REVIEWS Gotcha! by Miles Ogborn LINDA COLLEY Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850, Jonathan Cape, London: 2002; xx + 438 pp., hbk £20.00; ISBN 0-224-05925-4. The flight from Tangiers in 1684, the loss of the American colonies after 1783, defeat by the armies of Tipu Sultan at Pollilur in 1780, and the retreat from Kabul in 1842. These are crucial instances in a history of the defeat of British imperial forces and the thwarting of the ambitions of British imperialists that Linda Colley sets against the ‘Rise of the British Empire’ in her new book Captives. 1 Hers is an argument about the paradoxes of empire. Alongside the increasing power of Britain in the Mediterranean through Gibraltar and Minorca, the massive extension of the British imperium in the Americas via the Seven Years War (1756–1763), the making of a vast Indian empire from the bridgehead in Bengal in the middle of the eighteenth century, and the unparalleled achievement of the largest overseas empire that the world had ever witnessed by the opening decades of the reign of Queen Victoria, Linda Colley brings into view an alternative account of smallness, weakness, fragility and division, and of an empire without direction and dangerously overstretched from the outset and at every stage until 1850. Indeed, we are to see both these histories at the same time. Professor Colley is at pains to stress throughout that nothing that she says about the fragility of empire is to deny its violence, and that nothing in her account of the difficulties of making an empire on a global scale is to doubt that vast swathes of Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific were reshaped by British imperialism. What we are asked to consider, through a pair of familiar maps – of the world turned red by Victoria’s empire and Europe enlarged by Mercator’s projection, and of the ‘post-imperial’ recognition of the claims of the global South in Arno Peters’s projection – is the smallness of the British Isles. This, she argues, is the key. How could such a small country with such a tiny population rule the world? Only with difficulty, since it was always in danger of extending its reach beyond its grasp. Only with violence, because of the anxieties of size and the fear of failure. Only with help, since the assistance of others – of native ‘Others’ – was the sole means of effective rule over huge areas and vast populations. And only as ‘Britons’, because it was with the formation of a remarkably centralized nation- state and the founding of a strongly cohesive national ideology that these meagre resources could be deployed effectively. 2 All of this sent the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish across the seas, and all of it made them vulnerable there. In particular, they were vulnerable to capture by indigenous powers. Captives retells imperial history through accounts of these captivities. History Workshop Journal Issue 56 © History Workshop Journal 2003; all rights reserved at Queen Mary & Westfield College on February 28, 2015 http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from