The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire

by David Veevers

The story of the British Empire is a familiar one: Britain came, it saw, it conquered, forging a glorious world empire upon which the sun never set. In fact, far from being the tale of a single nation imposing its will upon the world, the British Empire found itself reshaped by the tenacious resistance of the powerful Indigenous and non-European people it encountered. From ill-advised ventures in Ireland to the failure to curtail North African Corsair states all the way to the collapse of commercial operations in East Asia, British attempts to create an imperial enterprise often ended in embarrassment and even disaster.

In this book, David Veevers looks beyond the myths of triumph and into the realities of British misadventures in the early days of Empire, meeting the extraordinary people across the world who were the real forces to be reckoned with. From the Emperors who determined the expansion of the English East India Company, to the West African kings who resisted English entreaties and set the terms of the lucrative slave trade, to the Paramount Chiefs in America who fought to expunge European forces from their homelands, The Great Defiance retells the story of early Empire from the perspective of the Indigenous and non-European people who held the fate of the British in their hands.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Audiobook, British Literature, Asia, Africa, India

510 pages, Hardcover

First published May 25, 2023

About the author

David Veevers, Ph.D. (2015), University of Kent, is Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. He has published in numerous edited volumes and journals on the English East India Company. His first monograph, A Hundred Gates: Asia and the Transnational Origins of the British Empire, 1600 - 1800, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Reviews

[Ivor Hardy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Do not read this book; do not sully yourself with it, no matter how tempting it seems.

All those who shepherded it to print should hang their heads in shame, for it’s hard to imagine anything this bad has been put between the covers since Kate Price was penetrated by Dwight Yorke. It is an unpolished turd of a book, the stale excrement of so called Professor David Veevers imagination.

[Wing · Rating 5 out of 5]

This highly readable page-turner begins the story with the Tudor Conquest of Ireland and ends with the First Anglo-Maratha War. Eschewing the blatantly absurd jingoism that characterized earlier accounts, this balanced and comprehensive narrative paints a detailed picture of the multipolar world in which the English—and, after 1707, the British—Empire found itself competing. Well-established polities continually thwarted English expansion. Defiance is an understatement; in fact, the English often found themselves reduced to vassals of other behemoths. Particularly impressive, at least to this reviewer, is how Veevers manages to clearly explain the otherwise bewildering complexity of pre-modern Indian history. Veevers also effectively reminds the reader, at appropriate moments, that the slave trade was inextricably tied to the empire's raison d’être. Likewise, this perversity was linked to non-essential goods such as tobacco, sugar, spices, and luxurious textiles. The world is absurd, yet it can be understood. To understand it, we need fine books like this. Five stars.

[Simon Mee · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little bit tricky about what it is about, but I do not hold that too much against it.

Storytelling

The Great Defiance massively expanded my knowledge of the First British Empire, and I do think that is at least a significant credit to the book than a massive knock on me. Even the chapter on Ireland, which covered a period and subject I learned about in High School, revealed significant gaps in my knowledge.

Veevers is also good at providing linkages between his chapters, which gives explanatory power to the push and pull and British mercantilism. Funds from Irish estate drove ventures in North America. The oft despised Britain cloth found a good home with the Ottomans which, provided trading goods that might be worthwhile in the Far East. Slavery (along with a lot of the 18th Century American Indian interactions) is a little under-covered but also features as a force of trade and supply.

In order to lessen its reliance on exporting silver from England for Indian goods, Company ships stopped at the West African ports on their way to Asia to exchange English manufactures for ivory, gold and palm oil, which would then eventually be exchanged for Indian textiles. Hoping to fold West Africa into its trading monopoly over Asia, the Company successfully purchased monopoly rights from an ailing ‘Guinea Company’ in 1657 and duly took control of England’s trade to West Africa. Soon, the Company’s ships returning back to Europe from the Indian Ocean would also begin selling Indian textiles to West African merchants.

While ostensibly about the “resisters” to British colonialism, the sourcing does mostly rely on the colonisers, particularly with the American Indian chapters where written records are limited. This does impact the narrative flow at times, particularly when compared to the Indian chapters, where Veevers occasionally can take pages off from talking about the British at all to describe the variation irruptions of Maratha and Mughal power. One (unintentional?) result of the sourcing and viewpoints is that The Great Defiance goes a long way to explaining why the British succeeded, particularly with the Second British Empire. The ability to raise capital, farm intensively, and call upon a centralised state seems not far from the virtuous circle of Why Nations Fail - where Britain's enemies are disunited or unable to mobilize large forces, resistance weakens.

Gamesmanship

This book has tried to bring back into the main narrative of the period of world history from 1500 to 1800 a dozen peoples and places whose importance and power have become distorted by the pens of their eventual colonisers.

I have a comment that perhaps does not fit under a proper review of the book itself, which is why I have parked it here – sometimes you really can see the publisher’s hand in things.

The full title of the book is The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire. The jacket description does refer to the early British empire, but there are no dates. Only when you read the introduction do you get a set time period – 1500-1800.

Choosing this timeframe does deal with certain criticisms raised in the negative reviews – the British record of success was very mixed 1500-1800, even more so than the Victorian blunders of the 19th century. The conquest of India took off after that period, along with painting the map red in Africa, Australia and arguably Canada. Other powers did successfully contest British control, and I am fine with the narrative attempting to show their viewpoints. It’s just that its clearly a deliberate trick not to mention that on the cover or description of the book, because limiting the scope potentially limits interest – potential readers might expect something about the Zulus or similar. Even if they are quickly disabused in the introduction, they might be committed by that time.

Additionally, I do consider Veevers does tend to overstate the virtues of the various resisters. I suspect it is not a deliberate hyping up (all the time) for sensationalism, more the subconscious “sane-washing” of the “resisters” decision-making process where we lack direct sources as to their thoughts.

A case in point would be the leaders of the Powhatan, described in almost glowing terms physically at times, and who brilliantly … …lose. They rationally conduct all their dealings with the “babes in the woods” colonials. Explanations for eventual defeat include where a third party ends up in charge, because the new leader fails to appreciate the insights our main characters had into the effectiveness of guerrilla style raiding, and instead seek stand-up battle. Never mind that said raiding doesn’t seem to have done much else than make the war a slow bleed, nor that the talent of those “Great Leaders” for repeating tricks (lulling colonials into accepting American Indians as peaceful neighbours then suddenly massacring them) failed to win the war and justified the colonials treating the Powhatan as untrustworthy. While Veevers understands the issues raised with the massacres, he seems to portray the adverse results on the Powhatan as a matter of irresistible force of the British rather than an incredibly dumb choice.

As the desperate colonists there could attest, Indigenous power was frequently capable of rendering English people the victims and reversing the imperial relationship entirely.

As a rule in The Great Defiance, British traders and explorers face enemies that are blessed godlike powers of divination, who then use those powers to… …lose… …if not straight-away. Even the relatively successful Japanese seem to have been a lot less sanguine about the results of 200 odd years of isolation than Veevers is.

But at a time when Britain was trading in the lives of millions of enslaved Africans, engaged in the conquest of India and fighting a global war against Napoleonic France, Tokugawa Japan had forged an oasis of peace and prosperity within a maelstrom of violent Western imperialism.

Despite those qualifications, the narration is excellent, and I really do appreciate the broadening of my horizons via a different perspective (even if the sourcing is still colonial).

[Simon Gibson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very well researched and balanced account of the British Empire from the perspective of those non British peoples it affected. I think a must read for all wanting a rounded history of Britain from more than a blinkered, anglocentric, white, perspective.

[Emmanuel Gustin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important story and a great read! The nations that resisted the building of the British Empire have often been dismissed as helpless natives armed “with sharpened fruit”, as Blackadder put it. Veevers paints sketches of a diverse series of nations and tells us how, each in their own specific way, they put up a strong fight and won important, albeit temporary, victories. Each reader may have their own preference; I was fascinated by the stories of the West-African kingdoms and the history of the Marathas.

Some reviewers here seem to imagine that Veevers goes out of his way to paint the European colonisers as “bad” and the non-Europeans as “good”. That is a shallow reading, because the author does not obfuscate the violence and cruelty that marked some of the African, American and Asian nation-building efforts, or the genocidal brutality of some of the efforts to eliminate the English settlers. In fact he makes a point of highlighting that internal violence and destruction often provided the foreigners with the necessary wedge to establish their own foothold. What Veevers tries to show is not that the conquered civilisations were “good”, but that they were complex, flourishing, and able to fight back. And where he makes a strong moral judgment, he tends to judge individuals, not entire peoples. (I find him somewhat surprisingly tolerant of Robert Clive and sharply critical of Warren Hastings.)

You could read this as a story of British persistence in the face of adversity — entirely fitting with that nation’s tradition of memorising and even celebrating its setbacks and defeats. But it seeks to avoid that perspective to try to see it from the other side, from the side of the non-European resister to colonisation. Of course that involves some speculative projection, and I am not sure that we can truly get into the mind of a Powhatan leader or a Mughal official. But looking at a conflict from both sides is a good historical approach, and long overdue for some of these wars. If it is a bit of a polemic, that is perhaps about time!

I have a few reservations — mostly that this account has, at least in some chapters, a tendency to boil down to “histoire bataille”. It is by design primarily a history of the battles these people fought, either against the English or against each other, and that implies some reductionism. Nevertheless the account given of the Marathas here, for example, is far more interesting than the story Dalrymple gives in “The Anarchy”. Let’s call it a good starting point for more.

There are some misspellings and syntactical errors (in the electronic version, at least) that are a bit annoying and that good proofreading should have caught. And I find it a bit odd that so many historical figures in this story who were definitely not English-speaking, are quoted speaking or writing a kind of Stuart-era English. Is that because of the source, or is it an affectation? But these are minor irritants.

[Kieran Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very interesting. It casts a spotlight on some of the lesser-told narratives of British colonial history.

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 worst part of this book is its subtle blaming of all slavery on European powers - not discussing the complicity of African societies in much detail, and even basically stating at one point "Yes the Barbary States took European slaves, but not as many as the transatlantic slave trade so it's fine". Slavery is such a complex, global and ancient institution that could have had a really considered discussion in this book, but instead it's far easier to blame Europeans, and almost verges on patronising indigenous societies by implying they didn't know any better, or that it was solely Europe's fault for buying slaves.

I also found it wryly amusing that the conclusion packs another century and a half of indigenous defiance into one paragraph, which actually would have served as a great final chapter.

I did enjoy reading the book, but I also became annoyed at the seeming laziness of the writing and its almost self-defeating and contradictory analysis of powerful, sophisticated and respected societies that were manipulated by European powers because they didn't know better. A small rewrite could really bring out the powerful and necessary message of this book, but sadly it falls short.

[Owain Delf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative and an important counterweight to prevailing ideas about how Britain built its empire. The chapters often follow a very repetitive format and this in combination with the writing style made it a sometimes unenthused read, but overall enjoyable.

[Emmanuel Gustin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important story and a great read! The nations that resisted the building of the British Empire have often been dismissed as helpless natives armed “with sharpened fruit”, as Blackadder put it. Veevers paints sketches of a diverse series of nations and tells us how, each in their own specific way, they put up a strong fight and won important, albeit temporary, victories. Each reader may have their own preference; I was fascinated by the stories of the West-African kingdoms and the history of the Marathas.

Some reviewers here seem to imagine that Veevers goes out of his way to paint the European colonisers as “bad” and the non-Europeans as “good”. That is a shallow reading; the author does not obfuscate the violence and cruelty that marked some of the African, American and Asian nation-building efforts. In fact he makes a point of highlighting that internal violence and destruction often provided the foreigners with the necessary wedge to establish their own foothold. What Veevers tries to show is not that the conquered civilisations were “good”, but that they were complex and flourishing.

You could read this as a story of British persistence in the face of adversity — entirely fitting in that nation’s tradition of memorising and even celebrating its setbacks and defeats. But it seeks to avoid that perspective to try to see it from the other side, from the side on the non-European resister to colonisation. Of course that involves some projection, because I am not sure that we can truly get into the mind of a Powhatan leader or a Mughal official. But looking at a conflict from both sides is a good historical approach, and long overdue for some of these wars. If it is a bit of a polemic, that is perhaps about time.

I have a few reservations — mostly that this account has, at least in some chapters, a tendency to boil down to “histoire bataille”. It is by design primarily a history of the battles these people fought, either against the English or against each other, and that implies some reductionism. Nevertheless the account given of the Marathas here, for example, is far more interesting than the story Dalrymple gives in “The Anarchy”. Let’s call it a good starting point for more.

There are some misspellings and syntactical errors (in the electronic version, at least) that are a bit annoying and that good proofreading should have caught. And I find it a bit odd that so many historical figures in this story who were definitely not English-speaking, are quoted speaking or writing a kind of Stuart-era English. Is that because of the source, or is it an affectation? But these are minor irritants.

[Cuthbertvontintagel · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Laugh Your Way Through History with 'The Great Defiance' by David Veevers - A Comedy of Errors, Liberal Guilt, and Historical Hilarity!"

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.

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.

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."

Veevers' revisionist fantasies are downright absurd. He gives Indigenous and non-European people credit for being cunning masterminds who constantly outsmarted the British, as if the British were just a bunch of hapless fools stumbling into traps left and right. He paints Indian Emperors as the ultimate scam artists who hoodwinked the "nefarious" East India Company, as if the British couldn't spot a con job if it smacked them in the face. He lauds West African Kings as shrewd negotiators who set the terms of the slave trade, as if the British weren't the ones raking in the profits. And he hails Paramount Chiefs in America as valiant freedom fighters, as if the British were trembling in their boots at the mere sight of a few angry colonists.

In conclusion, "The Great Defiance" is a comedic gem that will have you rolling on the floor with laughter. David Veevers' absurd historical revisionism, extreme self-hating liberalism, and comedic errors make for a sidesplitting read that's too hilarious to take seriously. If you're in need of a good belly laugh and a prime example of a liberal guilt trip gone wild, this book is a must-read. Kudos to Veevers for his comedic prowess and a special shout-out for his imaginative storytelling that's sure to tickle your funny bone!

[Alistair Antonopoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is overall a well written and researched book that makes a valuable contribution to recasting the focus of much of the existing historiography surrounding the rise of the British empire.
It covers overviews of North America, South Asia, West Africa and the Caribbean, and rightly presents the often successful struggles of local people's against the colonising British as the actions of sovereign peoples possessed of agency, rather than the "savages" blindly resisting civilisation.
This book also makes a valuable counter argument to the still all too frequent colonial myth making surrounding the "benefits of empire" (Niall Ferguson's Empire being a prime example of this).
I have seen a significant number of negative reviews of the Great Defiance from people that seem to be personally offended by the idea that Britain is and was not inherently superior and on a civilising mission, but rather was simply in large part motivated by commercial gain and was perfectly happy to exploit anyone it could to that end. This is perfectly exemplified by the East India Company, which owes it's eventual dominance in a large part to having successfully exploited the power vacuum left by the decline of the Mughal empire and the fracturing of the Maratha confederacy, but as Veevers points out throughout, local peoples were fully aware agents in their interactions with the British, and sought equally to exploit their arrival for their own ends.
The one criticism I would level at the work is that Veevers, albeit briefly, treats the Ottomans as a resisting empire to the British, but sadly, does not delve any deeper into the experience of the Ottoman subject peoples who themselves frequently resisted and rebelled against what was also fundamentally a European coloni empire in more ways than not.

[Damian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a great read! It is very, very readable, with brevity and wit.

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.

Never mind all the red-faced gammon reviews here denouncing this book as ‘apologising for being British’ or ‘liberal guilt’; if your British and you don’t feel guilty about the Bengal or Irish famines, you probably won’t read this book (and you are probably a sociopath).

[Ellie Stevenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cracking history with very little to fault it for. I think it loses some steam in terms of conveying later chapters around Indian history in a really compelling way - you get a little muddled on what’s happening where, particularly given that this is supposed to be about the British connection that ultimately doesn’t seem to matter all that much - but it’s great earlier on, with particularly fascinating and vivid description and details around eastern North America that I’d never encountered anything remotely like before. Definitely worth picking up.

[Patrick Moody · Rating 4 out of 5]

The blurb in the back is a bit misleading.
None of the non English/British peoples ends up actually remaining totally free and independent except the Japanese and Chinese and they are not given nearly as many pages as the sub continent and we all know how that ended.
It’s an interesting book in that it gives the viewpoint of the colonised and details their ATTEMPTS at resisting the empire but does not in any way reveal any areas from which it was sent packing.

[Fleur Booth · Rating 4 out of 5]

wow could have carried on reading and learning forever