Author Description

From South Africa, Sierra Leone and Mauritius, to Kenya, America, Cyprus and New Zealand, this book is a global sweep of resistance in the British Empire. It is also the third volume of Richard Brown's epic 'Rebellions Quartet'. This volume explores a diverse range of anti-colonial resistance within the British Empire from a broader chronological and geographical perspective using examples from the seventeenth through to the twentieth century. 'Rebellion' is seen as a broad concept encompassing resistance to the authorities as well as direct action. Rebellions include those of slaves, convicts, indentured workers, and indigenous peoples, rebellions caused by taxation, millenarianism, and nationalism; and the eminently 'British coup' in New South Wales, Australia, in 1808, when Governor William Bligh (he of the mutiny on the HMS Bounty) was removed from power by military and settler action. The book concludes by drawing together the differing modes of colonial resistance and rebellion, and how the institutional structures, motives and opportunities, and the relationships between colonists and colonised created the modern world we know today. The opening chapter examines the development and nature of Britain's burgeoning Empire from its origins in the seventeenth century, how it was peopled and governed. Chapter 2 considers the ways in which colonial authorities treated native peoples in Virginia, Australia and New Zealand in their quest for greater access to land and why that treatment, whether legalised by treaty or purchase or by brutal expropriation led to resistance and rebellion. Chapter 3 looks at the question of slavery in the British Empire and the nature of slave resistance and rebellion especially, in Africa and the 'middle passage', in the American colonies, the West Indies and in Mauritius. Although the slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in 1807 and slaves were emancipated after 1833, the consequences of slavery continued to be a problem and