HISTORY: 'The British were not very nice, but they were interesting," Linda Colley told her audience at a Millennium Lecture on empire hosted by Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street in 1999. "English, Welsh, Scots and Irish have all, to differing degrees, been greedy, pushy, intrusive traders and warmongers, aggressive, violent, frequently oppressive, often arrogant and perfidious.
They have also been markedly creative, innovative, curious, energetic, outward-looking, busy." This colourful view underpins Prof Colley's new book, Captives, the follow-up to her bestselling and agenda-setting Britons. Captives takes as its starting point Dean Swift's story of Gulliver, who returns from his travels to be overwhelmed by the stench, ugliness and ignorance of his own countrymen. Captivity, if not necessarily at the
hands of Lilliputians, Brobdingnags and Houyhnhnms, was integral to the British experience of empire. Colley uses accounts written or dictated by Britons captured overseas.
Their reports are raw and often maudlin, but the pain that they convey remains shocking. "Captives and captivities were the underbelly of British empire," writes Colley, and pretty scabrous it was too. Colley weaves together stories of
imprisonment in North Africa, North America and South Asia to make a broader point about
the smallness of Britain itself. Between 1600 and 1850, any country with pretensions wanted an empire. The Western seaborne empires of Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and the Dutch co-existed with the land-based territories of the East, which included the Chinese, Russian, Ottoman (Turkish), Safavid (Persian) and Mughal (Indian) regimes. Of all these the disparity between imperial commitments and domestic resources was greatest in Britain.
Britons on imperial adventures were often left painfully exposed. Unarmed merchantmen were captured at sea because there were not enough Royal Navy convoys to protect them. Unwelcome civilian traders and settlers lacked sufficient army back-up, and were often killed or imprisoned. Even where the British did establish themselves, poorly supplied
and under-strength regiments struggled to protect them.
The result was frequent embarrassing reverses, heavy casualties and high captivity rates, not just in the military, but also among women and children. The Irish were integral to this story. Ireland before the Famine provided almost 40 per cent of the imperial legions. By the 1830s, more than half of all white soldiers serving in India were Irishmen.
Added to this were adventurers such as George Thomas – "the man who would be king" – and wealthy Irish merchants such as the Butlers in Morocco. Many found themselves unprotected and in difficulty. In the 1730s, for example, 29 Irish mercenaries ended up as slaves. They had deserted the British army in Tangiers to serve with the Spanish opposition. Stationed in the brutal garrison of Oran, they quickly decided that life in the British army was not so bad after all, and fled. They were captured in Algiers with their only hope of release coming in desperate appeals to the British Consul.
It is just this kind of event, with its jumble of nationalities, religions and cultures, that makes Linda Colley's new study such an engaging read.
Captives is another important and beautifully written book by this first-rank British historian. It is also frequently moving. There are adventurers aplenty, but what takes the eye are the tales of everyday people caught up in
extraordinary circumstances. All human experience is here for these footsoldiers of history, including greed and selflessness, treachery and fidelity, cowardice and courage. From this emerges a technicolour picture of the variety
and complexity of imperial life. In Linda Colley's empire, nothing is as simple as black and white.
- Richard Aldous teaches history at UCD.
His biography of Malcolm Sargent has just
been published in paperback by Pimlico