History from below

Professor Linda Colley is a distinguished historian. In her Britons, published in 1992, she proved that good, imaginative professional history could attract a wide public. Captives is a more complex book that demands close reading, as she unravels the ambiguities that challenge customary certainties of imperial history.

The empire celebrated at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was ‘reimagined as inexorable and inevitable’. No one could have imagined this in the period she examines from 1600 to 1850. Time and time again, it was an empire challenged by its ‘smallness’, the incapacity of a small island to provide the manpower to run an empire. It was, as a perceptive analyst wrote in the early 1800s, an empire planted in a flowerpot.

The inevitable military disasters and reverses set off ‘captivity crises’ encountered in the conquest of empire. British subjects found themselves captives as prisoners of war. It is their narratives of their sufferings in captivity that sew together this book in order to supply from below a revisionist history of the empire.