Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt

Description

Contrary to nationalist legend and schoolboy history lessons, the British Empire was not a great civilising power bringing light to the darker corners of the earth. Richard Gott's magisterial work recounts the empire's misdeeds from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the Indian Mutiny, spanning the red-patched imperial globe from Ireland to Australia, telling a story of almost continuous colonialist violence. Recounting events from the perspective of the colonised, Gott unearths the all-but-forgotten stories excluded from mainstream British histories.

Richard Gott is a former Latin America correspondent and features editor for the Guardian. A specialist in Latin American affairs, his books include Cuba, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America, The Appeasers, Land Without Evil and Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution. He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the institute for the study of the Americas at the University of London.

Vivid and startling ... Gott's achievement is to show, as no historian has done before, that violence was a central, constant and ubiquitous part of the making and keeping of the British Empire * Guardian * His message is stark but Gott is never shrill. He writes as a scholar, not an accuser. * Red Pepper * A tour de force. * History Today * A welcome, even necessary, corrective. * the Independent * Stimulating, inspirational and much needed. * Morning Star * Pungent and provocative ... a rich compendium of revolt * Scotland on Sunday *