Wednesday, December 7, 2016

THE WOMAN MOST LIKELY TO EMBODY THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE COMMON STOCK


The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh by Linda Colley - Pantheon (2007)


Who was Elizabeth Marsh? Did she extend the boundaries of human knowledge? Did she fight for the rights of a minority group, or otherwise subvert the hierarchy of power? Did she discover something? Paint something? Birth something? The simple answer is no. Unlike several other figures I’ve written about, who were celebrated during their lifetimes but have since retreated into the historical shadows, Elizabeth Marsh was never famous and never achieved anything of note. So why did I commit myself to reading Linda Colley’s delightful biography, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh? And—perhaps more to the point—why on earth would Colley spend years of her life digging through obscure archives in order to unearth paltry snatches of information on a woman who doesn’t really matter? 

The paradoxical answer is that Elizabeth Marsh matters precisely because she doesn’t. She was born in 1735 to a mediocre family of sailors and soldiers. She struggled financially her entire life. The one book she wrote, The Female Captive, is nowhere near the top of its genre, and was written as a final, desperate attempt to earn some extra income. And yet, the fact that a modern historian can learn anything about such an unimportant woman reveals the extent to which the British Empire of the 18th century was radically different from those that came before. Writes Colley, 

Elizabeth Marsh was socially obscure, sometimes impoverished, and elusively mobile. In the ancient, medieval and early modern world, such individuals, especially if they were female, rarely left any extensive mark on the archives unless they had the misfortune to be caught up in some particular catastrophic event: a trial for murder or heresy, say, or a major rebellion, or a massacre, or a conspiracy, or a slaver’s voyage. That Elizabeth Marsh and her connections, by contrast, can be tracked in libraries and archives, not just at interludes and in times of crisis, but for most of her life, is due in part to some of the transitions that accompanied it. During her lifetime, states and empires, with their proliferating arrays of consuls, administrators, clerks, diplomats, ships’ captains, interpreters, cartographers, missionaries and spies, together with transcontinental organizations such as the East India Company, became more eager, and more able, to monitor and record the lives of ‘small’ people—even, sometimes, female people—wherever they went. 

Because so many of our modern bureaucratic systems are rooted in this period of imperial expansion, it can be difficult to understand how profound the accompanying social and cultural changes really were. Whereas, under previous global empires, there existed a rigid separation between the ruling noble class and a faceless swarm of peasants, with the advent of the industrial revolution and Britain’s rising naval prominence, a powerful merchant class began to influence the shape and character of empire. These merchants were, for the most part, highly educated in commerce and international trade. They calculated and recorded everything that could be quantified. And when they found themselves in a position to enact laws and influence the priorities of government, they treated the British Empire and its many diverse subjects like a vast warehouse of goods, whose global movement must be meticulously tracked in order to guarantee a net profit. Thus, it became vital to collect information on every single body that could contribute to the preservation of the empire, not just the lords and ladies in England. With the demands of such a large and culturally diverse empire, the average sailor in Jamaica suddenly found himself worthy of attention and scrutiny. As Colley writes in her introduction, 

…this is not just an account of an individual and a family: it is also, thirdly, a global story. Elizabeth Marsh’s existence coincided with a distinctive and markedly violent phase of world history, in which connections between continents and oceans broadened and altered in multiple ways. These changes in the global landscape repeatedly shaped and distorted Elizabeth Marsh’s personal progress. So this book charts a world in a life and a life in the world. It is also an argument for re-casting and re-evaluating biography as a way of deepening our understanding of the global past. 

A professor of history at Princeton University, Linda Colley has spent a significant part of her life devising new perspectives on British imperial history. She frequently challenges the dominant narrative, as in her 1982 book, In Defense of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714-1760, which advocates for the vilified political party under Whig supremacy. Her 1992 book, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, similarly examines previously neglected populations, and won the Wolfson Prize for History. Described on her Princeton faculty page as ‘an exercise in meshing biography with trans-continental history,’ The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh was named one of the ten best books of 2007 by the New York Times. In addition to her nonfiction books, Colley is also a frequent contributor to the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Review of Books. She has curated museum exhibitions and given countless lectures throughout Europe and the United States. Through all of her diverse projects, Colley exhibits an underlying interest in the ‘small’ people of empire. She is fascinated with how the average British citizen came to see himself and his role in the volatile world of complex trade and warfare. Thus, Colley suggests that through her family and their naval connections, Elizabeth Marsh was,

…brought into contact with some of the main forces of global change of her time: enhanced maritime reach, transoceanic and transcontinental commerce, a more deliberate mobilization of knowledge and written information in the service of the state, the quickening tempo of imperial aggression and colonization, emigration, war, slavery and the slave trade. Many millions of people were caught up in one or more of these. Elizabeth Marsh was affected and swept into movement by all of them. 

And yet, despite the extent of these global forces, Colley is careful never to stray too far from her biographical subject. She gives Elizabeth Marsh the same intimate attention usually bestowed upon monarchs and intellectuals. She immortalizes every insignificant movement and event because she can, and because the alternative would be inhumane. This is one of the warm and cozy traps into which modern historians can easily fall. Writes Colley, 

Because of the tendencies of our own times, historians have become increasingly concerned to attempt seeing the world as a whole. this has encouraged an understandable curiosity about very large-scale phenomena: the influence of shifting weather systems on world history, ecological change over time, patterns of forced and voluntary migration, the movement of capital, or commodities, or disease over continents, the transmission of ideas and print, the workings of vast overland and oceanic networks of trade, the impact of conflicting imperial systems, and so on. These, and other such grand transcontinental forces, were and are massively important. Yet they have never just been simply and inhumanly there. They have impacted on people, who have understood them (or not), and adapted to them (or not), but who have invariably interpreted them in very many different ways. Writings on world and global history (to which I stand enormously indebted) sometimes seem as aggressively impersonal as globalization can itself. 

This is why Colley chooses to let the details of Elizabeth Marsh’s life illustrate the wider global changes, rather than overwhelm readers with her own extrapolations. Marsh’s written account of her capture in Morocco is not a work of literary merit, but it reminds readers of the existence of the individual amidst the chaos of globalization. During another, much later, period of immense global change, American sociologist C. Wright Mills argued that the 1950’s were convulsed by a series of violent, existential ‘earthquakes,’ caused by the collapse of colonial empires, the emergence of atomic warfare, and unchecked mechanization. Comparing Elizabeth Marsh to 20th century Americans, Colley writes that,

…like other members of her family, she tried to make sense of the changes transcending seas and continents that she and they were so markedly living through and acting out. The extent and quality of Elizabeth Marsh’s global earthquake in the mid-eighteenth century was substantially different from that perceived by Mills in the 1950s, though the flux of empire, enhanced state power, runaway military violence, modernization, and strains on family and marriage were part of her experience too. Elizabeth Marsh’s earthquake was also very different from out own at the start of the twenty-first century. But the nature of her ordeal, her precocious and concentrated exposure to so many forces of transcontinental change, and her sense in the face of these ‘impersonal and remote transformations’ both of shock and wonder, entrapment and new opportunities, remain eloquent and recognizable.

It is Linda Colley’s determination to locate the personal within ‘remote transformations’ that renders her biography so evocative. Strangely, her close attention to the particular details of Elizabeth Marsh’s life actually makes it easier for diverse readers to see themselves reflected in her chosen subject. Paradoxically, Colley’s dissection of a single isolated experience has the capacity to reach farther, and touch deeper, than the impersonal voice which would speak for an entire demographic. Thus, in The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, Colley succeeds in her aim to capture ‘a world in a life and a life in the world.’  




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