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.

"Veevers brilliantly retells the story we thought we knew...Important and thrilling" - Dan Snow

"Underpinned by a breathtaking amount of research...a rollicking read" - Suzannah Lipscomb

"An important book from an exciting voice" - Sathnam Sanghera

"A provocative book which will ruffle feathers...well argued, thoroughly researched, and engagingly written" - Andrew Mullholland, Military History Matters

"Powerfully argues...how a colonial narrative of "they came, they saw, they conquered" erases centuries of indigenous (and enslaved) agency...This wide-ranging book will hopefully shift Britain's toxic public debate about empire" - Irish Times

"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

"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