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

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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. 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”. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. It focuses on a colourful cast of characters, from Irish lords and Indigenous American chieftains, to Japanese shoguns and Hindu horsemen, retelling an age-old story of British imperial conquest into a new story of Indigenous and non-European resistance and survival.

It’s a subtle enough idea; there are plenty of histories setting out Britain’s inevitable rise to power, some even portraying this as a good thing, and in parallel there are plenty of works detailing the crimes of British and other colonialists/imperialists. A good example would be the Maratha empire in north-central India and its struggle with the longer established Mughals. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Whether you're a military history enthusiast, a fan of untold war stories, or simply intrigued by the SAS's legendary reputation, this episode promises to be a captivating journey into the heart of covert operations and unyielding courage.This is context for explaining the importance and success of the Marathas in resisting British ambitions, but it also serves as a taster for anyone unfamiliar with this aspect of Indian history. Even the bloody local warfare that blighted West Africa is blamed on European merchants providing its inhabitants with modern firearms, thus creating “the conditions for mass violence”, rather than on those who made the decision to go to war or pull the triggers. If his chapter on Dahomey is anything to go by, it would involve a lot of gushing about the cool cities built on the profits of slavery, provided that their owners were of the right race.

We at Penguin Random House Australia acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Traditional Custodians and the first storytellers of the lands on which we live and work. They burst out into the world because their own land, ‘on the farthest northwest tip of the Eurasian landmass’, was ‘drab’ and ‘dreary’. As the author of numerous bestselling books and an expert in American history and foreign policy, Thomas guides us through the fraught final days of the Pacific War.David lives on the Sussex coast with his wife Jessica and their two very energetic children, Florence and Henry.