[Books 2007] Linda Colley
Jul. 27th, 2007 11:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inulro39. The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History by Linda Colley
Another one I heard about on Radio 4, but a better gamble - I used and enjoyed one of Colley's books, Britons: Forging the Nation for my PhD.
This book is a spin-off from her last book, Captives (which I haven't read yet) and is the story of Elizabeth Marsh, a British woman who lived from 1735 to 1785, travelled around the world and wrote about some of it. Most notably, she was kidnapped by Moroccan pirates and imprisoned there for some time, and wrote one of the first Western books about that country. She also made an early overland trip from Madras to Dhaka, which she didn't publish but left extensive diaries.
Colley's point is to show how the events Marsh's life were related to the fortunes of the emerging British empire, especially by the increasingly global wars it was fighting at that time. The way the interweaving of the personal and the global is handled is a major strength of this book.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book even though my head hasn't really been in the right place to take in a "real" book, which says a lot about how engagingly written it is.
A definite thumbs-up.
Another one I heard about on Radio 4, but a better gamble - I used and enjoyed one of Colley's books, Britons: Forging the Nation for my PhD.
This book is a spin-off from her last book, Captives (which I haven't read yet) and is the story of Elizabeth Marsh, a British woman who lived from 1735 to 1785, travelled around the world and wrote about some of it. Most notably, she was kidnapped by Moroccan pirates and imprisoned there for some time, and wrote one of the first Western books about that country. She also made an early overland trip from Madras to Dhaka, which she didn't publish but left extensive diaries.
Colley's point is to show how the events Marsh's life were related to the fortunes of the emerging British empire, especially by the increasingly global wars it was fighting at that time. The way the interweaving of the personal and the global is handled is a major strength of this book.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book even though my head hasn't really been in the right place to take in a "real" book, which says a lot about how engagingly written it is.
A definite thumbs-up.
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Date: 2007-07-27 11:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-27 04:08 pm (UTC)