CAPTIVES: 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

CAPTIVES: 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. By Linda Colley. Pantheon. 438 pp. $27.50

Linda Colley made her name as a highly original historian with Britons (1993), which explored the deliberate creation of "British" (and anti-Catholic) identity and patriotism after the Act of Union brought England and Scotland together in 1707. Her equally innovative Captives examines the British imperial enterprise through its less publicized failures and the experience of British citizens taken prisoner.

Whatever the anthem "Rule Britannia" might say, Britons were made into slaves with dismaying regularity. By trawling through the archives, Colley can account for at least 8,000 British taken prisoner by the North African pirate beys in the 17th and 18th centuries. And in the wars against Tippoo Sultan of Mysore starting in 1768, some 1,300 British soldiers were held captive—a strikingly high proportion of the approximately 10,000 British troops then in India. These numbers usefully challenge the orthodox narrative of endless success through British military and naval prowess. In land warfare, the British enjoyed little technological advantage once the Indian states hired or suborned European artillery specialists.

Colley places the initial British defeat in India, at Pollilur in 1780, squarely in the context of the parallel reverses suffered a world away in North America. By seeking to hold both India and the North American colonies, the empire was overstretched and humbled. In 1784, when Parliament passed new legislation to regulate the affairs of the chastened East India Company, any further attempts at imperial expansion were explicitly ruled out— "schemes of conquest and extent of dominion [are] repugnant to the wish, the honor, and the policy of this nation."

That changed swiftly with the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and the threat of a French alliance with Tippoo Sultan. The British concentrated naval assets in the Mediterranean to defeat the French in Egypt and sent troops to India to fight Tippoo. The outstanding Admiral Horatio Nelson and General Arthur Wellesley (the future Duke of Wellington) secured India and the Mediterranean, and the reborn British Empire advanced to its most glorious and rapacious phase. Colley splendidly and readably places this triumphal comeback in the context of the nation’s previous losses.

British propaganda often emphasized the interior lives of the country’s captured soldiers—"the strength of their sympathy with one another," in the words of a 1788 memoir. "Teetering on the verge of unprecedented global intervention," Colley writes, "the British then—rather like Americans now—needed to be persuaded that they were not only a superpower, but also a virtuous, striving, and devoted people." She goes on to draw further parallels with the U.S. response to accounts of prisoners of war in North Vietnam. Great powers whose populations are accustomed to victory, it seems, make overseas humiliations tolerable by focusing on individual suffering rather than strategic miscalls.

Colley has something in common with military historian John Keegan, who found a new and illuminating way to retell old tales by focusing on what battle did to its losers and to its wounded. But unlike Keegan, Colley brings a contemporary edge to her writing, as in that reference to the Vietnam War. Some may object to modern politicking in a book about the past, but it adds the spice of controversy and provocation to the writing of one of the most interesting historians at work today.

—Martin Walker