Over the course of his distinguished scholarly career, Ian Steele has made important contributions to the histories of North American colonial empire, warfare, the Atlantic, and Amerindian history. In his newest book, Steele offers an exhaustively researched and sprawling study of captivity in Allegheny country between 1745 and 1765. His study proposes to construct a multidimensional history of captivity as object of political struggle, terrain for imperial and intercultural conflict, fact of borderland life, culturally situated social practice, lived individual experience, object of reflection, subject of narration, and stuff of mythmaking. The book retraces how European imperial powers, colonial settlers, and Amerindian communities mobilized a variety of practices and understandings of warfare and captivity in the mid-Atlantic borderlands; it reconstructs how two decades of conflict reshaped these practices; it excavates captives’ specific experiences and strategies when faced with capture; and it trains a critical eye on contemporary captivity accounts.

Drawing upon an impressive documentary foundation composed of archival sources, captivity accounts, and correspondences, Steele builds his study around a database composed of 6,130 people who were either captured or killed during wars in the Alleghenies over the course of the period under study. While this approach makes the book a long and at times arduous read, it nonetheless carries considerable payoffs: it makes possible the construction of a finely grained sociological portrait of captives and their experiences, one sensitive to gender, age, social station, specific situations, and the superposed chronologies of borderland history and local and imperial warfare; it also provides a measure of the scale and importance of the phenomenon on the imperial fringes of British North America. The book's exhaustive approach also demonstrates the considerable complexity of the captivity phenomenon – product of negotiations between culturally specific conceptions of combatants and noncombatants; of wartime, peacetime and raiding warfare; and of captives, hostages and prisoners of war – as well as the place of captivity within Amerindian kinship and adoption practices, European insistence on the return of captives, the weight of local situations, and the appropriation and adaptation of new practices. Following the example of historians like Brett Rushforth, Linda Colley and John Demos, who see in captivity a privileged site for the narration of imperial history, Steele's book offers a significant contribution to a range of scholarly conversations on the histories of empire, intercultural exchange and conflict, warfare, Native America, North American frontiers and borderlands. Its broad focus brings to bear categories drawn from social, gender, cultural, political, and military history, as well as ethnohistory.

Steele divides his book into five parts. Part One considers captivity before the Seven Years War, analyzing Amerindian raiding warfare and the ambiguous status of fur traders, whom Amerindians were reluctant to capture, given their role as a source of arms and other essential trading goods and their ineligibility for adoption, yet who were often caught in broader struggles between the French and British commercial empires. Part Two offers a detailed narrative of capture and captivity during the Seven Years War. Successive chapters analyze raids, sieges, pitched battles, and the persistence of war on the Allegheny frontier after 1763 during the Anglo-Indian War. Part Three considers captivity as social experience. Successive chapters analyze the “trail into captivity” – the arduous march of white captives back to Amerindian communities – the complex processes of acculturation aimed at producing “white Indians” – European or colonial captives integrated into Amerindian communities –captives’ escape efforts, and the experience of loss among captives’ family and friends. Part Four considers efforts to win the release of captives, analyzing gift exchanges, diplomatic negotiations, redemption attempts, and campaigns to liberate captives by force mounted by local communities or the British army. Part Five considers the aftermath of captivity, analyzing redeemed captives’ difficult reintegration into their societies of origin as well as the self-consciously crafted first-person accounts of captivity experiences and the ways in which they were received and read. The book closes with an appendix cataloguing all named captives taken in the Allegheny country between 1745 and 1765.

Given the rich empirical evidence gathered here, one wonders if more could have been made of it. Did captivity operate in ways specific to the Allegheny country, or are Steele's conclusions generalizable to other terrains? How does the mid-eighteenth-century experience compare with that of earlier periods? Can useful comparisons be drawn with other borderland and imperial contexts? Such reservations aside, this is a book that already accomplishes so much and will occupy a significant place in the historiography of colonial America. Such interrogations will help guide future research.