A Boy’s Own Book of Anti-Colonialism
31st October 2023
“From the Indian Emperors who contained the nefarious ambitions of the East India Company, to the West African kings who resisted British demands and set the terms of the trade in enslaved people … this book retells the history of early Empire from the all too familiar story of conquest to one of empowering defiance and resistance.”
This extract comes from the publisher’s blurb of David Veevers’ ambitious and wide-ranging new book, The Great Defiance: How the World Took On the British Empire. To be sure, competing for shares of the market for slaves against European traders qualifies, at least technically, as “resistance” — but is that really of the “empowering” sort? Empowering to whom? Could a modern and progressive historian really write in praise of African slave-traders for being better at slave-trading than their European competitors?
Sure can. Look at all of the black people in the U.S. who affect Muslim names, despite the role that Muslim slave-traders had in the global traffic in African slaves. (I don’t see any Jews naming their kids ‘Adolf’ or ‘Heinrich’.)