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

Product Information

A big plus here is the book’s entertainment value. The style is lively, the subjects and locations wide-ranging. There is a lot to learn about the cultures the British encountered, their histories and motivations. A good example would be the Maratha empire in north-central India and its struggle with the longer established Mughals. 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. This is a provocative book which will ruffle feathers, perhaps among some MHM readers. But it is also an important one. While the heart of The Great Defiance is historic, presenting an alternative narrative of what is often described as the ‘First’ British Empire, its central purpose is historiographic – to demonstrate that much of the history of this period is distorted. 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. 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. The “success” of early resistance to English imperialism, he argues, was in large part due to the weakness of the English state and its colonial entities. With “the Glorious Revolution” and the act of union with Scotland, Britain gained the “political and religious stability, and fiscal and commercial effectiveness” to more effectively project its strength globally.

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. Veevers, D., 2018, The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c.1550-1750. Veevers, D. & Pettigrew, W. (eds.). Brill, Vol. 16. p. 187-210 13 p. A deft weaving of global trade and local imperatives that is at once compelling, thought-provoking, and occasionally harrowing, The Great Defiance skillfully reorients our perspective on the received history of the earliest days of English trade and colonial ambitions and the emergent British Empire. Professor Nandini Das 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’. The English, and then the British, would go on to conquer many more nations in the subsequent centuries, using military and economic might to establish a global empire. That history is often told from the perspective of British success, of “progress” and “modernity”, a “great divergence” in which Britain became the most advanced and dominant power on Earth. But as David Veevers writes in his provocative new history of the empire’s first centuries, it is just as important to remember that everywhere they went the British found advanced societies offering fierce resistance to their colonisation. The history of the early modern world, he argues, looks very different from their perspective.

Hold onto your hats, folks, because David Veevers has unleashed a riotous romp through history with his latest book, "The Great Defiance." With his trademark self-hating liberalism turned up to 11, Veevers takes readers on a sidesplitting journey through the British Empire's misadventures, painting the British as a bunch of bumbling buffoons and Indigenous and non-European people as cunning geniuses.

Maratha soldiers fighting the British at Fort Talneir during the Third Anglo-Maratha War (1817-1819). The Maratha empire had developed a sophisticated military culture that fiercely resisted British imperialism. Image: Wikimedia Commons

Lively, engaging...the breadth of his scope, spanning four continents over three centuries and drawing on a dazzling range of scholarship and primary sources, is novel...this is history for the real world now BBC History Magazine Despite the impression of imperial eccentricity conjured by his name, Moon was a sober observer of the British dominion in India. He thought it had done some good and some bad things, and that its eventual demise was long overdue. Dismissed by the British government for being too sympathetic toward Indian nationalists, he later spent 14 years holding important positions within the government of independent India at the invitation of its new rulers. Despite having many reasons to do so, they did not hate British people such as Moon anywhere near so much as Veevers seems to. 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. 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. When Japanese shoguns massacred Christian converts, forbade their subjects from travelling abroad and expelled foreigners, they were merely, according to Veevers, removing “the more corrosive European forces that elsewhere in Asia had paved the way for full-on colonisation” to create “an oasis of peace and prosperity within a maelstrom of violent Western imperialism”.

David is Lecturer in Early Modern History. He read History at the University of Kent, where he also completed his MA and PhD in 2015. His thesis was a study of the English East India Company in South Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, exploring in particular the way in which informal social networks shaped the formation of an early modern colonial state.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.

Join us for this thought-provoking journey into one of the most critical periods in global history, offering a comprehensive understanding of the intricate dynamics that ultimately brought World War II to its dramatic conclusion. Another is modern relevance. Whatever view one takes of Veevers’ argument, it is difficult to deny that it has application not only for the corpus of early modern history, but also for modern Britain. Looked at through this lens, many of the questions that dominate British contemporary life take on a different hue. That’s no bad thing – it is history’s primary purpose. 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.Christopher Kissane is a historian and writer, and host of the Ireland’s Edge podcast. Further Reading 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’. Ultimately, the book really highlighted that one cannot understand the impact of world events if only told from one perspective, particularly if that perspective is that of an aggressor. Clearly true of all history, of course, but 'we' (Britain) seem to overlook that when it comes to matters of the past which are more difficult to discuss. The many atrocities of the era are described in the most purple of prose, but they are only condemned when committed by Europeans. In a striking passage, Veevers patiently explains that when the English cut off the heads of their enemies, it was for “humiliation” and “deterrence”. When the Dahomians did it, it is matter-of-factly justified as “expressing the king’s spiritual power over the people”.