David is Lecturer in Early Modern History. He read History at the University of Kent, where he also completed his MA and PhD in 2015. His thesis was a study of the English East India Company in South Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, exploring in particular the way in which informal social networks shaped the formation of an early modern colonial state. 

David stayed at Kent to take up the position of Postdoctoral Associate on the £1m funded 5 year Leverhulme Trust project 'The Global Determinants of the English Constitution', under its P.I. William A. Pettigrew. In 2018, he moved to Queen Mary, University of London, to undertake a 4 year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the School of History. He joined the School of History, Law, and Social Sciences at the University of Bangor in 2022, where he teaches courses on seventeenth century England, early modern Asia, and global history more widely.

David has published his research widely, from academic to public-facing pieces. His first book, The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2020. His second book, The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire, was published with Penguin in 2023 and became a Waterstone's Best History Book in 2024. His next book, a history of the first family from England to establish slave plantations in the Caribbean, will be published by Icon Books in 2027. He has appeared on radio and television - including the BBC - and his words have been printed in The Guardian, The Times Higher Education Supplement, History Today, and other public publications.

D.Veevers@bangor.ac.uk

Undergraduate

HPS-2055: Making History

HTH-2230 and HTH-3330: Emperors, Shoguns and Trading Companies: Asia and the British Empire, 1600 - 1800

HGH-2112 and HGH-3112: The World Turned Upside Down: Civil War, Regicide, and Revolution in England and Wales, 1600 - 1700

HTH-2168 and HTH-3168 War, Colonialism, and Resistance: European Empires in the Early Modern World

Postgraduate

HPH-4030: The Glorious Revolution

HPH-4005: Themes and Issues in History

HPH-4006 Documents and Sources: Medieval and Early Modern

David studies the early modern British Empire, with a particular emphasis on the expansion of the English East India Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He's interested in the cross-cultural links between the English and the Asian societies they engaged with, as well as the political and diplomatic relationships the Company and its officials constructed with Asian polities, such as the Mughal Empire. Recently, his research has become much more global, focusing on the Indigenous and non-European experiences of English colonialism. His most recent book told the story of how non-European people encountered British imperial expansion in the years 1500 to 1800, and either accomodated, contained or resisted it, from the Atlantic to East Asia, and everywhere in between.

He is currently undertaking a new research project funded by a British Academy Small Grant award, titled 'Indigenous Enslavement and the Beginning of English Plantation Colonies in the Lesser Antilles, 1600 - 1676'. The project seeks to reinsert the Indigenous Kalinago people back into narratives of England's use of enslaved labour in the Caribbean. Instead of a neat linear narrative from free indentured to unfree slave labour, triggered by the sugar boom, the project will show how Indigenous slave labour was used by English settlers from the very beginning of colonisation in the Caribbean and continued into the later seventeenth century despite the onset of mass slave labour from West Africa. He has begun writing his third book on the project, which will be published with Icon Books in 2027.

David is happy to supervise historians on a broad range of topics, from the East India Company to the wider themes of European colonialism and Early Modern Global History.

I am willing to supervise a PhD

2023

2021

2020

2019

2018

  • PublishedGender
    Veevers, D., 2018, The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c.1550-1750. Veevers, D. & Pettigrew, W. (eds.). Brill, Vol. 16. p. 187-210 13 p.
    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
  • PublishedIntroduction
    Veevers, D. & Pettigrew, W., 2018, The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c.1550 - 1750. Veevers, D. & Pettigrew, W. (eds.). Brill, Vol. 16. p. 1-42 42 p.
    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review

2017

2015

2013