Captivity and Captivation: Gullivers in Brobdingnag

Linda Colley. Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600-1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002). Pp. 468. £20. ISBN 0224059254

William Dalrymple. White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London: HarperCollins, 2002). Pp. 640. £8.99 (paper). ISBN 0006550967

Arthur Conan Doyle. The Tragedy of the Korosko (1898; rep., London: Hesperus, 2003). Pp. 112. £5.59 (paper). ISBN 184391039x

Daniel Vitkus, ed. Piracy, Slavery and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia Univ., 2001). Pp. 416. $62 (cloth) ISBN 0231119046. $23.50 (paper) ISBN 0231119054

You cannot condemn the ways of Europe for not being those ofTahiti, nor our ways for not being those of Europe. You need a more dependable scale of judgment. . . . Do you know a better one than general welfare and individual utility?

—Denis Diderot, Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage

During the seventeenth century and much of the eighteenth, three great Islamic empires, each more powerful and far wealthier than any European state, held sway over a vast territory in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of south-eastern Europe. The Ottomans controlled the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, the Safavids ruled Persia and parts of what is now Afghanistan, and the Mughals struggled to hold India against recalcitrant Hindu kingdoms and rival Moslem sultanates in the south. In North Africa the regencies of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers were formally subject to but increasingly autonomous from the Sublime Porte, while the powerful Sultan of Morocco, controlling the vital Straits of Gibraltar, was fiercely independent and pursued his own course. An important part of the economy of these four regimes derived from plunder of European shipping in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and the regimes maintained large corsair fleets for this purpose. Successive Islamic dynasties had been the dominant Middle Eastern power for a thousand years; and although the seventeenth century marked the height of Ottoman expansion and the eighteenth century the beginning of the end, it was not apparent to contemporaries that they were in terminal decline or that defeat outside the walls of Vienna in 1683 or acceptance of the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699—which recognized the loss of European territory and acknowledged other powers as equal states—were anything more than temporary setbacks. In the early stages of the Enlightenment radical thinkers such as Spinoza cited the might of Islam and the extent of its dominions as evidence that universal Christianity might not be the world's divinely appointed destiny, and as late as the 1750s Voltaire commented that nothing very positive had emerged from years of constant warfare with the crescent: "The Christian powers have lost a great deal to the Turks within these five centuries [i.e., since the Crusades], and have scarcely gained anything from each other." ¹

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed a slow shift in the balance of power between East and West, the decline of all the Islamic empires, and the rise of Britain as the world's preeminent power—eclipsing the former maritime empires of Spain, Portugal, and Holland, and limiting France to a peripheral role. Between the Ottoman defeat at Vienna and the 1840s, when its decline was so apparent that the Czar could dub it "the sick man of Europe," the stand-off between the European and Moslem worlds was not unlike the Cold War between the West and the Soviet bloc from the late 1940s to the 1980s. The major powers avoided direct conflict, but there was continual confrontation and skirmishing at the periphery, where the great tectonic plates rubbed together; and for two hundred years the major earthquake zones were southern Russia, North Africa, and India. As in the Cold War, defection and imprisonment were prominent features of the interaction between the two systems. The vivid parable with which Linda Colley chooses to illustrate the themes of her absorbing study is not an obvious story of conquest and domination like Robinson Crusoe, but Swift's...