Author(s): Richard Gott

Popular History

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