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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.

Captives is that rare thing—a highly imaginative scholarly work that is as readable as it is interesting. Colley's earlier work Britons: Forging a Nation (1992) is excellent. Captives is even better.

Preston Jones is a contributing editor to Books & Culture.

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Books & Culture Corner appears Mondays at ChristianityToday.com. Earlier Books & Culture Corners and Book of the Week include:

Another Third Way? | The mixed record of Catholic social thought. (Feb. 17, 2003)

Divine Numbers | Can you say "Christian" and "mathematics" in the same sentence? (Feb. 10, 2003)

Getting Beyond Victimology | A provocative collection of essays for "the black silent majority." (Feb. 3, 2003)

Strange Bedfellows | Christopher Hitchens and Christopher Caldwell collaborate on a collection of political writing. Has the millennium arrived unnoticed? (Jan. 27, 2003)

Encounters of the Gods | Christianity and Native American religion in early America. (Jan. 20, 2003)

Books Present, Books Past, and Books to Come | Plus: A new format for this column. (Jan. 13, 2003)

Double Indemnity Meets Dead Souls | A conversation with novelist Richard Dooling. (Jan. 6, 2003)

Books of the Year | The top ten. (OK—make that twelve.) (Dec. 30, 2002)

Entertain Us | Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and the rapture of distress. (Dec. 16, 2002)

Boys Will Be Boys | A new book by a leading Christian feminist scholar inadvertently reveals the flawed assumptions underlying much talk about "flexibility" in gender roles. (Dec. 9, 2002)

Street Cred | Dave Eggers: The portrait of an artist as a … what? (Dec.2, 2002)

Epicurus'—and Darwin's—Dangerous Idea | How we became hedonists. (Nov. 18, 2002)

Weird Science? | A Darwinian debate continues. (Nov. 11, 2002)

Of Moths and Men Revisited | A Darwinian debate. (Nov. 4, 2002)

Angels in Heaven | A game that's more than a game. (Oct. 28, 2002)

Number One with a Bullet | America's foist family as a tool for evangelism. (Oct. 21, 2002)

Train Up a Child | Helping children to become intimately familiar with Scripture. (Oct. 14, 2002)

Acting Like Those 'Evangelicals' | Guilty as charged? (Sept. 30, 2002)

Ugly Evangelicals | Is this us? (Sept. 23, 2002)

Herbie Goes Bananas | The rise and fall and rise and fall and rise of the VW Beetle. (Sept. 16, 2002)

So Far, So Near | A graduate of Murree Christian School in Pakistan, the site of a deadly assault by Islamic terrorists in August, reflects on his growing-up years, on what has changed in the interim, and on the beleaguered Christian community in Pakistan (Sept. 9, 2002)

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