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”. Lively, engaging...the breadth of his scope, spanning four continents over three centuries and drawing on a dazzling range of scholarship and primary sources, is novel...this is history for the real world now BBC History Magazine 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. 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. 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.

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. Published "Inhabitants of the Universe": Global Families, Kinship Networks and the Formation of the Early Modern Colonial State in Asia

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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. 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. 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. 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.

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. Very interesting. It casts a spotlight on some of the lesser-told narratives of British colonial history. 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. 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.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. David is Lecturer in Early Modern History. He read History at the University of Kent, where he also completed his MA and PhD in 2015. His thesis was a study of the English East India Company in South Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, exploring in particular the way in which informal social networks shaped the formation of an early modern colonial state. 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). 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.

Courting India: England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire by Nandini Das (Bloomsbury, 2023). With an extraordinary depth of research and brilliant writing, Das illuminates the often-overlooked beginnings of British involvement in India from both western and Indian perspectives. 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. These are ingredients in the mix though, rather than the central concern of Veevers. His is a multifaceted analysis, equally interested in the commercial, political, and social drivers of the events he describes. This makes for a rounder, perhaps more thoughtful overview than a strictly military history would provide.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. 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.