Linda Colley has been the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University since 2003, and specializes in the histories of Britain since 1700. Using largely cross-disciplinary methods, she has striven to examine Britain’s past in a broader European, imperial, and global context. A graduate of Bristol University, she completed her Ph.D. in history at Cambridge University (1977). After a period as Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, she moved to Yale University in 1982. Her early books include InDefiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714-1760 (1982), and the path-breaking work Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (1992). In 1998, Professor Colley left Yale to accept a Research Professorship in History at the London School of Economics. In this period, she wrote Captives (2002), a work on the experiences and writings of the thousands of Britons who were taken captive in North America, South Asia, and the Mediterranean and North Africa between 1600 and 1850 as the British Empire expanded. Her most recent work is The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (2007). Professor Colley is also a public figure and intellectual, who writes for British and American periodicals and newspapers, including the Guardian , the Times , the New York Times , the Times Literary Supplement , and the London Review of Books . She is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academia Europaea. In 2009, she was awarded a C.B.E. She will deliver the Fifth Indian Economic and Social History Review Lecture at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi on 15th December 2011. Here she responds to questions by Sanjay Subrahmanyam , joint managing editor of the IESHR, and Professor of History at UCLA.
SS: In an autobiographical essay, the Cambridge historian Chris Bayly has alluded to how his early background in Tunbridge Wells, and family’s experiences, may have influenced his way of looking at history. You were an undergraduate at Bristol, and then did a doctorate with J.H. Plumb at Cambridge, before publishing your first book, In Defiance of Oligarchy (1982). Do you think your background and early years before coming to Cambridge influenced your way of doing history, or the questions you have asked and continue to ask?
LC: I’m sure early influences have an impact on most historians (and on everyone else). I was born and spent my first five years in Chester, an ancient city that retains some of its Roman walls and fortifications, and contains a great medieval cathedral, as well as Tudor, Stuart and early 19th century architecture. Visiting these things was free, and my parents – who had little money - made the most of this. So I have very early visual memories of objects and scenes that were represented to me, as a child, as being of and speaking to the past. I suspect, too, that since my father was constantly moving from place to place on account of his job, I learned early a certain restlessness, and perhaps a sympathy with individuals and groups in the past who were more than usually mobile.
SS: In India, it used to be common to make a sharp distinction between Marxist and non-Marxist historians in Britain. In your experience, has that division made much sense since the 1970s and what is its status today?
LC: I am old enough to remember when large numbers of history researchers at Cambridge and elsewhere were still intent on studying working class ideologies and identities/ radical protests/ and militant trade unionism, usually in some industrial city, somewhere; and when the editorial board of the journal Past and Present was dominated by great Marxian figures like Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, and individuals sympathetic to socio-economic analysis such as Lawrence Stone. Obviously, that time is long gone, but I’d want to make three points. First – even at their most influential - Marxist historians in the UK tended to be kept out (or to keep themselves out) of the highest positions of formal academic influence. For instance, E.P. Thompson only occasionally held a University job, while Hobsbawm was never able to gain an Oxbridge post. Second, many onetime Marxist historians in the UK (as elsewhere) have retained a marked commitment to theory, while switching the nature of their theoretical allegiance. Thus Gareth Stedman Jones moved for a time into linguistic analysis; while Catherine Hall has embraced post-colonialism. Third (and again this is true not just of the UK) the decline of Marxism, plus the rise of cultural and intellectual history, has sometimes had the unfortunate effect of leading young scholars to neglect economic history. I hope this is now beginning to change.
SS: You have had dealings with some of the most important historians of an older generation: J.H. Plumb, Eric Hobsbawm (whom you mentioned already), John Elliott, and many others. What would you say was their influence on you, and would you say that there was a reciprocal influence of your generation on theirs in the context of journals like Past and Present?
LC: Partly because of my generation and interests, I have been almost exclusively beholden to a succession of male intellectual grandees and mentors. They have each afforded me different things. So Jack Plumb was, in the conventional sense, a negligent research supervisor. But his patronage power in the States proved essential to my career, and he allowed me – like the rest of his protégés – to find my own way, in my own style. The best scholars do try persistently to learn from and keep abreast with younger practitioners, though doing this gets harder all the time of course. But serving on the editorial board of any major journal certainly helps, because you’re constantly exposed to new writings and references. I’m struck by how impressively John Elliott assimilated new work on early modern England and colonial America, as well as keeping abreast with his own Hispanic studies, so as to write his recent Empires of the Atlantic World . I’m sure he’d accept that being on the board of Past and Present helped him to achieve this.
SS: Over the past three decades, you have been one of the leading figures in defining a new approach to the history of the British empire. Yet, with exception of a period of five years from 1998-2003, the greater part of your time has been spent teaching outside Britain, first in Yale and then at Princeton. Does this position as a sort of “outsider” have a significant impact on your work?
LC: Yes, of course. But I’d want to put the point more positively and in a wider context. In recent decades, interpretations of the “British” past (and of just what this has meant over time) have diversified. These shifts have been partly due to political factors: devolution, a vastly increased rate of immigration, growing if reluctant absorption of the UK into the EU, an increasing acceptance within the UK of imperial decline and imperial controversies etc. In addition, far more British-born historians now work overseas than was the case before 1970, and the teaching of the British past outside the UK has become much less dependent on how the subject is studied within it.
For me, the experience of working in the US, and teaching American students who tended to be both very bright but also very ignorant about the UK, involved, and continues to involve a re-thinking of my subject. Working in America (along with lecturing in different continents) has also provided me with new information and exposure to different approaches to history that I might not have gained had I stayed throughout in the UK (though doubtless there have also been intellectual and other losses!). Encountering Jonathan Spence at Yale in 1982, for instance, not only afforded me my first introduction to Chinese history – which at that point was barely taught in the UK – but also influenced my approach to historical writing. Spence’s use of individual trajectories so as to explore wider trends, in books like his Death of Woman Wang and The Question of Hu , undoubtedly fed into my planning of the Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh . By the same token, learning about early modern American captivity and captivity narratives from John Demos at Yale, was one of the reasons I decided to embark on my own Captives.
SS: A significant part of your work, especially since your book Britons (1992), may be thought to reflect on questions of British national identity. This is of course a thorny issue today. How, as a historian, would you address the question of a multi-cultural Britain as a project and as a reality?
LC: One of the benefits of working outside the UK is that I don’t have to keep fielding media/politicians’ enquiries about “Britishness” and its ills. Having constantly to do this almost drove me mad during the five years (which were otherwise very profitable) when I was at the London School of Economics!
I have come to think that what is needed in the UK, from school-level onwards and as an aid to wider public understanding, are forms of “British” historical teaching and interpretation that pay more attention to movement: movements over time and by different peoples into these islands (ie. Great Britain and Ireland), movements over time out of these islands, and movements within and among these islands. Not so as to provide for some mushy and anachronistic multi-cultural vision of the British past, but in order to put some new and different strands of past experience on the agenda and to disrupt some customary ways of thinking. I find it strange and rather unacceptable, for instance, that in my (very eminent) section of early modern historians at the British Academy, there are several people who produce excellent work on past British and European witchcraft, but no specialist at all on the history of different kinds of slavery or the slave trade. The latter surely had rather more impact on the British Isles - and across the continents - than the former.
SS: You have intervened in public debates regarding history in Britain, including in the recent discussion of Richard Evans’s criticisms of the “Tory interpretation of history”. In this context, what are your views on the possible reform of the teaching of history in schools in Britain today? Are there any possible lessons from this debate – positive or negative – for similar issues in India?
LC: As I argued some months ago in the Guardian , and in a recent lecture on BBC Radio 3, I think – I am bound to think – that history teaching in schools should extend until students are at least aged 16 (in the UK the subject is not compulsory after 14). I don’t know what the situation is in schools in India where history is on the syllabus. There is a delicate balance here that applies everywhere however. Governments should encourage and facilitate the teaching of history, but one does not want them to be able to dictate, for political or partisan reasons , what kind of history and interpretations are on offer to children.
SS: Your work, especially over the last two decades, is sometimes posed by analysts and reviewers within the framework of an emerging “world history”. Are you comfortable with that category? Further, have you ever considered yourself in the past decade or so to be a sort of “micro-historian” as well, in works such as Captives (2002) and The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh (2007)?
LC: Like many other scholars, I rather shy away from claiming to “do” global or world history, which – as far as any individual is concerned – is bound to seem an impractical if not a presumptuous aspiration. Even the most brilliant single authored world histories, such as Chris Bayly’s Birth of the Modern World , are notably stronger on some regions of the world than on others (in the case of his book, Latin America suffers) because no historian is capable of accomplishing the necessary reading, even in a long lifetime, or – crucially - of making all the intellectual leaps and connections that world history would ideally require.
Nonetheless, it is to my mind distorting to write British history, especially post 1600, without some kind of trans-continental purview and reach. J. R. Seeley was being provocative when he wrote in the 1880s that more 18th century British history happened in Asia and America than in the Houses of Parliament, but his caveat (which could be stretched to include other continents) remains a useful warning against Little Englander thinking. Am I a micro-historian? Not really. But I did want both in Captives and in Elizabeth Marsh to explore hitherto neglected approaches and source material. Much of what now passes for world history has evolved out of branches of economic history, and in part for that reason tends to be somewhat impersonal, abstract, and often very masculine in focus. Elizabeth Marsh was in part an attempt to do things differently: a charting of phases of early globalization through a single life and through the lives and perceptions of one extended family. In my current project, in which I’m trying to wrest constitutional history away from its traditional encasement within national narratives, I’m very much returning to the macro.
SS: What, if any, has been the impact on you personally, and on other British historians, of history-writing coming out of India since 1950? Do you believe that there is a real conversation today between Indian and British historiography? If so, what are the most interesting elements there?
LC: The impact of all kinds of scholarly work coming out of India has been growing relentlessly in the UK and in the US; and there is much greater awareness now – if not yet in all quarters - of the need to pay greater attention to non-Western scholarship in general. By way of example, I, and Rana Mitter [a historian of modern China] at Oxford have just started a three-year program of seminars, at our two universities, exploring how people in different parts of the world have conceptualized their membership of political communities from the 18th century onwards, but breaking away from the western-centric interpretations of this offered by earlier historians such as R.R. Palmer. Recent Indian historiography is bound to play a big part in our discussions, but so will work to do with China and colonial and post-colonial Africa. My own introduction to the work of Indian historians was by way of Ranajit Guha and the publications of the Subaltern Studies group. I continue to be impressed by how Indian historians, literary scholars, and political scientists are expanding and challenging the material and arguments available to historians of the UK and its onetime empire. But I am also impressed by the amount we still don’t know about connections and collisions in the past between varieties of Indians and varieties of Britons. In my current work on world-wide constitution-making, for instance, I came across an 1850s London edition of William Blackstone’s Commentaries , the canonical work on English constitutional law. A footnote in it claimed that “witenagemot”, the name of the supposed Anglo-Saxon parliament, was of North Indian extraction. Was this particular Victorian British editor of Blackstone familiar with some of the ideas of Ram Mohun Roy on early Indian constitutionalism? I suspect so. By the same token, I suspect there is still much to be learned about the impact of B.R. Ambedkar’s time at the London School of Economics in regard to his constitutional thinking. One would like to know more….
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