Hostages Have Often Paid the Price for British Imperial Ventures
Linda Colley, in the Guardian (Sept. 25, 2004):
An innocent man going about his business is seized by Muslim raiders, and his life is put at risk. Members of his family issue desperate pleas for his safety and release. Special church services and prayer meetings are held on his behalf. Petitions are dispatched to London urging the powerful to "do something" to free him. In sections of the media there are dark mutterings about the clash of civilisations.
No: this is not to do with poor Kenneth Bigley and his terrifying and terrible ordeal. I am writing about those Britons who were held captive in North Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries; but I could equally well have been referring to British captives in other continents and at other times. As far as these small islands are concerned, recurrent crises over hostages and captives is part of the price we have paid over the centuries for intruding so busily and often very violently into other people's lands.
In the early modern era, British commercial interests in the Mediterranean and colonial incursions into Tangier, Gibraltar and Minorca made us more vulnerable to the so-called Barbary corsairs. These were privateers, operating out of Morocco and other North African polities, who attacked Christian merchant and fishing vessels at sea, and took those on board captive. At least 20,000 Britons suffered this fate between 1600 and 1730. Some of these victims were enslaved in North Africa for years, or for ever. Others (just like Muslims captured by Christian corsairs) were forced to row in galleys - effectively a death sentence.
Those men and women who left Britain to settle in North America were also vulnerable to capture, sometimes by rival European colonisers, but mainly by Native Americans. The latter seized at least 3,000 British settlers in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia in the late 1750s alone. Many of these captives were ordinary folk, farmers, labourers, women, and children. The luckier ones were often absorbed into the tribes of their captors; but male captives were sometimes tortured to death. Naturally, in the years before the Raj was securely established, there were also many British captives in India. In 1780, perhaps one-in-five British-born soldiers in India were being held in captivity, most of them in the powerful southern Indian state of Mysore.
Some of these men were killed by their captors. Others died of malnutrition, or wounds, or despair. But, again, it was not only those in uniform who suffered. One of EM Forster's little-known works is an edition of the autobiography of Elizabeth Fay, a very ordinary Englishwoman who was reduced to utter terror when she was briefly held captive in Mysore.
These kinds of imperial captivities, whether of soldiers or civilians, also occurred in the 19th century. Some of the most famous happened when the British invaded Afghanistan in 1838. They did so not to colonise the region, but to enforce regime-change in Kabul. Initially, things went smoothly. Then, as tends to happen in Afghanistan, it got rough. Over 12,000 British and Indian troops perished in this Afghan war. Others were sold into slavery. And well over 100 British men, women and children were held captive for several months.
As with other captivity crises - as now - the fate of the individuals caught up in these overseas traumas aroused deep emotion and anger back in Britain. The captives in Afghanistan, wrote one London journalist in 1843, had: "excited more interest in the mother country than all the other events of the war"; "The history of the world," claimed another, "barely contains scenes of more terrific interest." ...