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The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History
by: Linda Colley

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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 910.92
EAN: 9780375421532
ISBN: 037542153X
Label: Pantheon
Manufacturer: Pantheon
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: September 04, 2007
Publisher: Pantheon
Release Date: September 04, 2007
Sales Rank: 60971
Studio: Pantheon

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
This is a book about a world in a life. Conceived in Jamaica and possibly mixed-race, Elizabeth Marsh (1735-1785) traveled farther and was more intimately affected by developments across the globe than the vast majority of men. She was the first woman to publish in English on Morocco, and the first to carry out extensive explorations in eastern and southern India. A creature of multiple frontiers, she spent time in London, Menorca, Rio de Janeiro, and the Cape of Africa. She speculated in Florida land, was caught up in the French and Indian War, linked to voyages to the Pacific, and enmeshed as victim or owner in three different systems of slavery.
She was also crucially part of far larger histories. Marsh’s experiences would have been impossible without her links to the Royal Navy, the East India Company, imperial warfare, and widening international trade. To this extent, her career illumines shifting patterns of Western power and overseas aggression. Yet the unprecedented expansion of connections across continents occurring during her lifetime also ensured that her ideas and personal relationships were shaped repeatedly by events and people beyond Europe: by runaway African slaves; Indian weavers and astronomers; Sephardi Jewish traders; and the great Moroccan sultan, Sidi Muhammad, who schemed to entrap her.
Many biographies remain constrained by a national framework, while global histories are often impersonal. By contrast, in this dazzling and original book, Linda Colley moves repeatedly and questioningly between vast geopolitical transformations and the intricate detail of individual lives. This is a global biography for our globalizing times.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- for people who love history
A great book -- I discovered it from my History Book Club, before the great reviews poured in from the critics. I think the New York Times had it as one of its ten best at the end of the year. For all persons interested in women's history, biography, India, Caribbean. Shows how much certain intrepid souls traveled in days of yore. And a rarity in those days--tales written by a woman. The author has done her research carefully & thoroughly; text is easy to follow, not boring. Loved the fact that she was related to Edmund Burke.

Rating:

- The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh
This was one of the worst books I have ever read. It reads like a Ph.D. thesis - with some sentences being 2 and 3 lines long. There is nothing said by the heroine - just about her - and in a most tedious descriptive manner, often confusing (since her mother shared her name). Boring boring boring. I gave up after half of the book was finished. It was a Christmas gift to me and I will donate it to our local University - perhaps some student of history or genealogy would be interested. I am certainly not.

Rating:

- Neither biography nor history but a curious speculation, of sorts

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.

Rating:

- Who is Elizabeth Marsh?
Elizabeth Marsh, daughter of a ship's carpenter, was conceived in Jamaica, was born in England in 1735, and died in Calcutta in 1785.

Between these dates, Elizabeth Marsh travelled extensively lived a full (albeit unconventional) life and saw more of the world than most of her contemporaries.

At twenty, as the sole female passenger aboard a merchant ship bound for Lisbon, she was captured by pirates and taken to Morocco. In order to escape, she pretended to be married to her sailing companion, James Crisp.

Ms Colley has written a book that portrays an unconventional life and the backdrop of the times in which Elizabeth Marsh lived.

Highly recommended to those interested in history through the lives of individuals.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

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