Volume 50, Number 9 · May 29, 2003
Catching the Conquerors
By David Brion Davis
Captives
by Linda Colley
Pantheon, 438 pp., $27.50
When we remember such events as the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 and consider current reports on the 'detainees' at Guantánamo Bay and the prisoners of war in Baghdad, it becomes clear that the era of America's global dominance is also an era of American and foreign captives. But those of us who are old enough to remember maps of the world on which about one fourth of all land (over 14 million square miles) blazed forth in red, depicting a British empire on which the sun 'never sets and never rises,' do not automatically associate the winning of such an empire with hundreds of thousands of British captives, the subject of Linda Colley's book.
Review, 3776 words
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