The Great Defiance
How the World Took on the British Empire
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The Great Defiance
Buy Now for $33.99
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Narrated by:
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David Veevers
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By:
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David Veevers
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
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.
©2023 David Veevers (P)2023 Penguin Audio
Critic Reviews
An important book from an exciting voice - Sathnam Sanghera
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
Only one thing, I would have liked the book to also include the hard and lengthy struggle by the Australian First Nations people to get their real history known. Another prime example here is how the British wrote the existence of ancient societies out of history when it stood in their way. They used "Terra Nullius", the old catch-all phrase for conquering, to try and “legitimise” the dispossession, dispersal and attempted genocide of the original inhabitants. Nevertheless now we know that First Nations people actually did fight back the best they could. "The Frontier Wars" of Australia.
Fascinating colonial history without Brittish bias
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The author chooses to ignore a range of historical evidence from both contemporary and archaeological sources. He very clearly does this to paint a picture of historical vicious greed and incompetence in nearly all his references to the English. He does so by often inventing motivations without context if he feels it suits.
Veevers would make a poor fiction author, but as a writer of history, his work is pathetically inept, incompetent and embarrassingly deluded.
Saying that, I’m sure the politically motivated propagandists of many history (critical theory) departments out there will flock to worship this nonsense as truth instead of researching the histories through considered investigations and understandings of contemporary values/settings.
Our world was and remains far more complex, interconnected and morally dissonant than was indicated here. Almost all moral reflections come after heavily biased language while simultaneously inserting modern value sets into a historical setting where they simply did not exist in the form they do today.
Any acknowledgement that historical society and its expectations and morality were fundamentally different to our own was not reflected in this work at all.
Effectively, if you want to learn how not to learn history, this is a good starting point.
Having said that, Veevers does read his fiction well. Perhaps a career change to a voice actor would suit him.
If you want history, this isn’t it.
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