Linda Colley is the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 professor of history at Princeton University and the author of Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, which investigated how inhabitants of England, Scotland, and Wales came to see themselves as British over the course of the 18th and early 19th centuries. and Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World 1600-1850, which used captivity narratives to investigate the vulnerability of the British empire and its makers. She is an expert on British, imperial, and global history after 1700. In 2014, and in advance of the referendum on Scottish independence, she was invited to deliver fourteen talks on BBC Radio 4 on the formation and fractures of the United Kingdom. These were later published as Acts of Union and Disunion (2014). She has delivered numerous invited talks, including the Prime Minister’s Millennium Lecture at 10 Downing Street in 1999. In the same year, she was named a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2009, she was named a Commander of the British Empire.
In her lecture, Colley lamented the fact that public discourse about empire, especially American empire, is often historically shallow and insufficiently comprehensive. She first examined recent arguments about America’s new imperialism and the reluctance to situate this in a long and comparative perspective. Colley insisted that scholars must see American empire not just in terms of overseas activities, but within the longer history of settler colonialism. In the second part of her lecture, she looked at the practical and ideological strains experienced by the British in regard to their empire to understand the history of ambivalence to empire. British behaviour at the height of their empire set a precedent for American disinterest in empire. Distaste for empire led both Britons and Americans to ignore empire entirely. Empire also placed national self-imaginings under strain; this was compounded by the fact that many imperialists were coerced in some way through land seizures at home. Colley ended by discusses future difficulties with empire. She pushed back against Edward Said’s argument that paying attention to the trauma of imperialists is unhelpful and distracting, suggesting instead that since empire is vast and diffuse, studying it required a wide-ranging vision with multiple approaches. Studying present-day empires is difficult, but vital. Now, the boundaries between self-declared nation-states and empires can be porous and unstable, calling for deeper thinking about empire in as extensive and historically-literate a way as possible.
Her lecture was held on November 25, 2004. Read a transcript below.