A British imperium enabled Scots to feel themselves peers of the Ebglish in a way still denied them in an island kingdom. The language bears that out…

- Linda Colley

In the last quarter of the 20th century, Britons have been understandably obsessed with the problem of having too little power in the world. In the t…

- Linda Colley

In the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, as in so many later conflicts, British women seem to have been no more markedly pacifist tha…

- Linda Colley

A fundamental reason why Britain was not torn apart by civil war after 1688 was that its inhabitants' aggression was channelled so regularly and so r…

- Linda Colley

These developments - a massive transfer of land by way of inheritance and purchase, an unprecedented rise in the profitability of land and increasing…

- Linda Colley

Contrary to received wisdom, the British are not an insular people in the conventional sense - far from it. For most of their early modern and modern…

- Linda Colley

At one level Great Britain at the beginning of the 18th century was like the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, both three and one, and altogether so…

- Linda Colley

Most Britons still lived and died without encountering anyone whose skin colour was different from their own. Slaves, in short, did not threaten, at …

- Linda Colley

Human beings are many-layered creatures, and do not succumb to the hegemony of others as easily as historians and politicians sometimes imply. Those …

- Linda Colley