Tin Học Cho Người Mới Bắt Đầu tải về miễn phí cuốn sách

Riyan Ganteng riyanganteng — Captivity, Linda Colley reports in this engagingly written and lavishly illustrated study, was an influential but understudied element of the British imperial project of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Before the middle of the 1800s, Britain was a small nation with a massively overextended empire, and the experience of capture demonstrated the vulnerability of its subjects and how easily non-Western peoples could thwart Britain's ambitions. In the seventeenth century, England aspired to dominate the rich trade of the Mediterranean, but “the sea that enticed...could also entrap” (p. 41), and Barbary corsairs took and enslaved 20,000 Englishmen by 1800. Barbary captivity became a unifying event for the English nation, generating fund-raising campaigns for ransom payments and public processions for returned captives. The actual experience of slavery proved less than terrible for most of these captives – slaves under Islam could legally marry and own property – and those who were ransomed brought home a positive view of Muslims, describing them as an urbane people whose faith was less threatening than Catholicism. The second and third groups of English captives whom Colley studies were Indian captives, in both senses of that adjective: the four or five thousand colonists captured by American Indians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the 1,700 prisoners-of-war taken by the Mysore kingdom in the Indian subcontinent. Native American captivity induced “panics” in colonial settlements and inspired a popular genre of literature, the Indian captivity narrative. Metropolitan Britons were initially indifferent to colonists' suffering; later, when several thousand British soldiers became French and Indian prisoners during the Seven Years' War, Britons began to produce their own Indian captivity narratives, but with a more nuanced view of Indians than the colonists'. By the 1770s many came to see Native Americans as victims of colonial aggression, and American colonists as people unfairly demanding privileges denied to other imperial subjects. Later in the century, after the American Revolution reduced the British empire to a low ebb of power, the East India Company's isolated holdings in India came under pressure from Tipu Sultan, and during the Mysore Wars of the 1780s and '90s many British soldiers became prisoners. Their narratives emphasized both the vulnerability of the British empire in India and the virtuous perseverance of Britons against a treacherous foe. CAPTIVES strongly resembles Colley's earlier book, BRITONS, in that both identify similar factors shaping group identity: a large and dangerous external threat (the French Empire, the Muslim world), a belief in the nation's collective virtue and its underdog status, and the use of print culture to spread both ideas. In the volume under review, Colley argues that Britons applied the narrative elements of nationalism to the ideological construction of empire: until the 1850s, Britons viewed their empire more as an exotic domain of peril and suffering than as a source of pride and wealth. One might further argue that such an imperial narrative is far more compelling for ordinary people than one that exclusively focuses on military conquests and on painting the globe red. One ominous development in Colley's account is the increasing xenophobia of Britons toward their imperial allies and subjects toward the end of the eighteenth century. Before 1800, British captives were able to hold nuanced views of Muslims and Native Americans, but increasingly thereafter they tended to view colonial peoples as savage, effete, treacherous, or some combination thereof. Was this change a product or a cause of Britain's shift from an informal commercial empire to a military and administrative one? This is a question worth asking, perhaps in a future book.