Colley offers Princeton students deeper insight into British history

by Karin Dienst
As a Briton teaching British history at an American university, Linda Colley is presenting an unfamiliar subject to most of her students. It is an ideal situation for Colley, who is interested in the big picture -- making cross-disciplinary connections in a global context and conveying her ideas to a broad audience.

Teaching in the United States is helping her to do just that, and is providing students at Princeton with a deeper understanding of Great Britain as well as many other areas of the world.

The Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History, Colley is an authority on British history since 1700. She is the author of "Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850," published in 2003 by Pantheon Books, which uses narratives written by Britons captured in North Africa, India and North America to investigate the complex dynamic between invader and invaded. Her other major work that solidified her reputation as a leading historian is "Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837," which was published by Yale University Press in 1992 and won the Wolfson Prize for History in 1993. She is also the author of "Namier" and "In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714-1760."

"Linda Colley is one of the top historians of modern Britain," said Robert Tignor, the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton and chair of the history department. "Her interest in the British empire fits well with the interests of a lot of members of Princeton's history department and makes Princeton one of the top places for studying the history of modern Asia and Africa where Britain had such a large impact."

Colley joined the Princeton faculty last fall from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she had a five-year Senior Leverhulme Research Professorship in History that enabled her to research and write "Captives."

In pursuit of untold stories while researching the book, Colley donned the proverbial "stout pair of boots" necessary for historical study, according to historian and social critic R.H. Tawney, and traversed some of the terrain of the far-flung British empire. Since the sea was crucial to this empire, Colley was eager to gain a sense of it as she traveled around the Mediterranean and to North Africa and India.

"Unless you go to the sites of these historical events, it's difficult to appreciate how vulnerable some imperial invaders were," said Colley. "One tends to assume they possessed overwhelming force and technology, but when one examines the extent of the terrain, the flux of climates, the difficult coastlines and the power of the sea, it becomes easier to understand why so many Britons engaged in global enterprise got captured or killed."

Read the full story in the Weekly Bulletin.