A biographer’s job is to write an account of someone’s life. A historian’s job is to mobilize information to make arguments about the past. Historian Linda Colley combines both to show “a life in the world and a world in a life.” She uses the story of Elizabeth Marsh, who was born on August 20, 1735 in Portsmouth Harbor on the coast of England. She was born the daughter of Milbourne Marsh, a carpenter, and Elizabeth Evans, who may have been black or mulatto. She also had two younger brothers named Francis and John. Elizabeth Marsh’s life was one exotic adventure after another as she traveled extensively and later wrote about it. Colley uses a single woman’s life to provide insight into broader historical forces, she engages readers to highlight the complex global issues and a woman’s place in those issues in the eighteenth century. Although there are not a lot of sources by Elizabeth Marsh to tell her full story, Colley uses Elizabeth’s Moroccan and Indian writings, her brother John’s memoir, Milbourne’s maps, and most importantly her uncle George Marsh’s books and journals about himself and his family. By using other people’s sources to tell this story, Colley connects Elizabeth to the world. In the 18th century British gender roles and position of women in society have not progressed to the extent that it has in recent years. …show more content…
Colley shows how Elizabeth Marsh lived outside the norms of her time, especially in regard to Elizabeth Marsh’s captivity in Morocco, the British navy and maritime trade, and her writing career and how those differences uncover what was going on in the British empire in the