Reviewed by William Henry Foster | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.2

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Reviewed by William Henry Foster | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

William Henry Foster, University of Redlands

Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield. By Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. 408 pages. $29.95 (cloth).
The field of intercultural colonial studies seems healthier than ever, at least in part because the effort to define frontier has in some quarters given way to a more instrumental use of the concept for purposes both grander and more intimate. Some scholars have adopted the lens of cultural exchange to locate complex individual and collective identities—exploring what might be called the middle ground of the soul. Others, meanwhile, have used the crucibles of frontier conflict to expose the normative assumptions of Euro- and Native Americans about gender ideologies, sexuality, consciousness, aesthetics, and performative culture. Yet another, and apparently increasingly popular, category may be characterized as the effort to illuminate whole imperial projects via the dynamic intercultural contacts among marginalized individuals or groups along the frontier's edges. It has been argued with increasing sophistication that settlers at the ambiguous peripheries of empire might nevertheless have succeeded in transmitting defining, if distorted, cultural signs and signals hinting at the nature of the imperial core and the connections that extended outward.	1
One of the most worthwhile examples of this latter approach is Linda Colley's Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (2002). Though Colley has dishearteningly harsh words for, to use her adjective, "provincial" American frontier historians whose pioneering methods she nonetheless relies on heavily, her book performs the useful task of linking Britain's Mediterranean, Atlantic, and East Indian frontiers through the common thread of captivity. One of Colley's ideas seems to be that there is an illuminating association between the large-scale assertion of empire and the small-scale, humiliating rebukes that naturally accompany the imperial (as opposed to colonial) process. Tales of captivity are handy indeed for illustrating these rebukes. One of the limits of this kind of approach to empire studies, however, has been its inherent one-sidedness. Colley, for example, says little about the French and Indians who held British American captives along their shared and porous frontier and whose cultures did so much to shape the cryptic narratives of compromised empire emitted by its vanguard. As for the other frontiers in question, Colley's book contains no Arabic or Hindi language sources whatsoever—sources that may have placed the captivity phenomenon in the additional contexts necessary to fully illuminate the imperial.	2
Now a new book has appeared that seems to adopt exactly this kind of multiple perspective. Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield, a painstakingly researched study by the intergenerational team of Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney, certainly stands as the definitive treatment of that famous occurrence in the death throes of Puritan New England by virtue of having fully come to terms with the texts and contexts of the event. Including captors as well as captives in the title signals the manner in which the book reaches beyond Colley's focus on the latter, and manages to achieve a greater significance than the sum total of the innumerable details that make it up.	3
Yet those details are impressive enough. The introduction sets the tone for what is to follow by an arresting physical characterization of the "colonial empires" as having been "like diaphanous spider webs ... based on networks of relationships that ran from London and Versailles into the interior of North America. Without them, officials in Europe could not project power and influence into places and onto peoples they often poorly understood. With them, colonists and Natives were able to strengthen communities that otherwise would have been destroyed in the turmoil unleashed by European imperialism.... at the edge of empire, solutions became problems and problems became possibilities" (4).	. . .

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