6. Volume 3: Disrupting the British World, 1600-1980

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.