Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Professor Linda Colley
Oration given on 15 July 2004
Chancellor, the Senate has resolved that the degree of Doctor of the
University be conferred upon LINDA COLLEY
Linda Colley is one of our most accomplished and influential historians.
A distinguished graduate of Bristol University, she took her PhD at
Cambridge where she enjoyed appointments at Girton, Newham, King's and
Christ's Colleges. In 1982 she migrated to the United States, to Yale
University, where from 1992 she was Richard M. Colgate Professor of History.
In 1998 she returned to Britain as Leverhulme Research Professor and School
Professor in History at the London School of Economics, and a year later was
elected Fellow of the British Academy. Among many distinguished named
lectures, she gave the Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge 1997 and the Raleigh
Lecture at the British Academy in 2002. Last year she left us again to
become Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University.
In recent years, mastery of the academic trade winds has been practised by
other British historians, including, happily, her husband, David Cannadine,
but Linda Colley has also ensured that her Anglo-American translations have
supported and inspired her recent and marvellously creative historical
writing.
Linda Colley's subject is Britain, but as understood in its European and
global situation, and her century, the eighteenth, but with clarifying forays
before and after that enlightened but misunderstood age. When she began her
studies, two great men dominated the writing of eighteenth century British
history, Sir Lewis Namier, who had died in 1960 but left a challenging legacy
and who, indeed, became the subject of one of Linda Colley's most revealing
books, and the other, Sir John Plumb, who was to be her Cambridge supervisor.
The world that Linda Colley has made her own was one of port and exquisite
porcelain, fine wines, gossip, country houses, clubs and knights of the realm
with interesting backgrounds, and I speak of the world of its historians in the
mid and late twentieth century as much as of their focus of historical interest.
Women, there were few, either as historians of the period or as proper subjects
of historical enquiry. Betty Kemp, Lucy Sutherland and Anne Whiteman were justly
acclaimed, historians' historians, but the public face of eighteenth century
studies, lively, provocative and not a little guided by Jack Plumb, continued to
be a largely masculine parade.
Linda Colley's first book, "In Defiance of Oligarchy", challenged our
understanding of Georgian politics, re-evaluating the survival of the Tories in
what we all know as the Whig century. Like all great historians, Linda Colley
refuses to believe without proof and without questioning. By rejecting the glib
and the undemanding she contributes to the recovery of our past and to an
understanding of what we are. In her earliest publications she asked new
questions about what stability meant in the century after the English Civil War
and why, at a time when most historians seemed preoccupied by rioters,
criminals, shop keepers and the mad, we should look again at the country
gentleman, whose history was, in fact, just as neglected and misunderstood. In
so doing, she brought new understanding of the political fabric of eighteenth
century Britain, reconsidering the nature of parties, of ideologies, of what and
how politics is - even, in fact, at one point, pondering the residual and
quixotic nature of Toryism in Colchester and the contribution of the reformist
Charles Gray, best known in these parts for helping to save the castle.
Linda Colley's most celebrated book developed from this type of questioning.
"Britons", which won the Wolfson Prize and both public and professional acclaim,
is a ground-breaking investigation of how communities are constructed and
imagined. Formally an exploration of British identity from the 1701 Act of Union
to the accession of Victoria, "Britons" asks, by pursuit of often marginalised
characters, what a national identity might be. In her more recent book,
"Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850", Linda Colley adopts the
compass of Gulliver rather than of Crusoe, considering the stories of captured
people as a means to understand empire more completely. Her daring is
wonderfully rewarded. Others have studied particular captivity narratives, but
no one has found the vision to range across so many lost voices and to use these
extraordinary accounts, where fiction can be as revealing as fact, to ponder the
imperial condition.
Our greatest historians do not simply retreat into the past, they bridge the
past and the present, they speak to our times and help us understand it.
"Britons" was published in the run-up to devolution in the United Kingdom and
against our continuing debate of sovereignty and national identity within the
New Europe. "Captives" continues to question ideas of nationhood and, in Linda
Colley's words, "its increasingly evident weakness". If, at the time of
publishing "Britons", the other, the represented enemy, was foreign, catholic
Europe, then "Captives" will be read not just in England where apparently almost
every car and bedroom window flies the flag, but in a western world that is
possessed of a new, or rather more ancient, presentiment of the foreign and the
un-Christian. In our often chilling times, Linda Colley asks us to consider how
identity and chauvinism are constructed, and why, for some, patriotism is not
only electorally but commercially profitable.
As a widely enjoyed communicator of the past, Linda Colley is an historian
for whom topicality is not apologetic but pertinent. Just as she has described
Namier's neglected newspaper writing as "journalism illumined and transfigured
by an original intellect and a great gift for the vibrant phrase", her own
articles in reviews and newspapers are lauded on both sides of the Atlantic for
their trenchant and compelling language. A British yearning for lost pink
patches on the globe has, she writes, "encouraged a persistent inclination to
pursue empire vicariously by clambering like a mouse on the American eagle's
head. "That great bird" she continues "needs no assistance, and we should look
to our own directions". And that is Linda Colley not writing in The Guardian, as
she so often does, but in "Captives". She is an historian, who like Macaulay and
Trevelyan, does not shy away from engagement with the present, lest we lose our
moral compass, lest we fall captive.
So, today, we honour an historian and a writer who has rescued past peoples
from the condescension of posterity while never condescending herself. Hers are
not simple books yet they appeal directly and have hugely expanded public
interest in history. In Linda Colley's own words "I write to seduce and to make
my readers think." She has made historians think, the reading public think, and,
we must hope, the elected think. Her mission is rescue, a rescue of lost
politics, of identity, of imperial purpose and consequences, all to disturb our
complacency, to engage us and make us not only enjoy our history but to reflect
on what it is for and why its study is so important and enthralling. She is not
simply a political, a social, a cultural or an imperial historian, but a
no-label historian who speaks to her age and challenges it.
Chancellor, I present to you LINDA COLLEY
Orator: Professor James Raven