Until the Dragon Comes

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Today, captives and thieves, with Catherine M. Cameron’s Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World and Megan Whalen Turner’s modern classic The Thief.

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Catherine M. Cameron, Captives: How Stolen People Changed The World. Lincoln Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. 2016.

This is a very readable and fascinating book. Its focus is on captive-taking (and, in consequence, on enslavement and marginalisation) in small-scale societies, drawing primarily on evidence from the Americas. A small-scale society is one that might be called “tribal”: not a state or, for the most part, even a proto-state. Maybe a chieftancy. Maybe a band. While Cameron’s work focuses on the small-scale, some of what her evidence and her arguments illuminate about captives and enslaved people has broader relevance.

The table of contents includes seven chapters: The Captive in Space, Time, and Mind, Captive-Taking and Captive Lives: the Sources, The Captive as Social Person, Captives and the Creation of Power, Captives, Social Boundaries, and Ethnogenesis, Captives and Cultural Transmission, and Captives in Prehistory. Cameron’s focus is on the Americas, but the themes she discusses struck me as having interesting relevance to captive-taking in both ancient Greece, my original area of study, and the Viking North Atlantic, my current hobbyist’s obsession. Particularly, in fact, with respect to the links she draws between enslaving captives and the creation and control of non-food surplus on the part of social elites — which provides matter most useful to think about when it comes to textiles and their production, to take one example — with respect to the role of captives in the performance of power and the social shaping of relations of power, and with respect to how captives can be used to define in-group and out-group boundaries and relationships. Less straightforward than this is Cameron’s discussion of how captives might claim or reclaim social power within their new paradigm of captivity, through assimilation, resistance, or some combination of the two.

A thought-provoking and very useful book.

Megan Whalen Turner, The Thief. New York: Greenwillow Books. 1996. This edition 2005.

I’m thirty years behind the times, but I finally understand why people have been recommending this book (and its sequels) to me since I first sidled into a conversation about thieves in fiction way back in my salad days on Livejournal of lamented memory. A short, sharp novel, excellently paced, with a wonderfully unreliable narrator. (He’s lying. Mostly by omission. It’s great.) The political worldbuilding feels strongly influenced by Late Bronze Age Greece, albeit with gunpowder weaponry: the scope is tightly limited, and the characterisation is strong and complex. Well worth checking out.

https://lizbourke.wordpress.com/2026/02/13/136-catherine-m-camerons-captives-how-stolen-people-changed-the-world-and-megan-whalen-turners-the-thief/

http://lizbourke.wordpress.com/?p=140782517