Snippets from a review of two books at: http://warandgame.wordpress.com/2008/02/16/book-reviews-british-empire/ posted on February 16, 2008 ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India 1 Linda Colley's 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. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002. xxii + 438 pp. $27.50 (cloth), $16.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-375-42152-5; 978-0-385-72146-2. 2 Kathleen Wilson's The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century New York and London: Routledge, 2003. xvi + 282 pp. $104.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780415158954; $30.95 (paper), ISBN 9780415158961. Colley's book is about the thousands of ordinary Britons-men and women, soldiers and civilians-taken captive by indigenous rulers and peoples in North Africa, India, and North America between the early seventeenth century and the middle decades of the nineteenth. Part of the book's appeal lies in the drama of the narratives that many of its subjects wrote upon regaining their freedom. In relating these stories, Colley uses her considerable literary talents to the fullest, blending masterful prose with judiciously chosen maps and illustrations. Her main interest, however, is what captivity has to tell us about the larger trajectory of Britain's imperial expansion. For readers of Colley's earlier work on national identity in Britain proper, perhaps the most striking part of her analysis is the vulnerability and fragile national identity of Britons in the colonies. Throughout the book, a leitmotif is that Britain's expansion "always involved dependence on non-whites and non-Christians, and not merely the experience of ruling them" (p. 71). Another theme is the frequency with which Britons taken captive adapted to-and in some cases adopted-the mores of their captors. For groups like the sailors condemned to work as galley slaves on Barbary corsairs, such cultural transgressions were the result of coercion and nothing else. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Britons also voluntarily refashioned themselves, changing religion (usually to Islam), taking non- European husbands and wives, and entering the service of local potentates whose resources frequently outstripped those of the British Empire. As Colley writes of British enlisted men in India during the first half of the nineteenth century, their aristocratic countrymen in the East India Company's officer corps were the object of far more resentment and hatred than the subcontinent's "natives" (p. 343). Although never welcome, captivity for such people could be a chance for escaping the constraints of their own society, whether social, sexual, or religious. [snipped]