising, then, to discover that the book relies so heavily on the very ‘colonial authors’ whom it derides. Whether for want of linguistic competence or paucity of source material, we hear much more in Veevers’ book from the European colonisers than from their victims (if ‘victims’ is indeed the appropriate word: this of course gets to the heart of one of the book’s tensions).

That power, however, was still contested. Veevers looks to west Africa, where the Atlantic slave trade underpinned centuries of British imperial expansion, to show how indigenous societies continued to help shape the empire through their own actions. Through the persistence of Dahomey (in modern Benin), “there was still room for states in the 18th century successfully to defy the British Empire, regardless of its growing power”. Only in the chapter’s last paragraph does Veevers note, almost as an afterthought, that Dahomey’s neighbours, “who suffered conquest and enslavement”, were not exactly thrilled by all of this. That is beside the point, though. The book is, after all, meant to be “a celebration of the power wielded by those who took on the British Empire and defied its expansion”, including King Agaja and his ilk.Finally, there may be a group educated in the Western tradition who accept and are not particularly surprised by the thesis, but nonetheless pause and consider its full implications. For them, and for me, this will be an important process. Sir Penderel was not alone in this regard. The history of ‘indigenous and non-European peoples’, Veevers tells us, has hitherto been ‘determined almost entirely by British perspectives and actions’. Not so, apparently, for his own book – which sets itself the task of ‘rewriting those Anglocentric histories of the early modern period’ which were ‘distorted by generations of colonial authors’. Brexit Britain is in the grip of a “history war” in which right-wing media, politicians and commentators are intent on defending the empire’s “legacy” from an academic and cultural shift towards “decolonisation”. Victorian myths about the “civilising” power of empire have been hamfistedly resurrected. While some historians prefer to ignore such politicised “debate”, Veevers is determined to take it on. Courting India: England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire by Nandini Das (Bloomsbury, 2023). With an extraordinary depth of research and brilliant writing, Das illuminates the often-overlooked beginnings of British involvement in India from both western and Indian perspectives.

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