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.