Global Dialogue with Linda Colley - Part 1

So, welcome back everybody.
Welcome Linda.

I'll start with an introduction and then
I'll proceed with questions from you.

And we have questions from, from the
Coursera students as well.

But it's a great pleasure to introduce a
friend, and a colleague, collaborator,

co-conspirator and.
[laugh] Yeah.

It's, it's coming, we'll see the
revolution is coming in, in global

history.
Professor Linda Colley is the Shelby M.C.

Davis 1958 Professor of History at
Princeton University and her work among

many things has really charted so many
different new directions in modern history

and I, I think, we'll try to get to a
number of them but we're not going to be

able to cover all the bases that she has
opened up.

Professor Colley received her Bachelor's
Degree from Bristol University and then

completed her PhD at Cambridge in 1977.
And she's been teaching here at Princeton

since 2003.
She's written many books all of them very

influential.
I'm just going to single out a few of

them, otherwise, we're going to be here
all morning.

One that is very relevant for our
consideration in Britain's, The Forging of

a Nation, 1701 to 1837 which was published
in 1992, which has been perhaps one of the

most influential monographs in the study
of the history of nationalism.

Captives, it was published in 2002 which
recast the ways in which we might think

about empire seen from the peripheries and
the margins through stories and

experiences of captivity in, say, imperial
subjects.

And more recently, a, a very influential
book called the Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh,

a woman in world history which was chosen
as one of the ten best books published in

2007 by the New York Times.
In 2008, 2009, Professor Colley guest

curated a major exhibition at the British
Library in London called Taking Liberties

and this exhibition attracted over 100,000
visitors and was opened by the then Prime

Minister of Britain, Gordon Brown,
Which opens up a whole new direction of

Professor Colley's work, which is on the
international history of writing

constitutions.
And, and I should say up front, since I

work on the history of constitutions in
Latin America,

It, it's an area where people have always
written very national histories of

constitutions.
I hope we can get to a point where we talk

about.
How people get the idea?

Where do people get the idea of writing
constitutions?

It's something we've been talking about in
this course.

So, Professor Colley writes on a grand
global scale but never loses sight of

detail,
Of the small, the particular, the

experience of global history.
She's also a very prominent public

intellectual with essays in The New York
Review of Books, The Times Literary

Supplement, The London Review of Books,
The Guardian, The New York Times and

elsewhere.
And in 1999, she delivered the Prime

Minister's Millennium lecture at ten
Downing Street in London.

So, it's a great pleasure to introduce
Linda Colley here.

And I am going to use my executive
prerogative this morning and start with

the first question if you'll indulge me
here.

And, and, and it's I have a personal
question for you which is how your

perception of the study of empire has
changed over the course of your career?

Well, I didn't start out as a historian of
empire.

I started out very much as a narrow
English historian of the eighteenth

century.
Mm-hm.

But if you start studying England and
ultimately Britain and what becomes the

United Kingdom in the eighteenth century,
you are soon led into empire because of

the sheer grasping greed of this society,
and for a while very successful greed.

And ultimately you're led into global
history.

Mm-hm.
Inexorably.

Because it's not just that by the 1820's
Britain claims,

And I stress claims, control of 25% of the
world's population.

But through trade,
Through investment,

Through exploration through the pursuit
and transmission of varieties of

knowledge.
Britain is moving very powerfully into

areas where it does not have formal
empire, like Latin America.

Mm-hm.
So, I was led inexorably in this

intellectual trajectory, and I suppose
what has interested me enormously,

Peronally, is that as I've traveled around
more and more of the world like so many of

us, I've become aware of the way that
empire is writing back.

Mm-hm.
I've lectured in India, I've lectured in

Africa.
And encountering scholars from those

places who inevitably have their own take
on British imperialism, that's been

intriguing, sometimes challenging I've
also had to read a great deal,

Not as much as I should, but that's true
of all of us.

And I suppose what I.
So, just a little bit, we all fall behind

right away.
We all fall behind.

Yes.
Yes, [laugh] we do indeed.

But I've also becoming increasingly
intrigued, not least in the project I'm

now working on, between the way that
empire and nation have to be studied in

tandem.
The nineteenth century classically

regarded as the big period of the spread
of nationalist ideologies.

I'm not saying that's necessarily right
but that's how it's often seen.

But it's also quintessentially a great age
of empire, both maritime empire of the

British sort and overland empire of the
Russian and the United States sort.

So, it seems to me that we got to look at
empire and nationalism in tandem.

And, and I find that very intriguing and
very challenging.

Mm-hm.
Mm-hm.

Mm-hm.
And, but there's a tradition not

necessarily of thinking about them in
tandem, that in a sense, nationalism was

often seen as a force that would eclipse
empire, replace empire as the global order

would be filled in by a world of nations
that once was dominated by a world of

empires, right?
Yes.

But I think we've got to be careful not to
conflate our understandings of the nation.

Mm-hm.
With what was necessarily thought in the

past.
Perhaps, we tend to think of nationalism

now with national independence, national
self-government.

But, very often in the nineteenth century,
nationalism is conflated, and it's not

just in the nineteenth century, with a
sense of national mission which easily

overlaps into the writers of empire.
So for example, when Japan creates a very

influential written constitution in the
1880s, one of the pioneering written

non-Western constitution.
This is a very nationalist statement.

We in Japan are now entering, celebrating
our modernity.

This is the written constitution in which
we encompass our identity.

But then, Japan can turn around and say,
because we have this pioneering Asian

constitution understandably, we can move
into parts of China.

We can move into Korea.
Mm-hm.

Because we have a civilizing.
Yes.

And constitutional mission that we can
pursue there.

Mm-hm.
Here's a classic example of nationalism

feeding into empire and vice versa.
We just got done reading a couple of

chapters from [INAUDIBLE].
At least, so, what's your take on the role

of print capitalism and the development of
nationalism across the world?

Mm-hm.
And I guess specifically in England also.

It's totally important.
And, and I should say that Anderson's book

was a major influence on me when I wrote
Britain's.

And I think his, his, his perception that
print allows people across distances to

imagine themselves as connected, even if
they never meet each other, is an

interesting one.
The problem is, of course, and the

challenge is, that print is an explosive
media.

Mm-hm.
Print can tell you everything as it does

now and the accelerating availability of
print I suppose, increasingly from the

eighteenth century.
But print becoming much, much cheaper from

the middle of the nineteenth century.
Print can do so much.

Print after all, not only tells you about
who you are.

It isn't just operating within your
nation.

One of the things that happens as
newspapers really take off in the

nineteenth century, for example, is that
big newspapers in New York and London

start employing foreign correspondents on
a very large scale,

Ditto Germany.
Mm-hm.

And that means that people in those
countries are not just getting print

information about their own society, but
they're getting print information from

beyond.
So, for example the Women Suffrage

Movement in Britain by the.
Mm-hm.

End of the nineteenth Century is
increasingly aware that women in

Australia, New Zealand are beginning to
get to vote.

Mm-hm.
And they are saying, hey, well, what about

us?
Yeah.

So, that's, in that case, their sense of
the uniqueness of their nation is really

being broken through by print.
Mm-hm.

So, I think we have to see print as a very
volatile mechanism.

Mm-hm.
Like all forms of communication.

Mm-hm.
Mm-hm.

And one of the things you've looked at
coming to the question of, of suffrage

and, and politics which maybe something
that's perhaps missing in Anderson's

account is the role of, of, of politics.
And that's another thing that you've

studied over the years, the way, the
organization and political parties and

democracy this is the morning after an
important election in the United States.

So, you know, what do we think the effect
that Democratic or activity or the

democratization of politics has on
national ideologies?

How do you connect these pieces up?
And then, I'm going to throw this back out

to you.
Whoa.

Yeah.
Again print is tremendously important in

popularizing politics at all levels.
By the early nineteenth century, both the

United States and the United Kingdom are
devoting much more thought to putting

political debates from Congress, from
Parliament into the newspaper press.

So as to familiarize a growing number of
voters with political argument in the

respective capitals.
But, of course,

Print can also propagate radical ideas
cheap subversive ideas.

Mm-hm.
And again, the transmission of political

information across borders, across oceans
seems to me one of the ways in which we

can link politics with imperial history,
with global history. Mm-hm.

For example, in Calcutta in 1822, when
Portugal briefly renews a very liberal

constitution, there are celebrations in
Calcutta by both Asian radicals and white

settler radicals.
Mm-hm.

Who used accounts of the Portuguese
Constitution which had been reprined.

In the Indian press. Mm-hm.
Mm-hm.

Which is very volatile by the early
nineteenth century and that leads them to

talk about constitutions, this group in
Calcutta, and start arguing about Indian

constitutionalism.
So, I think the movement of political

Mm-hm..
Information through print within the

nation is very important within empires.
But, how is printed information really

crossing oceans, really crossing
boundaries?

And, of course, this is connected to with
the spread of access to language, and

indeed what does translation mean?
What does political information, when it

is translated into another language, and
transmitted to another society?

Mm-hm.
What happens to it?

So, I don't think political history is
remotely dead.

Mm-hm.
I think it needs constantly to be

reimagined and amalgamated with our new
interest in transcontinental transnational