You could take two outwardly contradictory lessons from the historian David Turner’s new book on disability in the UK. First, that alarmingly little has changed for disabled people since the beginning of the modern age (the book’s first few stories, of 17th-century men and women having to prove they were disabled enough to receive parish support to avoid starvation, will be familiar to anyone who has tried to claim the personal independence payment). And second, that absolutely everything has changed - from the closing of asylums to the advent of prosthetics to the eventual, belated enshrining of disability rights in law.

But the central argument of Disability helps to reconcile these two narratives into a coherent whole. Turner, a professor at Swansea University, shows that while public and political attitudes to disability have remained poor, disabled people have challenged them at every stage, wresting progress out of even the most unpromising circumstances. This is not a story of rights and dignity bestowed from on high, but of the people and communities clawing them into being.

The sweeping perspective is anchored by incredible personal stories. We meet Duncan Campbell, an aristocrat who, at the turn of the 18th century, became a sensation as a deaf psychic, trading on myth and rumour relating to his disability to boost his fame and credibility at a time when deafness was equated with being childlike and ineducable. Or, two centuries later, May Billinghurst, the infamous “cripple suffragette” who used her bespoke hand-operated tricycle to break through police lines and commit acts of civil disobedience. Or, later still, Megan du Boisson, a 1960s housewife who campaigned for the first disability benefits awarded solely on the basis of impairment, when existing schemes only covered those injured at work or in war, leaving out almost all disabled women.

What they, alongside many others in the book, have in common is that they not only resisted the material limitations society imposed on them, but also rejected the assumptions that went with them. The cumulative picture is therefore not of a downtrodden minority but one defined by ingenuity, determination and grit. This may be a new perspective for many nondisabled readers, but members of the community will find themselves recognising the attributes of they and their friends in people who lived hundreds of years ago. It is welcome to see this understanding of disability so well articulated in a book for a general audience.

One sign of the devaluing of disability activism and history is the fact that none of the personalities in the book are household names. May Billinghurst surely deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the Pankhursts, and we ought to know that it was Vic Finkelstein, an anti-apartheid activist who applied what he had learned in South Africa to the UK disability rights movement, who first articulated what would become known as the social model of disability in the early 1970s, paving the way for activism that went far beyond calls for better financial support.

We should know, too, the name of 18th-century MP William Hay, who Turner describes as the first person to write about disability as a personal identity, just as we should know the names of Barbara Lisicki and Alan Holdsworth, the punk couple who kickstarted the successful 1980s and 90s campaign for the UK’s first comprehensive disability rights law. All fought loud battles with governments and societies that wanted them to be quiet. Hopefully this book goes some way to giving them the status – and voice – they deserve.

In showing how disabled people throughout history have rejected the narratives foisted upon them, Turner in turn rejects another false narrative: that disabled people are passive recipients of both discrimination and help. This book tells another, truer story: that we have always resisted and always fought to make things better.