History from below

Raymond Carr

CAPTIVES by Linda Colley Cape, £20, pp. 438, ISBN 0224059254

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 bestseller. 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 slay

eiy. 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. Their fate in captivity became common knowledge through ballads, fundraising sermons, above all the captives' narratives of their sufferings. Thomas Troughton's Barbarian Omit}, (1751) was a bestseller. He and his companions were brought to Drury Lane to clang their fetters on the stage. Here again Colley uses history from below for an exercise in revisionism. Edward Said in his influential Orientallsm argues that the premise of imperialism was the downgrading of Islamic culture. Yet while captives dwell on the tortures they have suffered, they show a respect for Islamic society. Moslems were religious, in their own way. Where Protestants studied the Bible, they sought enlightenment in the Koran and were superior to 'poor Romanists who live and die in an implicit faith' in what they are taught by their priests'.

Captives did not despise Muslims, they feared them. The great Moroccan Sultan Moulay [small was an oriental despot, but seemed more secure in his great palace complex of Meknes than the Hanoverians threatened by the Jacobites. The great Protestant fear was that captives might convert to Islam. This was, Colley argues, particularly the case with poor sailors who might expect better treatment in Muslim society than from a harsh landlord at home. Once the Ottoman empire was no longer feared, it could be despised. Colley notes how the transition from the fear of buggery by strong Moorish males was replaced by tales of females subject to but resisting the advances of lascivious Moors. The turning point came with Mrs Marsh's The Female Captive, published in 1769.

If the Barbary corsairs had brought contacts with an alien 'other', Francis Bird's statue that celebrates our gains in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 — Colley with great skill uses images to illustrate her narrative — revealed to Britons that Queen Anne's empire in North America contained a large number of native Indians. With the victories of the Seven Years War of 1756 to 1763 the Indian subjects of the Crown were even more numerous. The original settlers in the American colonies, thirsty for Indian lands, regarded Indians as savages outside the law, while the manstarved government at home might regard them as useful allies. No doubt some British officers might share the racism of the settlers, but captive narratives reveal another story. Peter Williamson, like so many of Colley's captives, was a poor man, marginalised in his own society. In his bestselling French and Indian Cruelty (1762) he complains that North American Indians had been treated as a people of whom advantages might be taken'. Yet unless some method was taken `to draw them into our interest' the British empire would always remain unstable. In

the American War of Independence that ended in defeat in 1783, the British welcomed the help of Indians and blacks who could expect little from a patriot victory. Colley concludes:

The fact that so many blacks and Native Americans sided with the British in the revolutionary war only made it easier for the new Republic to define citizenship in a way that excluded these two groups completely.

The 'smallness' of the metropolitan core remains at the centre of Colley's analysis and explains the recurrent bouts of cold feet on the part of the British government as the men on the spot, like Clive, landed it with new, vast responsibilities. In 1784 Parliament renounced 'schemes of conquest and extent of dominion' in India.

Captivity crises not only traumatise the captives. They traumatise the home societies, releasing insecurities, as America was obsessed in 1980 with the fate of the hostages imprisoned in Iran. In the 1780s our defeats at the hands of Sultan Tipu of Mysore and our disastrous invasion of Afghanistan, easy to conquer and to install a pliant ruler by regime change but difficult to hold, produced an outburst of 'scribbling mania' among the captives. The captives in Mysore and Kabul did not know they would be released, and could treat Tipu as light-skinned and 'agreeable'. Only with victory could he be demonised as black. Vietnam veterans only became heroes once America had recovered its confidence as a great power. British troops in India were regarded as 'scum', only kept by brutal floggings from deserting and crossing the colour line, marrying Indian wives and settling down to a more comfortable existence as renegades. Throughout this book it is the lower classes who show a 'flexibility' about colour. It was not the British troops but the native Indian sepoys who were regarded by British commanders as 'loyal subjects' and were not flogged. Hence the shock horror of the Mutiny.

Captives is not a drum and trumpet history, telling us how Clive, a Shropshire adventurer, won a fortune for himself and Bengal for Britain. It is history from below. Politically correct, it emphasises the fate of the illiterate, lowborn 'captives in uniform' in India, treated with the brutal harshness with which their class was treated at home. Imperial history cannot be severed from the history of Britain. Britons' views of themselves as a providential people under God reflected, in Edwardian Britain, their possession of a global empire. This, I think, was no longer true for my generation.

As a boy of six I visited the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1925 but increasingly the annual celebration at school of Empire Day came to seem the ritual of my father's generation for whom to lose India would reduce Britain, as Churchill argued, to the rank of a secondrate power. Any pretensions of global power are now impossible. The day of seaborne empires has passed and the future lies with the great land empires. Yet, Colley maintains, the yearning for global status has distorted postwar British history. Our smallness 'has encouraged a persistent inclination to pursue empire vicariously by clambering like a mouse on the American eagle's head. That great bird needs no assistance from us, and we should look to our own directions.'

Those less concerned with the political and moral legacies of imperialism but who find the history of the empire a stirring story, may wish to refresh their memories by visiting the brand-new empire museum in Bristol, mistakenly called a Commonwealth Museum, when, as Max Hastings observes, no one cares a stitch about the Commonwealth except the Queen. It may even help me to understand my father.