Waterstone’s ‘History Book of the Year’ published by Bangor University Historian

Dr David Veevers publishes new book The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire.

In his new book The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire, published by Penguin in 2023, our lecturer Dr David Veevers has set out to rewrite the history of the early modern world as defined not by the relentless expansion and success of England’s empire, but by the efforts of the Indigenous and non-European people who encountered it to contain, resist, and even defeat the English.

Image of book cover - The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire

Recently named a Waterstone’s ‘History Book of the Year’, The Great Defiance tells its story across 300 years – from 1500 to 1800 – and zigzags across the globe, from the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, all the way to West Africa and East Asia. Deploying rich archival sources, the book recounts in detail the dogged determination of the Powhatan Chiefdom to keep the Jamestown colonists at bay in Virginia. The book brings to life the forgotten history of the Kalinago people of the Caribbean, who fought the English for almost two centuries, raiding sugar plantations and liberating enslaved Africans. Readers even visit the Tokugawa Shogun of Japan, where belligerent English traders were eventually driven out of the country by the Shogun. Rather than rule the early modern world, Britain struggled to dominate the dynamic and powerful people and cultures it encountered.

Dr Veevers is a Lecturer in Early Modern History here at Bangor University. Many of the modules you can chose to study in the School of History, Law, and Social Sciences are based on the research he conducted for his book. In ‘The Tudor Conquest of Ireland’, you can explore the history of England’s very first colony, and how the conquest of Ireland culminated in the largest war England ever fought in the sixteenth century, a costly victory which pushed Elizabeth’s England to the brink of ruin and led to the devastation of Ireland. Similarly, in ‘Emperors, Shoguns, and Trading Companies’, students will study the oft-neglected history of Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the newly arrived Europeans met the world’s most powerful empires and richest economies, forcing the English to realise they came from a somewhat drab and impoverished country in comparison!

Listen to Dr Veevers discussing his book on this podcast.