Books The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History
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Rating: - World History Viewed Within a Single Life
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."