Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Alison Games, Georgetown University

Captivity is a common outcome of global interaction: the recent repatriation of the remains of Sara Baartman, the "Hottentot Venus," reminds us that captivity is a symbol of enduring asymmetries of power in postcolonial societies. Linda Colley might have noted that the reburial of Baartman, the captive, indigenous South African who became a sideshow star in early nineteenth-century Europe, also points up the ways the experience of captivity defined both imperial powers and their colonial subjects. As South African president Thabo Mbeki declared, "It was not the lonely African woman in Europe, alienated from her identity and her motherland who was the barbarian, but those who treated her with barbaric brutality."1	1
By rejecting an old historiography of empire that oversimplifies British expansion, Colley joins a growing chorus of historians who have vigorously emphasized the accidental nature of the empire.2 Colley's monumental book tells two separate but necessarily intertwined histories. One is that of captivity—how people experienced captivity, what they learned from captivity about other populations, how captives were received at home, and how Britons at home and abroad responded to captivity. A corresponding history is that of empire, here forcefully refracted through the medium of captivity narratives to help us see imperial expansion as few have depicted it so emphatically before: characterized by failure, anxiety, uncertainty, ambivalence, nuance, and complex and unpredictable racial ideologies. Captives thus weaves together domestic and imperial history, insisting on their connectedness.	2
Captivity narratives are familiar to scholars of early America; they are staples in both history and literature courses. Colley, however, refreshingly emphasizes that there is nothing unique about North American narratives of captivity. She explores captivity in three different geographic settings: the Mediterranean (in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries), North America (especially in the eighteenth century), and India (from the 1780s to the 1840s). With the exception of the Mediterranean, she focuses on captivity that resulted from wars or other military engagements. She draws on approximately 100 published and manuscript narratives, in addition to references to captivity on epitaphs and in some remarkable drawings.	3
One theme Colley emphasizes, the problematic nature of identity, builds on insights from her earlier work.3 Captivity narratives provide Colley with a creative entrée into questions about identity. She delineates identities that varied depending on location, with Britons at home seeing themselves differently from Britons overseas, and argues that captivity helped to shape and to reveal those identities. In her analysis of American colonists captured during the Revolution, for example, she notes that the British were loath to call captured Americans prisoners of war and did not do so until 1782. She casts the war itself as in part a problem of identity and allegiance: Britons in Britain were hindered during the war by their conflicting perceptions of the colonists as aggressors and by whether to extirpate them or to reconcile with them.	. . .