The Books
As each of us individually conducted research on a specific Atlantic traveler, collectively we read these books and used them as our navigational tools to sail the Atlantic's historiographical waters. The books' histories and stories guided us through our own process. Each of the following books features a unique, comprehensive approach to the early modern Atlantic world and the people who traversed it. Their authors provided us physical, conceptual, and narrative maps that we used to navigate our own understanding of the global Atlantic world. These books also offered us a set of concepts to understand and interpret the world our travelers inhabited and the challenges and opportunities they encountered in their journeys. Scott and Hébrard’s “micro-history set in motion,” Sparks's "Atlantic Creoles," Restall and Fernández-Armesto's "armed entrepreneurs," Sweet’s “Black Atlantic,” Jasanoff's "spirit of 1783," Pérez Morales's "masterless Caribbean," and Colley's "biography that crosses boundaries" offered us fruit for thought and nourished our weekly discussions.
The Books
As each of us individually conducted research on a specific Atlantic traveler, collectively we read these books and used them as our navigational tools to sail the Atlantic's historiographical waters. The books' histories and stories guided us through our own process. Each of the following books features a unique, comprehensive approach to the early modern Atlantic world and the people who traversed it. Their authors provided us physical, conceptual, and narrative maps that we used to navigate our own understanding of the global Atlantic world. These books also offered us a set of concepts to understand and interpret the world our travelers inhabited and the challenges and opportunities they encountered in their journeys. Scott and Hébrard’s “micro-history set in motion,” Sparks's "Atlantic Creoles," Restall and Fernández-Armesto's "armed entrepreneurs," Sweet’s “Black Atlantic,” Jasanoff's "spirit of 1783," Pérez Morales's "masterless Caribbean," and Colley's "biography that crosses boundaries" offered us fruit for thought and nourished our weekly discussions.
The Books
The Books
Ramusio Map (1534). Courtesy of John Carter Brown Library
Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007)
By James Aimer and Christopher Wilkins
From her early years, Elizabeth Marsh was destined to be an outlier, but as her life unfolded, her trajectory became even more extraordinary than anyone could have predicted. Elizabeth was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1735 to a member of the royal navy and his wife, who’s heritage remains largely unknown. Elizabeth grew up with close ties to the British Navy and with many valuable familial connections despite not being particularly affluent herself. After her family relocated to Menorca 1754, Elizabeth began to recognize that she desired a more fruitful life than her family had come to know in Menorca. Two years later, in 1756, with dreams of a husband and a lavish life in London, Elizabeth boarded a ship in Gibraltar. Her aspirations were quickly put on pause when a Moroccan vessel intercepted the ship in the Strait of Gibraltar and seized the entire boat as captives. The captive experience exposed her to a previously unknown culture, landed her in the arms of the Sultan of Morocco, provided a story for her narrative years later, and ultimately led her to her future husband, and fellow captive, James Crisp. When Marsh was released four months after her capture, she immediately married Crisp and finally began to establish her long-awaited life in London. Through Crisp’s upper-class network and diverse trading abilities, the couple began to live luxuriously and eventually looked for opportunity elsewhere. Their interest in departing England piqued when James Crisp’s trading business crumbled before their eyes and he faced bankruptcy. While their financial situation worsened, so did their relationship, and as the couple’s individual aspirations took priority over their marriage, they decided to temporarily part ways. After a failed speculative venture in Eastern Florida, James Crisp left for India while Elizabeth Marsh returned to her parents who now resided in Chatham Kent, England. Here, Marsh published her book, The Female Captive, and after hearing of her husband's moderate success with the East India Company, Elizabeth Marsh decided to reconvene with him. For years they travelled India, sometimes together, often separated, with unclear motives and a dwindling passion for their relationship. Their children, Burrish and Elizabeth Maria, gained education in Persia and England respectively, while their parents lived out their final years. Elizabeth Marsh died after succeeding in her final search for social relevance: finding her daughter a worthy husband. Although her life was anything but ordinary, we can derive a greater understanding of the world in which she lived through her story.
The world of Elizabeth Marsh. Image from Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh.
Elizabeth Marsh is a remarkable traveler not just by virtue of the experiences she endured across seas and continents, but for what she represents as a woman who bravely ventured across foreign lands and seas and fought to make her mark on a world that was actively stacked against her in myriad ways. Examining her story allows us a unique opportunity to understand a rare perspective during this remarkable era of global history, and not just an account of one particular place, at one particular time. By following the trajectory of one incredible traveler, Elizabeth Marsh, through a tumultuous period of world history, placed in the context of British Imperialism, we can understand how truly complex the world of the eighteenth century was and the principles of power and oppression that defined it across a number of levels. Indeed, through her travels Marsh finds herself on opposite sides of these stark divides on numerous occasions, revealing the fickle nature of power and liberty in a dynamic and ruthless global landscape. It can certainly be said that the experiences of Elizabeth Marsh illustrate a patchwork of events that defined the lives of those who lived through this time period in many ways, and the unique perspective of Colley’s writing allows for us to make inferences from a political and social vantage point that would not be possible from other styles of historical analysis and storytelling.
A Barbary corsair ship of the era, similar to the one by which Elizabeth Marsh was captured. Image from Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh.
Rarely are we offered an opportunity to study such a tumultuous period in world history through the experiences of one person: especially through the experiences of a woman in the mid-eighteenth century. As Colley notes aptly: “For Elizabeth Marsh, there was scarcely ever a secure divide between her personal life on the one hand, and the wider world and its accelerating changes on the other. This was the nature of her ordeal” (23). For Marsh, balancing this clash of events from her personal life and global experiences was par for the course, and her resilience throughout her ordeal is a testament to her strength. That strength, we might imagine, is likely representative of a great many people of this era who were not afforded the same opportunities to experience the highs and lows of a diverse and complex Atlantic in the same way due to oppression based on some factor of gender, race, religion, or any number of demographic distinctions. Some travelers of this unfamiliar and everchanging world encountered fantastic fortunes in their travels, others suffered immeasurably through no fault of their own. Elizabeth Marsh represents both of these perspectives, truly carving out her place as “a woman in world history.” In the truest sense, Marsh was not only a woman in world history, but a woman of many worlds: Britain, Africa, Asia, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and beyond. A global history told through Elizabeth Marsh’s full spectrum of experiences through the intersection of these worlds is the essence of why this narrative is so worth studying. In doing so, we allow ourselves to learn more about our past, and how personal and global events affect our own ‘voyages’ and ‘ordeals’ in the world today.
A page from Elizabeth Marsh’s Indian Journal. Image from Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh.