"We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers." So David Lloyd George explained the British government's demand at the 1932 World Disarmament Conference to keep the right to bomb for "police purposes in outlying places". Airpower had shown its value in spreading what Winston Churchill, when defending in 1919 the use of poison gas against "uncivilised tribes", had called "a lively terror". Richard Gott shows how a hundred years earlier more hands-on means were used to similar ends: the heads of rebel slaves in Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831 were cut from their bodies and placed on poles beside the roads. The mutilation of the corpses of the defeated never quite goes out of fashion.

Empires have always depended on violence. Killing, torture and the destruction of property are essential to those tasks of destroying resistance, extracting information and collaboration, and demonstrating dominance that underly all conquest. But it is the privilege of conquerors to tell stories that flatter their own past. It is, thus, rare to find the historians of any imperial power describing the ugly business of the frontier as more than unfortunate exceptions to an otherwise honourable enterprise. Britain is no exception: from the Victorians until the 1950s, its historians mainly saw in the British empire a great engine for diffusing liberty and civilisation to the world. If such Whig piety declined in the era after Suez, later scholars, studying particular places and times, never connected all the episodes of massacres, rebellions and atrocities. Popular historians continued profitably to sell happy stories of the empire to the British public  always marketed as daring revisionist accounts.

Gott's achievement is to show, as no historian has done before, that violence was a central, constant and ubiquitous part of the making and keeping of the British empire. This vivid and startling book embarks on a journey through the origins of Queen Victoria's Pax Britannica. Except that Gott shows in 66 short, gripping chapters, which take us from North America to the Caribbean, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Africa and Asia, that the span from 1750 to 1860 was never peaceful. Not a year passed, he shows, without conflicts, large and small wars, uprisings, repression and reprisals of astonishing brutality. This kind of study is newer than it seems: while in France there has been Rosa Plumelle-Uribe's La férocité blanche (2001) and Marc Ferro's Livre Noir de Colonialisme (2003), only John Newsinger's shorter The Blood Never Dried (2006) has ever portrayed with such system the dark side of the British empire, or told so fully the stories of those who resisted it.

Imperial history is so often viewed with triumphalism, nostalgia or regret, luring the reader into a patriotic investment in a fictional national past. Gott instead always writes from the perspective of the victims and rebels. We are introduced to a dazzling series of extraordinary men and women  Pontiac in North America, Tacky and Nanny in Jamaica, Papineau in Quebec, Wickrama Sinha in Ceylon, Myat Toon in Burma, Lakshmi Bai in India  who stood at the centre of communities in revolt. Gott shows the injustices that pushed them on the dangerous road of resistance, and makes us partners in their moments of victory and defeat. Yet he is always precise in explaining the British imperial interests at stake, and readers with interests in grand strategy and war, or students searching for vignettes to anchor essays, will derive as much pleasure and benefit from Britain's Empire as those reading for the drama of situation and personality.

Resistance, he shows, was not merely a detail. While most rebellions ended in defeat, North Americans in 1776-83 won their independence, the slave rebels of Haiti by 1798 forced the humiliating surrender of General Maitland, and the Javanese prevented the realisation of Raffles's dream of a British south-east Asia. Gott further punctures the "Jewel in the Crown" idea of the empire by reminding readers, as Linda Colley did in Captives (2002), that it was a very unpleasant place for most British people who went to the frontier as convicts, forced labourers or press-ganged soldiers and sailors. The rebellions of white settlers were as constant a fact of the regime as indigenous resistance.

What Gott loses by this focus on resistance, however, is any subtlety in understanding the meanings of collaboration. He repeatedly imposes the lens of 20th-century nationalism, and even anti-fascism, so that those who did not rebel become traitors or "fifth columnists". He does not examine with care or sympathy the varieties of loyalism, and the motives and experiences of those who chose, however mistakenly, to throw in their lot with the British. Neither does he explore how the economic and technological bases of British power changed between 1750 and 1850. For the revolution that science and industry brought to production, transport, communication and war made Britain able to attract and to extort indigenous collaboration more easily, and changed how the British understood themselves as a nation and their rights in the wider world. The empire was made by more than violence.

Gott has done well to remind us that violence was always at the centre of the "empire story". But this is not a book to make any British person feel guilty. For guilt could arise only if the reader made a narcissistic identification with the past of the British empire. Gott shows instead that today's Britons can, if they dare, choose to identify with the rebels rather than the conquerors, and to claim Lakshmi Bai and Gandhi, rather than Victoria and Churchill, as spiritual ancestors.

 Richard Drayton is the author of Nature's Government (Yale).