Linda Colley Historian and Author

Books

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  The Gun, The Ship and the Pen: War, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World

  W. W. Norton & Company, 2021

  Starting not with the United States, but with the Corsican constitution of 1755, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen moves through every continent, disrupting accepted narratives. Both monarchs and radicals play a role, from Catherine the Great of Russia, with her remarkable Nakaz, to Sierra Leone’s James Africanus Horton, to Tunisia’s Khayr-al-Din, a creator of the first modern Islamic constitution. Throughout, Colley demonstrates how constitutions evolved in tandem with warfare, and how they have functioned to advance empire as well as promote nations, and worked to exclude as well as liberate.

  Whether reinterpreting Japan’s momentous 1889 constitution, or exploring the significance of the first constitution to enfranchise all adult women on Pitcairn Island in the Pacific in 1838, this is one of the most original global histories in decades.

  
  
  
  
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  Acts of Union and Disunion

  Profile Books, 2014

  ‘Poses the fundamental question, will Britain break up this century? Essential reading for Scots and English alike as the battle over independence steps up a gear’
  Sunday Times 11 January 2014

  ‘Colley has offered a brief and very useful contribution to our British-Scottish, English, Welsh, Northern Irish and European debates: and she has done so in a commendably calm and reasonable tone of voice’
  Scotsman 29 December 2013
  

  ‘Required listening for anyone who intends to follow every twist and turn of the referendum campaign over the coming nine months and not go mad’
  Herald 28 December 2013

  ‘Colley does an excellent job of making the reader think about various political unions that made the UK… She not only explores each constituent nation’s unity, and disunity, within the UK enterprise but also discusses the world that the British and Irish made beyond these shores’
  Times Higher Education Supplement 23 January 2014
  

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  The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History

  HarperCollins/Random House 2007

  ‘A remarkable book, both for its contents and because it is a new species of biography’
  Guardian 26 May 2007

  ‘A tour de force of scholarly investigation’
  New York Review of Books 27 September 2007
  

  ‘A fascinating and compulsively readable book, written with great elegance and insight’
  Times Literary Supplement 2007
  

  ‘A minor miracle of biographical reconstruction… which slices across, and cuts deep into, huge areas of eighteenth-century life’
  Sunday Telegraph 07 June 2007
  

  ‘A work of skewering historical precision and vast imaginative reach’
  London Review of Books 21 June 2007
  

  ‘Like the best historians of any era, Colley had new questions to ask. Her answers have brought us a world in a book’
  New York Times 16 September 2007
  

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  Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850

  Jonathan Cape, 2002/Pantheon, 2003; Pimlico and Vintage paperback editions, 2003

  ‘A book which should alter the way in which the history not only of the British, but of all European Empires if written’
  London Review of Books 14 November 2002
  

  ‘Brilliantly illuminating’
  Washington Post  2003
  

  ‘Stunningly revisionist… Almost every page of Captives challenges a settled orthodoxy or opens up a fertile new field of research’
  History Today 2003
  

  ‘Brilliant and original’
   Los Angeles Times February 16 2003
  

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  Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837

  Yale University Press, 1992. Pimlico paperback editions 1994, and (revised) 2003

  ‘Linda Colley…has a capacity for historical generalization that puts her into the front rank of her contemporaries’
  Dissent Summer 1993

  ‘A very fine book… challenging, fascinating, enormously well informed’
  London Review of Books September 1992

  ‘Extremely learned and penetrating. It is also most entertaining’
  New Republic 1992

  ‘The most original, penetrating and readable volume on the eighteenth-century published for many a long year’
  The Independent 27 September 1992
  

  ‘Dashingly readable… lively and stimulating. She makes excellent use of artistic evidence’
  New York Review of Books  1992
  

  Winner of the Wolfson History Prize 1993

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  Taking Stock of Taking Liberties

  British Library, 2008

  ‘One of the most powerful demonstrations of our history and its consequences that you could ever witness… awe inspiring’Stroud News and Journal
  

  ‘The exhibition itself is brilliant. People are queuing to see the… myriad pages of paper and ink that have made us who we are’ New Statesman
  

  ‘A very sophisticated, but also accessible exhibition. You come away with the wonder, and you can wallow in it, and be challenged by it’ BBC Radio 4 Front Row

  ‘A rich and absorbing show of enormous educational value’ Oneworld.net

  ‘Our MPs should be frogmarched from their ivory tower to inspect this exhibition’ The Independent

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  In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714-1760

  Cambridge University Press, 1982; re-issued 2003.

  ‘Her book brilliantly rehabilitates the 18^th century Tory Party…one of the most important books on 18^th century politics to appear in this generation’
  London Review of Books 14 November 2002 
  

  ‘A book of admirable erudition and commanding stature’
  The Historical Journal 
  

  ‘A powerfully argued book, deeply based in original research, and elegantly and incisively written’
  The Observer 
  

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