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

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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

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 Published "Inhabitants of the Universe": Global Families, Kinship Networks and the Formation of the Early Modern Colonial State in AsiaIt is also the case that a lot of these engagements are small-scale and little-covered in mainstream military history. For that, they will make interesting, colourful, and often surprising reading for those with a broad interest in the subject. 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”. 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?

This approach does mean that some aspects of the early British imperial story are absent. The American Revolution is the most obvious of these and, indeed, there is barely any coverage of the history of the colonies on the north-eastern seaboard. Mentions are in passing, and only insofar as the region has a bearing on the rest of the narrative. Published The Contested-State: Political Authority and the Decentred Foundations of the Early Modern Colonial State in Asia

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. 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 I am writing this in English, it is partly because generations of Britons took the view that “there is no land unhabitable nor sea innavigable” and sailed forth from these islands to trade and to conquer. This does not mean that the experiences of the non-Western world should be ignored, far from it. To the extent that Veevers has tried to make an unfamiliar part of their histories more accessible to a lay audience, he is to be commended. In "The Great Defiance: Unveiling the Epic Saga of the British Empire," author David Veevers has masterfully penned a non-fiction masterpiece that immerses readers in a world of captivating exploration, exceptional resilience, and awe-inspiring historical significance. With meticulous research and a gift for storytelling, Veevers has crafted a literary gem that effortlessly combines insightful analysis with an irresistible narrative drive, making it nearly impossible to put down.

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. 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”. Of course, this is not what the book is about: its organising theme is the early British Empire. Those other players – Portugal, France, Spain, Holland, and so forth – inevitably feature heavily. Yet perhaps for reasons of space, Veevers does not offer us much by way of comparative analysis here. 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”.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 ‘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’. 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.

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.Of all the British villains in Veevers’ account, there is no one whose inclusion is more surprising than that of Sir Penderel Moon — a mild-mannered colonial civil servant and historian. His magnum opus, The British Conquest and Dominion of India (1989), was devoured by Veevers as an undergraduate. Now that he has achieved intellectual enlightenment, he condemns Moon for committing “a gross erasure of the people of India from his story”, relying on a quotation which does not reflect what Moon actually wrote.