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. Fascinating reading though they are, Colley is aware of their shortcomings. Some of them were written in the hopes of producing a best- seller. All were an attempt to safeguard their identity as Britons in a hostile world.
This was particularly the case when the captors belonged to an alien culture and religion. In the 16th to 18th century, the barbary Corsairs, operating from Muslim bases in North Africa, captured Christians as a commercial enterprise in order to extract ransoms for their release from slavery. Since the majority of the captives were poor sailors who could not hope to be ransomed by their families, large sums were raised in charity drives organised by the churches.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in