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Here are the stories of Sarah Shade, who was married to a succession of British military officers, attacked by tigers, and imprisoned by Indian ruler Tipu Sultan; Joseph Pitts, a white slave in Algiers from 1678 to 1693 and author of the first authentic—and very complimentary—English account of the pilgrimage to Mecca; and Florentia Sale, a captive in the Kabul insurrection of 1841 who used her time in confinement as an opportunity to interview military men for her memoir. There were also those who crossed the cultural divide and switched identities, like the Irishman George Thomas, a mercenary fighter for Indian rulers and failed dictator, and those who crossed but made it back, like John Rutherfurd, the onetime Chippewa warrior and Scot.

Colley uses these extraordinary tales to trace the changing boundaries of Britan’s pursuit of empire and its shifting attitudes toward Islam, slavery, race, and American revolutionaries.

Hailed by The Financial Times as a “White Teeth version of imperial history,” Captives is at once an
original chronicle and a prescient meditation on the meaning of empire.]]> 93779 3.60 187 48 2002 5 0 false Mon Dec 01 00:00:00 -0800 2003 Mon Aug 06 19:25:32 -0700 2007 Thu Dec 17 04:03:43 -0800 2009