Britain’s Empire is unsparing in its portrayal of the horror and brutality of imperialism, but reveals also the breadth and depth of resistance to Empire on the part of the colonised, invaded and enslaved.

I recall an old aboriginal man painted in the tourist-friendly manner who used to squat in Darling Harbour, Sydney, and rotate with his fellows opposite; between playing the didgeridoo over some kind of progressive house music and sitting staring out at the ferries toing and froing. I had no idea where he came from and now I do.

Richard Gott’s book tells me that this man was a product of a process so brutal that I am now surprised he existed to sit there on the pavement; surrounded by tourists off the cruise ships. If Britain’s Empire has a story to tell it is one of absolute savagery against the people who lived in the places ‘we’ went and where ‘we’ often remain, and how hard some of these people fought to hold on first to their lands, later to their existence. The book tells us that after tens of years of overt extermination, the white settlers, themselves often originally dissidents and rebels against imperialism, resorted to poisoned flour to kill the blacks, because it was harder to trace once some rudimentary laws were extended to the Aborgines.

Richard Gott was better known to me as The Guardian’s man in Latin America. Fittingly, this book combines the knowledge of a historian with a sharp, journalistic, readable style. He traces British imperialism by way of resistance to its advances and in doing so sweeps aside the Niall Ferguson-esque insistence that it wasn’t all bad. It was. The evidence of this is in the tales of those who fought imperialism from 1755 to 1857; often failing, occasionally winning, always desperate.

Gott covers four different categories of resister. Firstly, the indigenous people who revolted against colonisation, as in the Americas and Australia. Secondly, the resistance of people who were to be subjugated by means other than extermination and the mass influx of white colonialists, such as India. Thirdly, the rebellions by white settlers themselves against British rule and, finally, he revisits the Americas to chart some of the bloodiest incidents of repression in the various slave revolts which wracked Britain’s Caribbean acquisitions.

The book’s strength lies in its very detailed and short chapters, this perhaps a result of the author’s background as a newsman. These are an antidote to a great many historical and academic books, which can be impenetrably dull. In contrast, Britain’s Empire is highly rewarding whether read cover to cover or selectively. Even between readings for the review it tended to fall open on fascinating passages.

One of the key functions of the book is to peel away the damage done by centuries of historical airbrushing, and some of this resonates today. Of the 1842 loss of a British force as it was hounded from Kabul, Gott has dug up a quotation of eye-rolling relevance today, from Penderel Moon, ‘…so idiotic in conception and so inept in execution, that the reader may wonder how a nation capable of such blunders succeeded … in enlarging its empire …’ (p.338). There are lessons to be learned from history it seems, but first we have to scrape off the apologist’s veneer.

Gott allows us to see that the cannonading of mutinous sepoys, the vengeful sacking of Kabul, the massacres of rebellious slaves and the transportation of Irish dissidents to arid shores are not merely products of less civilised times. The tradition continues in the US ‘kill-teams’ mutilating Afghan corpses, the razing of Fallujah, the beating to death of Baha Mousa in Iraq and the whisking away of anyone a wee bit ‘terrorist-looking’ to Guantanamo or Bagram. These kinds of pursuits have a firm lineage; none of them is a case of benevolent intervention misapplied or of the transparent fiction of a ‘few bad apples’. Instead, they are a built-in, made-for-purpose feature of imperialism since its outset.

Britain’s Empire is, in one sense, another ‘people’s history’, but it surpasses many of these in accessibility and detail. It tells the reader that resistance to empire, as we see today in some of the same places mentioned in the book, is nothing to be surprised about. If you stir up the natives, they get punchy. Gott’s logic, if followed, demands stringently that we never accept the sly updating of ‘white man’s burden’ into ‘liberal interventionism’, or the ‘civilizing mission’ into ‘democracy plus diversification of oil industry’. Any more than we should accept the indiscriminate brand ‘Islamic extremist’ in place of the barbarous ‘Mussulmen’ of yesteryear.

The broad resistance movement in Afghanistan, the Naxalite movements in India, the insurgents in Iraq, the institutionalised racism in Australia and the Americas and the indigenous struggles against it, the anger in a still occupied Ireland and Palestine are not separate from, but a direct continuation of, imperial projects and peoples struggle against them. Gott’s book spells out the linkages.

Britain’s Empire brings together and archives the history of diverse people who share a sad tradition; that of those who were often outgunned, scared, tired, broken and oppressed and still fought. These were real people and while many of their names will never be known, they are lent back moments of their lives and trials over 500 excellent pages. I’d suggest we’re obliged to listen to them. For, as Gott points out in conclusion ‘…if Britain made such a success of its colonies, why are so many of them still major sources of violence and unrest…?’ (p.475).