'Captives': When Empire-Builders Become Victims
By ADAM HOCHSCHILD
The most powerful empire ever seen extends its influence throughout the planet. Its navy is the world's largest. A key battleground is Afghanistan. And yet in other far corners of the earth, terrorists, some virtually stateless, attack the citizens of this empire at will, killing them or holding them hostage. Many victims are civilians. Some of the most daring terrorist raids take place on the empire's own home soil.
The empire Linda Colley describes in her engaging, gracefully written but somewhat unsatisfying new book, ''Captives,'' is not our own. It is Britain's, between 1600 and 1850. During that time British military and sea power gradually spread around the world. But the very size of Britain's merchant fleet made it vulnerable to attacks from privateers. One particularly aggressive group, the Barbary corsairs of the North African coast, repeatedly sailed into British and Irish port towns in the 1630's to seize hostages who could later be ransomed.
Colley, the Leverhulme research professor at the London School of Economics, is best known for her 1992 study, ''Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837,'' an account of how a powerful modern state emerged from the combustible, fractious mix of English, Scottish and Welsh identities; Jacobite rebellion at home; and revolutionary and Napoleonic threats from abroad. It has quickly and deservedly become the standard history of Britain in that period. Her new book, however, is more like a traditional monograph, for Colley restricts her focus to the intensive study of one small body of literature. Under her microscope are the stories of Britons venturing abroad in three areas -- North Africa, North America and India -- who were taken captive.
''Captivity narratives'' have recently won much attention from historians of American culture, although not so much from their counterparts in Britain. Colley points out how the theme of captivity dominates one national epic, ''Gulliver's Travels,'' and appears continually in British poetry, song, art, fiction and journalism. Conquerors everywhere always prefer to see themselves as victims; the story of Britons held in the Black Hole of Calcutta came to overshadow the stories of the far greater number of Africans and Asians killed or captured by the British.
Nonetheless, the number of Britons taken prisoner during the empire's expansion is startling. Colley estimates that at least 20,000 British and Irish captives were held in North Africa between 1600 and 1750, and that some 3,000 settlers were captured by American Indians in the 1750's and 60's in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia alone. In fighting that began in 1779 at least one out of five British soldiers in India ended up in enemy custody. One of the most famous North American British captives, John Smith, whose life was supposedly saved by Pocahontas, had previously been seized by the Ottoman Turks and sold as a slave in Constantinople. Fear of humiliating captivity went hand in hand with empire building -- and still does, as Colley gently reminds us, noting the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-81, and the peculiar, obsessional belief that there were still American prisoners hidden in Southeast Asia after the end of the Vietnam War.
Colley examines the British captives' stories from every angle, and in her hands much is revealed. Anxiety about capture was so acute because Britain's army was spread so thin. Furthermore, the British could not completely demonize the darker peoples who kept capturing them, because the only way this small nation could take over so many larger territories was by enlisting or allying with favored groups of Indians, Africans and Native Americans. Another theme is the way British authorities always feared that people long held captive would ''go native'': by converting to Islam and getting circumcised, or by marrying Hindu wives or otherwise adopting their captors' customs. Many did: after Peter Williamson survived captivity in North America and finally was buried in his native Scotland, he was in moccasins, fringed leggings and a headdress of feathers.
As a writer, Colley is seldom less than elegant, and her book is enlivened by sharp-eyed descriptions of what some of the various places of captivity look like today, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the ruins of the island fortress of Seringapatam in India. She has an amazing set piece about a 1751 pageant at Covent Garden Theater, featuring emaciated Britons just returned from five years' captivity in Morocco and wearing rags and chains again for this strange appearance on stage. There is marvelous detail on every page, from the ancestry of the Stars and Stripes in the horizontal red and white stripes of the East India Company's flag to how the British obtained Tangier: ''Charles II . . . acquired the settlement along with other colonial booty in 1661, as part of the dowry of his sad, barren Portuguese bride, Catherine of Braganza.''
[However, t]o use captivity stories to talk about the makers of the empire seems to be a case of the tail wagging the dog....The big question that implicitly lurks in the pages of ''Captives'' is how, and at what costs to both conquerors and conquered, did this tiny island less than half the size of Madagascar manage to take over so much of the earth? So why not write the history of the British empire, in all its enlightenment and brutality, arrogance and illusions, greed and noblesse oblige, and use the experience of captivity -- in both directions -- as one of many means to tell the story?
Colley seems to sense this dog-tail problem, for, as if reaching for wider scope than that allowed by captivity tales, she broadens her definition of captivity in two odd ways. The first is to veer off briefly to look at Britons who were held as prisoners of war in the American Revolution -- captivity to be sure, but certainly of a far different, more conventional sort than the captures by non-Europeans that she has been talking about. The second is to include a lengthy chapter on ''Captives in Uniform'' -- the long-suffering British troops who, especially in India, kept the empire going while living in dreadful conditions. The chapter is filled with fascinating information, on deserters, on flogging as the main means of military discipline, on the British-Irish tensions that extended even here and much more. But we've come a long way from captivity: it feels as if the tail had sprouted an extra branch and that this material belonged in a book of broader reach.
It may seem presumptuous to suggest that an author should have written a somewhat different book, but the one I wish Colley had written is the one described on the dust jacket: ''The story of Britain's pursuit of empire and how its soldiers and civilians were held captive by the dream of global supremacy, 1600-1850.'' There are few, if any, living historians who could do a better job.
Adam Hochschild, the author of ''King Leopold's Ghost'' and other books, is writing a history of the early British antislavery movement.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/books/review/05HOCHCHT.html>
Linda Colley, _Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850_, Reviewed by William Dalrymple: <http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0,6121,835662,00.html>
Linda Colley: <http://www.lse.ac.uk/people/l.colley@lse.ac.uk/>
Linda Colley, "What Britannia Taught Bush," _The Guardian_ 20 September 2002: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4504753,00.html> -- Yoshie
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