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

Product Information

It is thus a mistake to approach this as the story of the early British Empire. Rather, it is the story of those who opposed the early British Empire. So some mental gymnastics are required of those of us accustomed to Western-centric accounts; and this is its point. Lively style 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. A fascinating new history of the early days of the British Empire, told through the stories of the forgotten international powerhouses who aided, abetted and resisted the march of the British, by the award-winning historian David Veevers. 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. Intriguingly, we read about the genesis of the Tea Act in terms of British ambitions in India and, with a nod towards the Boston Tea Party, Veevers leaves it at that. This is his chosen method, and certainly it would not be very plausible to classify the American rebels as ‘indigenous or non-European’ – Veevers’ slightly fuzzy but nonetheless workable definition of the ‘defiant’ societies he describes.

However, the author writes with the single formula: "Natives good, Europe bad". The book could have told a stunning narrative that humanity, no matter which continent it was birthed, is neither good nor bad. They all fought for conquest, they all tried to build empires (however they might have looked or been called) and all engaged in acts that could be considered immoral. The Irish never stopped resisting the English,” Veevers writes of the 17th and 18th centuries, but it is hard to fit O’Neill’s dynastic absolutism, the Catholic gentry’s royalist loyalism in the English civil war, and Henry Grattan’s sectarian ascendancy parliament into one narrative of national resistance (never mind the Irish soldiers and officials who helped spread the emerging British empire across the world). The vast and shifting conflicts of the 1640s in particular – the focus of recent decades of research in early modern Irish history – are almost entirely absent. The writers aim was to tell the story of those who were colonised by Britain, the regions and nations and peoples who became part of its empire, and how they resisted their incorporation into this world. He succeeds comprehensively in this aim. 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. While the latter is a worthwhile thing to aim for, it does have a common fault of presenting these subjects of colonialism as passive victims; this book emphatically adresses that deficit. 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. 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.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”.

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, D., 2017, The East India Company, 1600-1857: Essays on Anglo-Indian connection. Pettigrew, W. & Gopalan, M. (eds.). Routledge, p. 175-192 17 p. But Veevers has more than just Ferguson in his crosshairs. The Great Defiance seeks to bring down an entire school of thought which, we are repeatedly told, dominates British discourse about the Empire. Veevers chastises Sir Penderel Moon for concentrating on the ‘deeds, motives, and thoughts of the principal British actors’ in the British Raj; he did so, he argues, because Moon allowed his narrative to rest on the ‘histories and accounts of earlier generations of Anglo-British colonists who had also sought to write off India and its people’. A provocative book which will ruffle feathers...well argued, thoroughly researched, and engagingly written Andrew Mullholland, Military History Matters 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

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. 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. Non-Western polities are invariably described as powerful and sophisticated, which rather raises the question of why so many of them were conquered by a few thousand people from a pathetic little island. The role of local collaborators, indispensable to the establishment and maintenance of imperial rule, is notably absent. It would have spoiled the narrative. But it's Veevers' extreme self-hating liberalism that truly steals the show. He goes above and beyond to apologize for Britain's past, as if he personally carried out every misdeed himself. He's like a guilt-ridden puppy, wagging his tail in perpetual remorse for historical actions that he had absolutely no control over. It's a hilarious sight to behold, as Veevers contorts himself into a pretzel of guilt, trying to outdo every other liberal in the race to win the title of "Most Guilt-Ridden Human Ever."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.