Category Archives: Biography

303 p. & notes, 2007

Now THIS is the sort of history I want to write!  I’ve had this book on my shelves for years, ever since I began writing my thesis.  It takes just the approach that I want to use:

…this is a book that ranges between biography, family history, British and imperial history, and global histories in the plural.  Because of the tendencies of our own times, historians have become increasingly concerned to attempt seeing the world as a whole.  This has encouraged an understandable curiosity about very large-scale phenomena: the influence of shifting weather systems on world history, ecological change over time, patterns of forced and voluntary migration, the movement of capital, or commodities, or disease over continents, the transmission of ideas and print, the workings of vast overland and oceanic networks of trade, the impact of conflicting imperial systems and so on.  These, and other such grand transcontinental forces, were and are massively important.  Yet they have never just been simply and inhumanly there.  They have impacted on people, who have understood them (or not), and adapted to them (or not), but who have invariably interpreted them in very many different ways.  Writings on world and global history (to which I stand enormously indebted) sometimes seem as aggressively impersonal as globalization can itself.

In this book, by contrast, I am concerned to explore how the lives of a group of individuals, and especially the existence of one particular unsophisticated but not unperceptive woman, were informed and tormented by changes that were viewed at the time as transnational, and transcontinental, and even as pan-global, to an unprecedented degree.  I seek to tack between the individual and world histories ‘in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view’. (p. xxxi)

Linda Colley is an acclaimed historian of Britain and empire.  Her book Britons is heavily cited in discussions of Britishness ( although may I admit in a very small voice that I have this book on my shelves, too, waiting to be read?)  She writes big histories, but in this book she brings it back to individuals and their families.

So who was Elizabeth Marsh?  As in many cases when writing biography of a person who is not a public figure, the source material is patchy and in several instances, contestable.  From genealogical sources, Elizabeth Marsh can be located as a woman who lived from 1735 to 1785, who had two children, and was a wife, daughter and niece.  From her own writing in published travel narratives, we know that she was kidnapped by the Moroccan Sultan, Sidi Muhammed, and that she travelled extensively along the eastern coast of India.  From her uncle’s scrapbooks and journals, we learn of her extensive family networks and its mobility across the world.  A map on the opening pages of the book shows just how wide-ranging these family travels were: the Caribbean, the Americans, Britain, France, Spain Italy, Brussels, Hamburg, Menorca and Madiera, India, New South Wales, Marrakech, Tunis, Cairo, Sierra Leone and the west coast of Africa.

And yet there is so much that we don’t know about her, right down to the question of her appearance.  Her mother was Jamaican, but there is no way of knowing whether Elizabeth or her mother were coloured.  Elizabeth tells us that she was not sexually compromised during her kidnapping but can we believe her? She is largely silent on the nature of her relationship with George Smith, who accompanied her on her travels in India.  Nor can we know how her marriage to James Crisp, her fellow-abductee in Morocco, worked.  Colley speculates and imagines but she is upfront about the guesswork and supposition that she has utilized in piecing together Elizabeth Marsh’s life.

The book commences with a short introductory summary of Elizabeth Marsh’s life and clear identification of the themes that run through it:  her life; her family; her worlds; herself; history and her story.  There- it can be done in just thirteen pages!!  (says she, whose introduction threatens to engulf the whole thesis].   There are only six chapters and a conclusion, organized chronologically and each taking up a separate continent on her travels.   Without fail, each time I thought “Jeez, I could use a map here”, I turned the page and there it was.

But the book is much more than a biography (i.e. writing about the life of an individual) : it is history in its own right, with much to say about mobility, networks,  sea-consciousness and the British navy, trade and the intersection of the domestic and intimate with the commercial.  Each step of Elizabeth’s own life is embroidered with contextual and supplementary information so that as a reader you’re better able to judge the exceptionality or conventionality of what you have just read.  Is this distracting? Possibly, if you’re after a straight biography, but there was only one occasion where I felt that she was wandering a bit too far offtopic.

At times Colley moves into the present tense when describing Elizabeth’s lived experience, returning to past tense in her analysis,  with occasional shifts back into the present tense when describing her own insights as researcher and investigator.  These changes in tense are handled so adroitly that you’re barely aware of them.  They add to the immediacy of the narrative, and the feeling as if you’re being addressed by a researcher steeped in expertise and well in control of her material and eager to share it with you.

Do I regret leaving it so long to read this book?  Not really. I think that I would have been intimidated by it earlier in my own research, and reading it at the stage I’m at inspires me with an example, right there on the page, of the type of historian I’d like to be.

Other reviews (by a veritable Who’s Who of authors):

Claire Tomalin in the Guardian

Megan Marshall in The New York Times

Hilary Mantel in the London Review of Books (a lengthy but excellent review)

Lisa Jardine in the Times Higher Education Supplement

2011, 303 p plus notes

John McLaren ‘Dewigged, Bothered and Bewildered: British Colonial Judges on Trial 1800-1900’.

The title Dewigged, Bothered, and Bewildered is a play on the show-tune with a similar title, (Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered). It examines the careers of several 19^th century judges of the British Empire who, for various reasons, found themselves removed or ‘dewigged’ from their positions.  The title reflects the tone of this book- light and jocular at times- but it belies the sheer breadth of knowledge of individual colonies that it covers.   Its author, John McLaren, is professor emeritus in the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria (Canada)  and as Bruce Kercher’s endorsement on the back cover says “John McLaren is the only person I know with sufficiently broad legal historical knowledge to attempt such a huge task, and he succeeds at it remarkably well”.

It  might seem strange that a book about 19^th century judges  starts with an analysis of judicial tenure in the seventeenth century.  It was during the constitutional maelstrom of Charles  and James and the Glorious Revolution that two competing mechanisms for appointing and controlling judges emerged.  The ‘Cokeian’ model, associated with Sir Edward Coke, drew on the rhetoric of the Ancient Constitution and the ‘rights of freeborn Englishmen’ to  argue that the King, like other mortals, was subject to the law, and that he and his officers were subject to the jurisdiction of the stewards of the Common Law, the judges of the King’s Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer.  The rival ‘Baconian’ model, expounded by Lord Francis Bacon, emphasized the Divine Right of Kings and emphasized that judges must be the loyal servants of the monarch.  Hence, under the Cokeian model, judges should be employed ‘during good behaviour’ where, as long as there was not actual judicial impropriety, the judges were independent of the Crown.  The Baconian model, on the other hand, employed judges “at His Majesty’s pleasure” and kept the judges under the control of the King and his government.

All this might seem far removed from a judge in Port Phillip, Sierra Leone, Newfoundland or Upper Canada 150 years later, but McLaren argues that this 17^th century argument about the independence of the judges, abuses of power by the government,  and local control over the judiciary was played out  over again, this time in the colonies.  In this book, McLaren uses group biography to examine how these battles were exemplified through the careers of a number of colonial judges from Upper Canada, New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, Sierra Leone, Newfoundland and the West Indies.

Judge Willis has a starring role here: we meet him in the opening pages, and he is featured in two chapters.  He is, however, not the only judge in this book who appears as a trouble maker in two separate colonies.  Jeffrey Bent, well known in Australia for his struggles with Macquarie, reappeared in Grenada, where he again clashed with the governor.  Robert Thorpe, who was a ‘radical’ judge in Upper Canada prior to Willis’ appointment, also had trouble in Sierra Leone, and Sir John Gorrie seemed to be shifted from place to place when he fell out with various people in Fiji, the Leeward Islands  and  Trinidad.  There are a number of troublesome judges whose travails were restricted to one colony alone: Boothby in South Australia; Sewell and Monk in Lower Canada; Montagu in Van Diemen’s Land; Beaumont in British Guiana.

The chapters are arranged thematically, but chronologically and geographically as well. For example, the chapter ‘Courting Reform in a Counter-Revolutionary Empire 1800-1831’ deals with Robert Thorpe and Judge Willis in Upper Canada, where the judges’ reforming zeal clashed with conservative local interests.  It is followed by a chapter that makes the argument in the opposite direction for other British North American colonies  ‘Ultra Conservative Judges in an Era of Developing Reformist Sentiment in the British Empire 1810-1840’.  It covers similar years to the first chapter, but this time switches the focus around.  It  examines the  cases  of Sewell and Monk in Lower Canada and Henry Boulton in Newfoundland,  where conservative judges fled  the radical colonies for the protection of the home government.

Chapters 6-8 are focussed on Australian examples.  Chapter 6 ‘Guarding the Sanctity of the Common Law from Local ‘Deviations’ in Convict Colony 1800-1830’ examines the career of Ellis and Jeffrey Bent in New South Wales, followed by Ch 7 ‘English Legal Culture and the Repugnancy Card in the Australian Colonies 1830-1850’ which follows on chronologically in examining Montagu and Pedder in Van Diemens Land, and Willis in Port Phillip.  The term ‘repugnancy’ refers to the tenet that colonial law should not contradict English law.  Part of a colonial judge’s role involved analysing local laws drawn up in the colony and advising the governor whether the law was ‘repugnant’ or not.  Chapter 8 takes up the repugnancy question in Australia after 1850 with Benjamin Boothby in South Australia.

Chapters 9 and 10 examine judges in the slavery colonies in the West Indies and West Africa, with George Smith in Trinidad,  Thorpe in Sierra Leone and Jeffrey Bent in Granada between 1800-1830 in Chapter 9.   In Chapter 10 the time frame shifts to 1834-1900 with Joseph Beaumont in British Guiana and Sir John Gorrie in Mauritius, Fiji and Trinidad.

The final chapter draws together themes that emerge throughout the stories.  In a way, this chapter subverts, or at least challenges, the structural logic of the other chapters because some of these judges, Willis in particular, are not easy to pigeonhole.

As McLaren points out, it is important that troublesome, contrary, complex and contradictory judges should not be committed to “the ashcan of historical ephemera”.  We gain a view of empire from them that is not available from ‘don’t rock the boat’ jurists, and we must never lose sight of the fact that law is never a sideshow. Instead, it was an important instrument in the extension of imperial authority, infused with and supported by the constitutional and legal values of the English-speaking world of the previous two centuries. (p. 273, 274)

It is the PhD student’s nightmare that a highly prominent, esteemed and widely published academic release a book on one’s very topic while you are still working on- or worse, just as you finish-  your thesis.  I became aware of John’s work while I’ve been working on Willis myself, and it was with a mixture of trepidation and curiosity that I read his book.  I gained much from it, particularly in being able to compare Willis with other judges in similar situations, and it’s with relief that I can see where my own  more  bottom-up work can fit under his broad umbrella of judicial misbehaviour and discipline.

A group biography, like this one, has challenges beyond that of the individual biography.  There’s a danger that so many situations and people are introduced that the whole thing breaks down in confusion, but there’s also the advantage of being able to better define the exceptional.  I think that a sign that McLaren has succeeded so well is that on encountering a particular judge a second or even third time, there is a rush of recognition.  His judicial characters are so well drawn that when the final chapter draws together observations from across the work as a whole, there is no need to check back to see ‘now, who’s he again?’  The book is suffused with a lightness of touch and a sure grasp of the contours of so many different colonies that comes from the author’s long, deep immersion in colonial legal history.