Captives: Britain, empire and the world 1600-1850 Linda Colley Jonathan Cape, 438pp, £20 ISBN 0224059254

When I worked on the foreign desk of the Guardian years ago, there was a special category of news that we foreign specialists regarded with disdain. We labelled it "Brits in distress", and immediately handed over the agency tapes to the home news desk, where they were greeted with enthusiasm and often put on the front page. These stories of murder and mayhem and imprisonment affecting British citizens in distant parts, so irrelevant (we thought) to an understanding of the outside world, were grist to the mill of the tabloid-conscious home editors, who knew in their bones that they were just what the readers would fancy.

In Captives, a brilliantly illuminating study by one of Britain's most distinguished and adventurous historians, Linda Colley has mined the archives for similar tales of Britons held in durance vile. Like a good news editor, she recognises their true historical significance, and reveals why these ostensibly banal incidents have had such a purchase on readers over more than four centuries. She uses the material from these rich seams not for any prurient purpose, but to cast a new and wholly original light on the development of the British empire - and on its reception at home. It is a bravura performance.

"Captivity narratives", as they are rather clumsily labelled, were once a prime source of information for the wider public about developments in the far-flung empire. Here, they become the raw material for a reassessment of the personnel of empire - soldiers and sailors, poor whites and women in particular - and an attempt to reintegrate the history of empire into that of the British Isles.

Colley started life as a historian of 18th-century Britain. She is famous for her study of the invention of the British nation in the century after 1707, Britons: forging the nation (1992). When she started to move out of that mental cage and began to look at the wider history of empire, she was clearly astonished to find how different was the bleak imperial picture emerging from the evidence of the captivity narratives when compared with the retrospective and roseate images on offer in the 19th and 20th centuries. Empire in the early years was endlessly challenged, permanently under threat, with its armies undermanned and underfunded, and its citizens frightened and insecure.

Captives is designed in three sections, each one of which might have made a single volume of impressive originality. The first section concerns Britain's empire in the Mediterranean - a subject about which I suspect many readers, as I was, will be wholly unfamiliar - from the establishment of a colony at Tangier in 1662 to the French conquest of Minorca in 1756 (and the downfall of Admiral John Byng). The second section deals with a century and a half of British colonial experience in North America, while the third part looks at British India at the end of the 18th century, confronted by the armies of Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan. The book concludes with a coda on Afghanistan in 1842.

Throughout the first and final parts of the book runs the story of Britain's continuing encounter with Islam, which gives this sturdy work of imperial revisionism an unexpected present-day relevance. The first "captives" of the title were those seized by "pirates" off the Barbary coast, the shoreline of Islamic countries from Libya to Morocco. Like the "sea gypsies" in the archipelago south of Singapore with whom the British did battle in the 1830s and 1840s, these Islamic pirates were not really pirates at all. They were privateers, state-licensed offshore tax-gatherers, taking tolls from the passing trade, and attacking ships of the states with which their countries were at war.

In the Mediterranean maelstrom of the 17th century, everyone was involved in the same game - the French, the Italians, the Dutch, the Portuguese and the Spanish. Prisoners were taken, sometimes to be sent into slavery and sometimes to be held for ransom. The line from "Rule Britannia", written in 1740, that "Britons never will be slaves" had for long been the reverse of the truth. Thousands of Britons were held captive on the North African coast, or set to work as galley slaves. Slavery, Colley reminds us, could be white as well as black, and was recognised as such by the British at home. "A great number of our good subjects peaceably following their employment at sea," announced a royal proclamation in the 1690s, are now "slaves in cruel bondage . . . driven about by black-a-moors, who are set over them as task-masters" - a reference to the black slave soldiers of Morocco.

To the British, this hostage-taking was the terrorism of the day, and Colley gives a riveting account of how communities across the country, mobilised by the churches, were dedicated to fundraising for the purpose of ransoming the captives. Although she does not say so, it is not too fanciful to imagine that the deep well of popular concern for foreign tragedies, tapped into today by contemporary organisations such as Oxfam, Christian Aid, Save the Children, or Amnesty International, was first constructed through the ransom appeals of the 17th century. This concern was originally aroused on behalf of the Christian inhabitants of the British Isles, made more poignant by their being held captive under the crescent rather than the cross, and their hopes of eventual salvation seriously at risk.

The captivity narratives from North America were rather different, and in the early years they made little impact on the British Isles, as they were rarely published on this side of the Atlantic. The Indians rarely sought to ransom their captives, so no fundraising appeals were made in Britain. Not until the outbreak of the Seven Years' War in 1756 did the British begin to take a keen interest in America and in the captivity narratives it had produced. By then, it was a bit late.

Colley uses her material to show how the British islanders and the American colonists were gradually moving apart in the centuries before 1776 - and nowhere more so than in their attitude towards the Indians, who are placed centre stage in her story. The authorities in London perceived the Indian chiefs as potential allies, whose followers might be used as military allies, much as the French in Canada had been able to do. Indeed, the real cause of the American revolution was not so much the affront to the colonists of taxation without representation. Rather it was that the British had handed the American hinterland over to the Indians and intended to prevent the settlers from moving west. The settlers, for their part, had grown over the years to see the Indians only as a permanent threat and danger to their homes and plantations. As Colley puts it, "they yearned progressively for these peoples' lands, and for their disappearance", not to say extermination. After 1776, they got their chance.

Colley's concluding section deals with the other Indians in India proper, and here too, as in the earlier chapters, she looks closely at the stories of the captives who in effect joined the other side. Throughout the early history of empire, the imperial frontiers were always permeable, and apparently solid British citizens could easily end up dressed in Muslim kit, happy in their new lives.

Colley's purpose throughout has been to try to escape from the one-dimensional view of empire, and to view it in all its complexity. As empire is once again on the world's agenda, her landmark study of the British variant should provide fuel for many fresh debates.

Richard Gott is writing a history of imperial rebellions

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