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

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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. Veevers' writing style is a delight to behold. Each sentence is carefully crafted, effortlessly blending eloquence with accessibility. The prose carries a certain cadence, drawing readers deeper into the narrative and allowing them to visualize the grandeur and significance of historical events. Whether describing decisive battles or intimate interactions, Veevers' words evoke emotions and create a powerful connection between the reader and the subject matter. Centred around an impressive array of stories from across the world, 'The Great Defiance' offers an engaging narrative that highlights those who resisted British attempts to colonise and offers an important qualification to the telological view of the formation of the British Empire as an inevitable by-product of modernisation and globalisation. Broadly speaking, the over-arching argument is that the indigenous resistance was successful in at stopping, slowing, or frustrating British colonisation, and is furnished by lucid details of the characters and moments that played out across the early-modern world.

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. 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. To rewrite the history of the expansion of the British empire from the point of view of those who fought against it is an interesting conceit, though far from original. The true innovation of Veevers’ book lies in his having written it in the high-jingo style of imperialist literature that would have made many a Victorian colonial enthusiast blush — but from the point of view of the soon-to-be colonised. 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. 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.

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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. For nine long years from 1593 Ireland was ravaged by one of the largest and most brutal wars that Europe had seen for centuries. Tens of thousands of soldiers died from fighting and disease, while even more civilians died from famines instigated by English attempts to starve the population into submission. As the Elizabethan state poured money and men into Ireland, it seemed to many that the country could never be subdued. As veteran officer Nicholas Dawtry wrote in 1597, a “conquered nation” is “evermore malicious unto those that conquered them, and so will be until the world’s end”’. The Great Defiance is a great read. It is well researched, engagingly written and gives a great insight of the empire from an external angle.

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. 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. 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. 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, 1685-1730Of 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. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) Published The Contested-State: Political Authority and the Decentred Foundations of the Early Modern Colonial State in Asia It is quite surprising, then, to discover that the book relies so heavily on the very ‘colonial authors’ whom it derides. Whether for want of linguistic competence or paucity of source material, we hear much more in Veevers’ book from the European colonisers than from their victims (if ‘victims’ is indeed the appropriate word: this of course gets to the heart of one of the book’s tensions).

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.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. 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 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." 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’.

The methodology and perspective that Veevers has adopted means that the book is not comprehensive. It proceeds through the first 300 years of British (technically English, then British) expansion chronologically, but not exhaustively. Most of these areas have been well researched and documented before, and Veevers gives full credit to the historians concerned. Laugh Your Way Through History with 'The Great Defiance' by David Veevers - A Comedy of Errors, Liberal Guilt, and Historical Hilarity!" 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”.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. 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? Works of history are sometimes criticised for being insufficiently forthcoming in their arguments. No such criticism will be levelled against David Veevers’ The Great Defiance: How the World Took On the British Empire. His second book is as provocative as it is wide-ranging. Bouncing from Ireland to India, from the Caribbean Sea to the Sea of Japan, it tells the story of how the English, later the British, were resisted and evaded, outflanked and outplayed, by the peoples, kingdoms, and empires which they encountered between 1500 and 1800. A provocative book which will ruffle feathers...well argued, thoroughly researched, and engagingly written Andrew Mullholland, Military History Matters