The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History [Paperback]

Linda Colley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 11, 2008

In this remarkable reconstruction of an eighteenth-century woman's extraordinary and turbulent life, historian Linda Colley not only tells the story of Elizabeth Marsh, one of the most distinctive travelers of her time, but also opens a window onto a radically transforming world.Marsh was conceived in Jamaica, lived in London, Gibraltar, and Menorca, visited the Cape of Africa and Rio de Janeiro, explored eastern and southern India, and was held captive at the court of the sultan of Morocco. She was involved in land speculation in Florida and in international smuggling, and was caught up in three different slave systems. She was also a part of far larger histories. Marsh's lifetime saw new connections being forged across nations, continents, and oceans by war, empire, trade, navies, slavery, and print, and these developments shaped and distorted her own progress and the lives of those close to her. Colley brilliantly weaves together the personal and the epic in this compelling story of a woman in world history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

There were many ordeals—and adventures—in the tumultuous life of this emblematic 18th-century Englishwoman. At age 20 Marsh was captured by Barbary pirates and narrowly fended off the Moroccan sultan's attempts to induct her into his harem. She married a British merchant, went through both luxurious high living and humiliating bankruptcy, followed him to India, where they remade themselves as colonial grandees, then suffered another bankruptcy. (A further ordeal was snagging a husband for her under-dowried daughter.) Historian Colley (Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850) styles Marsh a female Candide batted about by world-historical forces. Shaped by the breakdown of barriers in this age of proto-globalization (Colley speculates excitedly, but without evidence, that Marsh was of mixed racial background), her life was opened up by the rise of the British Empire and disrupted by attendant upheavals like the Seven Years War and the American Revolution. Still, in Colley's account, she retains her own power: Marsh cannily leveraged family connections to the British naval bureaucracy to facilitate her voyaging, published a piquant memoir of Moroccan captivity and enjoyed a scandalous 18-month tour of India accompanied by a dashing, unmarried British officer. Colley makes of her story both an engaging biography and a deft, insightful social history. Photos. (Aug. 14)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Linda Colley, a history professor at Princeton, first encountered Elizabeth Marsh while researching her previous book, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850. Using the scant sources available, Colley fleshes out this long-forgotten woman’s extraordinary life, which was frequently shaped by world events: war, commerce, imperialism, and global shifts of power. Unfortunately, the lack of personal papers means that readers never really get to know Marsh. However, Colley’s intention here is "recasting and re-evaluating biography" to deepen our understanding of the "global past," and she brings Marsh’s world and the forces shaping it vividly to life. Instead of portraying a life played out against world history, Colley turns the genre on its head and presents world history as it played out in a single life.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; Reprint edition (November 11, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385721498
• ISBN-13: 978-0385721493
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #131,773 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

67 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars World History Viewed Within a Single Life, September 11, 2007

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (Hardcover)

You expect a biography to tell you about someone important, someone who has gained accomplishments in some field of human endeavor, and because of the accomplishments is worth coming to understand as some sort of outstanding example (good or bad) of humanity. Chances are you have never heard of Elizabeth Marsh, an Englishwoman of the eighteenth century, and it isn't that she has an undeserved obscurity. Her life was different in many ways from those of her contemporaries, but she had no special talents or accomplishments, and her life was not exemplary in any way. So it is in some ways odd that historian Linda Colley has made her the subject of a penetrating biography, _The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History_ (Pantheon). Colley has pieced together what can be known of Elizabeth Marsh's life from the spotty writings of Marsh and her family, but as an expert on world history of Marsh's times, she has put the life in the context of the start of globalization. It was a confusing age full of changes that no one knew were coming, and Elizabeth Marsh and her family, who had ties to the British navy and to seagoing trade, thus were in the middle of the changes. In this way Colley's book is history from the bottom up, an attempt to understand the lives of a few ordinary people caught up in larger events.

Elizabeth Marsh got her beginning far from England, born in Jamaica in 1735. Her father was a ship's carpenter, and there is a surprising ease of access to shipboard travel throughout Elizabeth Marsh's life. Her traveling life, her real life, began in 1755, when her family sailed to Menorca, and later to Gibraltar. In 1756 she boarded the _Ann_, a merchantman full of a cargo of brandy, commanded by James Crisp, and thus that she began the prime adventure of her life. The _Ann_ was attacked by Moroccan pirates, and all those aboard were kidnapped and taken to Marrakech, where she had to confront the Sultan who may have wanted her for his harem; she was saved at least partially because she pretended to be James Crisp's wife. When they were released, they married for real. Crisp was involved in the nautical trades of tea, textiles, liquor, dried fish, and anything else. His trade was not always legal, but he had contacts worldwide and seems to have been energetic in his business dealings. His trade, however, did not go well due to global problems well above his capacity to predict or manage. He declared bankruptcy in 1767, moved with Elizabeth to India where he worked in the East India Company, but also failed there. The travels of the couple had worn them down; Colley writes that the fissures in the marriage were "due to the way in which she and he were repeatedly driven and chose to travel very large distances on land and sea." She had left him, traveling ostensibly for her health, but in the company of an unmarried man, touring down the Indian eastern seaboard. She outlived her husband by six years, dying of breast cancer after a mastectomy at only age 49.

There are few details and anecdotes to make Mr. and Mrs. Crisp fully rounded characters, but they are within these pages mere sport for larger historical and economic events. They are battered by wars between England and France, and then England and America, although neither of them saw a shot fired in either conflict. The opening up of world markets, the changes in the slave trade, the conversion from agriculture to industry, and other revolutions all affected the couple. Colley's book succeeds in showing how these huge, sweeping forces affected a woman who could not have understood them and could have done nothing even if she had. Globalization meant, as Colley writes, that "the world was both widening and shrinking" and thus the lives of Elizabeth Marsh and many of the others detailed here were "twisted out of customary moulds in the process". Colley intelligently, but unforcefully, reminds us many times in these pages that we are in the midst of new and even more powerful globalization forces, and Elizabeth Marsh's "shock and wonder, entrapment and new opportunities, remain eloquent and recognizable."

22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, September 29, 2007

By 

Charles A. Reap Jr. (Pittsboro, NC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (Hardcover)

Being a history buff, I was particularly intrigued by (1) the research that Colley put into this, and (2) the actual description of March's happenings. It is an easy read if you don't mind some extraneous detail. I heartily recommend it to others interested in obscure history.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Neither biography nor history but a curious speculation, of sorts, February 7, 2008

By 

Sue Moran "avid reader" (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (Hardcover)

Professor Colley has done a lot of research on Britain's 18th century world, and this book has come out of that. She presents an extraordinary interweaving of naval history, commerce, the status of women, slavery, and the emergence of the USA, among other subjects. I like the way she is upfront about her speculation about Elizabeth Marsh. As she goes along she makes it clear what is in the record, what she believes would have been typical of the era, and what she is only guessing at. Very admirable. But I found the book dry in places. A little more scholarly than I was in the mood for.