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

Product Information

In this episode, I've had the pleasure of talking with a good friend of the podcast, Alvaro Gomez Velasco, our eyewitness on contemporary politics in Spain.

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. Drawing insights from the seminal work "False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism" by renowned scholar John Gray, we delve deep into the intricate web of economic, political, and social forces that have shaped our world. Maratha soldiers fighting the British at Fort Talneir during the Third Anglo-Maratha War (1817-1819).It is, indeed, difficult to see how Veevers differs from his own crude depiction of his supposedly benighted scholarly forebears. There can be little to quibble with here unless one takes the view that Veevers’ analysis is badly flawed. Description:In this episode of the Explaining History podcast, we embark on a journey through modern economic history, tracing the evolution of global free markets from the height of Victorian Britain to the transformative concepts of Francis Fukuyama's "End of History. Whatever non-Western people did was heroic; whatever the British did was “heroic”, between sarcastic quotation marks.

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. Arguably the book will be less useful and certainly less shocking for them than it will be for others. 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. The book could have told a stunning narrative that humanity, no matter which continent it was birthed, is neither good nor bad. The core thesis of the book is that ‘the defining feature of the pre-modern world was not the emergence of an all-encompassing British Empire, but the great defiance of the people who found themselves in its path, and their heroic struggle in resisting it, often successfully’.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. After pages and pages of admiration for the ‘indigenous and non-European peoples’ and denigration of their would-be imperial masters, one might be lulled into cheering on the determination of King Agaja of Dahomey to ‘put the Europeans in their place’ – before realising that what he really was fighting for was his right to ‘set the terms of the lucrative trade in enslaved people’. There we find ‘indigenous Javanese from the coasts and Sundanese from the highland interior; migrating Malay; Chinese diaspora communities; Indian merchants and their families; Arabs of the Ottoman Empire; even Swahilis from East Africa’. Inherently so, in that the argument being made is radical, setting out to challenge much of what has come before. Instead, our picture of Banten is drawn for us by the testimonies of ‘one Dutch visitor’, ‘one European merchant’, and the English privateer Sir James Lancaster.

His second book, The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire (Ebury/PenguinRandomHouse), is a narrative history of Indigenous and non-European power and the ways in which the people caught in the crosshairs of British colonialism resisted and even contained it. 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. 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. Drawing from these rich experiences, McManus has penned his latest novel, "Love in a Lost Land," a poignant tale that encapsulates the passion, peril, and paradoxes of this transformative period. In his conclusion, after reassuring his readers that he does not advocate “for the British role in the history of this period to be erased” (albeit after minimising it over 400 pages), Veevers adds mournfully that through its colonial expansion, “Britain ‘Unmade the World’”.

This makes for a rounder, perhaps more thoughtful overview than a strictly military history would provide. Don't miss this deep dive into history with Damien Lewis, as we uncover the legacy and indomitable spirit of the SAS in Italy during World War II.

For nine long years from 1593 Ireland was ravaged by one of the largest and most brutal wars that Europe had seen for centuries. 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. His first monograph, A Hundred Gates: Asia and the Transnational Origins of the British Empire, 1600 - 1800, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.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.