Captives: The Story of Britain's Pursuit of Empire and How Its Soldiers and Civilians Were Held Captive by the Dream of Global Supremacy
By Linda Colley
Pantheon Books
438 pp.; $27

In mid-February The New York Times reported that three Americans captured by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia "could be held as war booty." It seems that the guerrillas want to trade politicians and policemen they are holding captive for fellow rebels being held in Colombian prisons and, the Times continues, the Americans offer "potentially valuable leverage."

The survivors among the Japanese citizens kidnapped years ago by North Korea (many of whom remain unaccounted for) can probably feel these American captives' pain. As Princeton University professor Linda Colley points out in this outstanding book, nations, armies, pirates, and rogue regimes have long taken captives for various reasons—to hold them for ransom, to make slaves of them, to gain a sense of power over enemies, to compensate for losses in war, to acquire information.

Everyone knows that Europeans enslaved Africans in the early modern period. Fewer know that Africans, too, enslaved Africans, as did Arabs. I suspect even fewer know that Arabs—"Barbary pirates"—"Turks"—enslaved Europeans. But early modern Britons—"English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish men, women and children," among others—knew better. They knew, for instance, that if they ventured toward the Straits of Gibrcaptionar they had a decent chance of being captured and becoming a North African's slave. But, then again, one needn't have ventured far: "Among nineteen women redeemed from Algiers in 1646, were two, Ellen Hawkins and Joan Brabrook, who had been seized fifteen years before from Bcaptionimore, County Cork."

Cast your eyes across the Atlantic to the North American continent and things grow more complex still; for there we find Europeans enslaving natives, natives enslaving captured Europeans, Englishmen enslaved by Frenchmen, and French captives abandoning European ways for the sake of assimilation into a native culture. We find some Englishmen treating savages savagely and others, many of whom had been captured as children, loath to return to Western civilization. Later we find Americans who had established a moderately peaceful modus vivendi with natives turning against "redskins" because of their associations and alliances with the British "red coats" of the Revolution.

Elsewhere in this book we stumble over Britons—quite a few of them—who would rather trade with dark-skinned Muslims than with pale-faced Catholics. We find soldiers from the British army—an institution supposedly infested with young ruffians committed to white supremacy—deserting in India, taking on Islamic names, and marrying locals. Other military men who were captured by Indians preferred to stay with their captors rather than seeking to escape, for sometimes their fate as captives was less dismal than the everyday lives they led in the army—where, before the 1830s, flogging was habitual and furloughs in England practically nonexistent. "Company soldiers were allowed to [enlist] for twelve years," Colley writes, "but since they received a pension only after twenty-one years, most signed on for life: or rather death. … Before [the 1850s], few private soldiers and NCOs in India could hope to live long enough to fulfill their term of service and return to Britain." Under such circumstances, desertion, sometimes fed by the simple desire to marry and have children, makes a great deal of sense.

One point Colley makes repeatedly is that imperial Britain was both intrusive and vulnerable. It's astonishing that, at its height, Britain's global empire was 125 times larger than the British Isles themselves. (By contrast, the Dutch empire at its peak "was perhaps fifty times bigger than the Netherlands.") But Britain's grasp wasn't always as strong as it might have seemed. Small in size and population, it could not have acquired the empire it did (even briefly) without the assistance of locals. In the late 18th century, the British East India Company "increasingly relied on local rulers, agents and landowners to raise men and taxes, and employed a growing array of Indian informants, spies, suppliers, clerks, and administrators of all kinds." By the late 1830s, most of the 200,000 men who served in the British East India Company's private army were Indian.

Readers in search of support for the sad prejudice of the contemporary academy, wherein westerners are basically bad and English people are the worst, will find this book challenging. Colley is committed to seeing all of her subjects—soldiers and officers, slaves and masters, captives and captors—as flawed human beings very much like us. She keeps her eyes on the necessary complexity of human action in the past, and the delightful result is a book that does much to correct the glib generalizations that textbooks trade in.