IESHR Lecture on 15th December

[niharika]

The Indian Economic and Social History Association

and

SAGE

are pleased to announce the

Fifth IESHR Lecture

by

Linda Colley

Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University

 

Written Constitutions, Identity, and Empire

 

7:00 pm, 15 December 2011 Stein Auditorium,

India Habitat Centre

(Please join us for tea at 6:15 pm, before the lecture)

 

The aftermath of the American and French Revolutions witnessed the invention and increasing proliferation of a new kind of written constitution. Whereas, in 1786, no independent polity had possessed a single document that it formally styled a constitution, by the end of the 20th century, written constitutions had become almost universal: part of the evolution of a more uniformly organized modern world. This process of transformation has customarily been linked with, and interpreted in the light of the rise of nation states and of national and democratic identities. Yet, from the very outset, written constitutions were consistently devised and deployed so as to foster internal colonialism, and to serve as aids in overland and maritime empire. In this lecture, Linda Colley explores the imperial as well as the national significance of these political devices, with special reference to Britain, the United States, and India.

Professor Linda Colley is the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University. She completed her Ph.D. in history at Cambridge University (1977) and was Fellow of Christ’s College until 1982 when she moved to Yale University. In 1998 Professor Colley accepted the Senior Leverhulme Research Professorship in History at the London School of Economics and in 2003 moved to Princeton University. She has authored several books amongst her most recent are Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (1992, which won the Wolfson Prize for History), Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600–1850, (2002) and The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (nominated by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2007). In 2008–9, Professor Colley guestcurated a major exhibition at the British Library, London, Taking Liberties, which dealt with the meanings of constitutional texts, and published an interpretative essay Taking Stock of Taking Liberties: A Personal View (London, 2008). She is currently researching a book on Britain and international constitution making c.1780–2000.