The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History

Biographies & Memoirs

COLLEY, Linda

Community & Culture

Harpercollins

The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: How a Remarkable Woman Crossed Seas and Empires to Become Part of World History

History

Harper-perennial

Spine creased, page edges tanned. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837

Europe

London: Vintage

Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850

Linda Colley's latest book is at once a grand saga, a remarkable detective story, and a major work of revisionist British and imperial history. Ranging in setting from white slave markets in North Africa, to imperial conflicts and catastrophes in North America and India, it recovers the experiences of a vital but forgotten category of individuals. The captives in question are those hundreds of thousands of English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish settlers, soldiers, sailors, traders and travellers seized and subordinated by different non-European peoples in the course of Britain's early imperial enterprise and expansion. At one level, Captives is an exploration of what happened to these aggressorvictims and why. Here are the tales of Sarah Shade, a camp follower in the East India Company's army who became a captive in Mysore; of Joseph Pitts, seized by Algerian corsairs and the first Briton ever to complete the pilgrimage to Mecca; and many more. But Colley also uses these captivity tales to investigate Britain's imperial story far more broadly, re-assessing the depth and quality of British power. She investigates what these overseas captivities reveal about British relations with and attitudes towards non-European peoples - and vice versa. The result is a book that raises questions both about the impact and meanings of British empire in the past, and about this empire's legacies and successors today. Illustrated throughout, and evocatively written, Captives will change the way in which the British empire is looked back on, both amongst those who still retain some admiration for it, and amongst those to whom it remains profoundly controversial and troubling.

Captives: Britain, Empire and the World: 1600 - 1850

JONATHAN CAPE.

Lewis Namier (Historians on historians)

Weidenfeld and Nicolson

Before he died in 1960, Lewis Namier was widely regarded as one of the most important historians in the Western world. This biography reassesses his contribution to both British and European history and explores the connections between his life and the subjects which obsessed him.

How was Great Britain made? And what does it mean to be British? In this prize-winning book, Linda Colley combines imperial, political, social, and cultural history to analyze the evolution of Britishness, evoking its enduring tensions as well as its powerful characteristics. Hailed at its publication as the most dazzling and comprehensive study of a national identity yet to appear” (Tom Nairn), Britons isnow reissued with a new Preface by the author commenting on the book’s genesis and critical reception and on recent political developments.A sweeping survey, . . . evocatively illustrated and engagingly written.”Harriet Ritvo, New York Times Book Review Dashingly written and firmly unsentimental.”Keith Thomas, New York Review of BooksExtremely learned and penetrating . . . [and] most entertaining.”Conor Cruise O’Brien, New Republic Challenging, fascinating, enormously well informed.”John Barrell, London Review of Books [Colley] has a capacity for historical generalizations that puts her into the front rank among her contemporaries.”E. P. Thompson, DissentAbsolutely magnificent.”Jeffrey Hart, National Review

Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707 1837, Second Edition

Yale University Press

Lewis Namier (Historians on Historians)

Americas

St.Martin's Press

Britain’s pursuit of empire seems an inexorable march across continents toward its ultimate—if temporary-—global hegemony. But, as Linda Colley shows in this masterfully written book, Britain’s overseas enterprises were always constrained by its own limitations in size, population, and armed forces, and by divisions among its subjects-—constraints and deficiencies that could make the dream of empire an ordeal even for its makers. Drawing on a wealth of captivity narratives by men and women of different social and ethnic backgrounds from the early seventeenth century to the Victorian era, Colley chronicles the complicated dynamic between invader and invaded. Here are the stories of Sarah Shade, who was married to a succession of British military officers, attacked by tigers, and imprisoned by Indian ruler Tipu Sultan; Joseph Pitts, a white slave in Algiers from 1678 to 1693 and author of the first authentic—and very complimentary—English account of the pilgrimage to Mecca; and Florentia Sale, a captive in the Kabul insurrection of 1841 who used her time in confinement as an opportunity to interview military men for her memoir. There were also those who crossed the cultural divide and switched identities, like the Irishman George Thomas, a mercenary fighter for Indian rulers and failed dictator, and those who crossed but made it back, like John Rutherfurd, the onetime Chippewa warrior and Scot. Colley uses these extraordinary tales to trace the changing boundaries of Britan’s pursuit of empire and its shifting attitudes toward Islam, slavery, race, and American revolutionaries. Hailed by The Financial Times as a “White Teeth version of imperial history,” Captives is at once an original chronicle and a prescient meditation on the meaning of empire.

Captives: The story of Britain's pursuit of empire and how its soldiers and civilians were held captive by the dream of global supremacy

Pantheon

This is a book about a world in a life. Conceived in Jamaica and possibly mixed-race, Elizabeth Marsh (1735-1785) traveled farther and was more intimately affected by developments across the globe than the vast majority of men. She was the first woman to publish in English on Morocco, and the first to carry out extensive explorations in eastern and southern India. A creature of multiple frontiers, she spent time in London, Menorca, Rio de Janeiro, and the Cape of Africa. She speculated in Florida land, was caught up in the French and Indian War, linked to voyages to the Pacific, and enmeshed as victim or owner in three different systems of slavery. She was also crucially part of far larger histories. Marsh’s experiences would have been impossible without her links to the Royal Navy, the East India Company, imperial warfare, and widening international trade. To this extent, her career illumines shifting patterns of Western power and overseas aggression. Yet the unprecedented expansion of connections across continents occurring during her lifetime also ensured that her ideas and personal relationships were shaped repeatedly by events and people beyond Europe: by runaway African slaves; Indian weavers and astronomers; Sephardi Jewish traders; and the great Moroccan sultan, Sidi Muhammad, who schemed to entrap her. Many biographies remain constrained by a national framework, while global histories are often impersonal. By contrast, in this dazzling and original book, Linda Colley moves repeatedly and questioningly between vast geopolitical transformations and the intricate detail of individual lives. This is a global biography for our globalizing times.

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