"Airbrushed from history . . . "

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	• Captives : The story of Britain's pursuit of empire and how its soldiers and civilians were held captive by ... Linda Colley, 2003 - 464 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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"Airbrushed from history . . . "

Once, i hoped for a truly comprehensive survey of the British Empire and its global impact. This excellent book is almost the response i wished for. Colley examines "a quarter of a millennium" in an overview of three stages of Britain's expansionist adventure. From the start, she reminds us, Britain's miniscule population and limited resources made it an unlikely candidate for global expansion. Contending with nations better prepared or more experienced in empire-building, the founding of the British Empire was typified by false starts and unlikely events. In using the accounts of prisoners - kidnappees, prisoners of war or other captives, Colley is able to point out how both public views and policies changed during the growth of the Empire. Most important, she argues, is the need to dispel notions that the empire was monolithic in concept or development.

Clearly organised and written with clarity and intensity, Colley opens her study with an example of glaring failure. How many remember Britain's occupation of Tangier on the west coast of Africa? The city was part of a queen's dowry in 1661, giving Britain a control point over the Mediterranean trade routes [Gibraltar came under British power in 1701]. With Spain, France and Italy, not to mention the Dutch, all expanding their sea-going commerce, Tangier was a key location. The British poured immense sums into Tangier to create a fortified city, but it was lost less than a generation later. Colley explains how relations with the "Barbary" states of North Africa drove British foreign policy for many years. Those relations included ongoing efforts to redeem captives taken by corsairs, swift vessels that even raided coastal areas of the British Isles.

Britain's next expansionist efforts were even less calculated - the settlement of North America. While religious and other dissident groups founded communities along the eastern shores of North America, Britain's policy toward them remained ambivalent. Unlike the mostly military Mediterranean and Indian ventures, Colley says, North America focussed on settlements. When captives were taken, they might thus be whole families, with a wide age range and including more women that would be the case elsewhere. Accounts of captivity, therefore, were different from Tangier. Men taken by the Barbary corsairs might adopt local dress, customs, language, even Islam. This blurred the image of Muslims as the Other - an identifiable enemy figure. In North America, as colonies expanded, the Native Americans became more demonised in tales of warfare and capture. Even so, she notes, the North American enterprise was "poly-ethnic", with many nationalities arriving and the use of favoured Native American tribes as allies.

Britain's Indian incursions, Colley points out, added new dimensions to imperial imagery. Severe defeats and sepoy [Indians acting for British rulers] uprisings forced reflection on colonial costs and eroded prestige. Captivity accounts expanded knowledge of the culture of the subcontinent, demonstrating how many aspects of Indian life might be adopted - even brought home to Britain. Yet, captive accounts are generally sparse or non-existent. The Mysore wars created a population of captive soldiers held in recessed dungeons, but not one account of their ordeal reached print in their lifetimes. By the era of Victorian Britain, tales of captive life were nearly "airbrushed from history".

Given the location of some of her areas of study force comparisons to modern situations. Afghanistan has been the subject of outsider invasion more than once. Each time, while declaring they intended "no war on the Afghan people", people died as the intruders sought to install unpopular leaders on them. Inevitably, the result was embarrassment for the invaders and incarceration of their troops and civilians. Thus, even at the end of the period of Colley's study, she notes that the British Empire was still being consolidated haltingly. Uniformity, never a well-defined condition of the enterprise, remained lacking. Defeats and losses through captivity brought criticism and demands for redemption of captives. It failed to halt the expansionist nature of British policy, however.

Colley's book opens a new phase in historiography. Her eloquent style keeps this book alive for the reader at all times. Those thinking history can only be "dry" when written by an academic are in for a pleasant shock in picking up this book. Well illustrated and containing a rich bibliography, students of empire will welcome this book on their shelves. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

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a new perspective

I very much enjoyed the book. It was, to me, a new perspective on England, the Empire and British influence in very different parts of the world. I was especially interested in the North American section, but since I enjoyed her writing style so much I forged ahead into the Asian section.

I found the book to be densely packed with ideas new to me and topics that generated my interest in learning more.

I recommend this book to those interested in American Revolutionary history as well as British history in general.

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The Cost of Empire

Colley makes it easy to understand why English is the world standard language today: a small population could only control as much as it did by co-opting vast numbers of people and this meant expending captives at a fairly high rate.

Their story is the story of the Empire at its bleeding edge.

Using captives to illuminate imperial expansion is a novel idea and well done.

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reviews: page 1, 2

Britain?s pursuit of empire seems an inexorable march across continents toward its ultimate?if temporary-?global hegemony. But, as Linda Colley shows in this masterfully written book, Britain?s overseas enterprises were always constrained by its own limitations in size, population, and armed forces, and by divisions among its subjects-?constraints and deficiencies that could make the dream of empire an ordeal even for its makers. Drawing on a wealth of captivity narratives by men and women of different social and ethnic backgrounds from the early seventeenth century to the Victorian era, Colley chronicles the complicated dynamic between invader and invaded.

Here are the stories of Sarah Shade, who was married to a succession of British military officers, attacked by tigers, and imprisoned by Indian ruler Tipu Sultan; Joseph Pitts, a white slave in Algiers from 1678 to 1693 and author of the first authentic?and very complimentary?English account of the pilgrimage to Mecca; and Florentia Sale, a captive in the Kabul insurrection of 1841 who used her time in confinement as an opportunity to interview military men for her memoir. There were also those who crossed the cultural divide and switched identities, like the Irishman George Thomas, a mercenary fighter for Indian rulers and failed dictator, and those who crossed but made it back, like John Rutherfurd, the onetime Chippewa warrior and Scot.

Colley uses these extraordinary tales to trace the changing boundaries of Britan?s pursuit of empire and its shifting attitudes toward Islam, slavery, race, and American revolutionaries.

Hailed by The Financial Times as a ?White Teeth version of imperial history,? Captives is at once an
original chronicle and a prescient meditation on the meaning of empire.

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