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. 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 announces his bête noire in the introduction: it is those ‘bestselling books that crowd the shelves of history sections today, proclaiming how “Britain Made the Modern World”.

Non-Western polities are invariably described as powerful and sophisticated, which rather raises the question of why so many of them were conquered by a few thousand people from a pathetic little island. The Maratha empire had developed a sophisticated military culture that fiercely resisted British imperialism.The British empire was a racist, rapacious, and violent force that enslaved, exploited and erased peoples and cultures across the globe. 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. Despite having many reasons to do so, they did not hate British people such as Moon anywhere near so much as Veevers seems to.

The history of ‘indigenous and non-European peoples’, Veevers tells us, has hitherto been ‘determined almost entirely by British perspectives and actions’. 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. We must, “consider all of the diverse threads of world history equally, regardless of which ones eventually went on to achieve dominance”. The non-Western peoples in Veevers’ book can kill, conquer, exploit and sell slaves; what they cannot do is be bad.For nine long years from 1593 Ireland was ravaged by one of the largest and most brutal wars that Europe had seen for centuries. With “the Glorious Revolution” and the act of union with Scotland, Britain gained the “political and religious stability, and fiscal and commercial effectiveness” to more effectively project its strength globally. Joining us for this exploration is the esteemed Professor Emeritus James Walvin, an expert in the history of slavery and abolition.