About Linda Colley
From Linda’s Website: I am a British-born historian, currently based at Princeton University, who started out working in 18th century England.
Over the course of a long career, my interests have evolved and spread: into curiosity about the forging and the fractures of the United Kingdom; into explorations of aspects of, and individual actors in Britain’s overseas empire; and – in recent decades – into a fascination with how to approach and grapple with the demands of global history.
Throughout, I have been intrigued with issues of identity and their fluctuations, and all my books touch on this in some ways. My first book, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714-1760 (1982), was about partisan identity under pressure. Namier (1988) was a short study of a major historian torn between his Polish and Jewish roots, his interest in Marx and Freud, and his growing desire for English acceptance and real and imagined stabilities. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (1992), which won the Wolfson Prize for history and is now in its fifth edition, was a study of nation-makings and possible breakings. Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850 (2002) examined and re-interpreted sectors of the “British” empire by looking at some of the many English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish men and women who got caught out and trapped while crossing over into other peoples’ lands and seas, and the strains of these experiences on their birth identities. The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (2007), chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of that year, treated just one of these captives. It was also an attempt to write a different kind of biography: an attempt to track down the life-story of a possibly mixed race and incurably itinerant woman, while intermeshing this with passages in 18th-century global history.
I have always sought to combine academic, archival, and scholarly research with experimenting with different forms of writing and reaching out to different kinds of readers and audiences. My sixth book, Acts of Union and Disunion, was an expanded version of fifteen lectures commissioned by BBC Radio 4 and broadcast early in 2014 in advance of the referendum on Scottish independence. As with these talks (which are still available as BBC podcasts) this book seeks to elucidate, in short compass, the composite and shifting nature of what is now the United Kingdom. I anticipate that future revisions are bound to be needed.
Over the past ten years or so, however, my main interest has not been with matters British and Irish. Instead, I have been working on a big book spanning global history from 1750 until after the First World War, which seeks to revitalize and unpack constitutional history by connecting it with some of the histories of the war. This book – The Gun, the Ship and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World – is set to be published on both sides of the Atlantic in March/April 2021.
The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World
Vivid and magisterial, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen reconfigures the rise of a modern world through the advent and spread of written constitutions.
A work of extraordinary range and striking originality, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen traces the global history of written constitutions from the 1750s to the twentieth century, modifying accepted narratives and uncovering the close connections between the making of constitutions and the making of war. In the process, Linda Colley both reappraises famous constitutions and recovers those that have been marginalized but were central to the rise of a modern world.
She brings to the fore neglected sites, such as Corsica, with its pioneering constitution of 1755, and tiny Pitcairn Island in the Pacific, the first place on the globe permanently to enfranchise women. She highlights the role of unexpected players, such as Catherine the Great of Russia, who was experimenting with constitutional techniques with her enlightened Nakaz decades before the Founding Fathers framed the American constitution. Written constitutions are usually examined in relation to individual states, but Colley focuses on how they crossed boundaries, spreading into six continents by 1918 and aiding the rise of empires as well as nations. She also illumines their place not simply in law and politics but also in wider cultural histories, and their intimate connections with print, literary creativity, and the rise of the novel.
Colley shows how―while advancing epic revolutions and enfranchising white males―constitutions frequently served over the long nineteenth century to marginalize indigenous people, exclude women and people of color, and expropriate land. Simultaneously, though, she investigates how these devices were adapted by peoples and activists outside the West seeking to resist European and American power. She describes how Tunisia generated the first modern Islamic constitution in 1861, quickly suppressed, but an influence still on the Arab Spring; how Africanus Horton of Sierra Leone―inspired by the American Civil War―devised plans for self-governing nations in West Africa; and how Japan’s Meiji constitution of 1889 came to compete with Western constitutionalism as a model for Indian, Chinese, and Ottoman nationalists and reformers.
Vividly written and handsomely illustrated, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen is an absorbing work that―with its pageant of formative wars, powerful leaders, visionary lawmakers, and committed rebels―retells the story of constitutional government and the evolution of ideas of what it means to be modern.