Introduction

In her book, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (2004), historian Linda Colley speaks of Englishmen and women as ‘individuals caught up bodily in zones of imperial contest, forced into protracted encounters where they were at the bottom, and other people who were generally not European, and not Christian, or white, had power of life or death over them’ (16). These were individuals, Colley writes, ‘who got caught and caught out because of this [Britain’s imperial] power’s amalgam of incessant extroversion and aggression, and frequent and intrinsic vulnerability’ (17).