Linda Colley: 'I don't even know if I'm British any more'

Linda Colley has influenced No 10 and helped to shape the debate on national identity. But she thinks our education policy 'a disaster'. Stephen Howe meets a historian of empires, old and new

Most academic historians labour in decent obscurity, producing detailed monographs on very small subjects. They are bought only by university libraries and read, if at all, by a handful of specialists. The minority who "cross over" to appeal to a general readership tend to be regarded rather sniffily by their peers. A J P Taylor's colleagues never forgave him for the popularity of his newspaper articles and TV lectures. Today, people like David Starkey attract a similar mixture of envy and disdain.

It's quite rare, still, for a historian to achieve a high profile and broad readership on the basis of serious writings, rather than dumbed-down pop history or TV work – and to do so without losing the respect of staider colleagues. Linda Colley managed just that with her 1992 book, Britons.

Her timing was right: the book appeared just as public debate on British national identity was moving to the top of the political agenda, driven by Scottish and Welsh nationalism, the Tory crises over Europe, and the delayed cultural impact of mass immigration. Colley was far from being the only historian to address those issues in the Nineties, and her focus on the 18th century might have been thought to make her work distant from current preoccupations. But it was her Britons which caught the moment, and was seen – not least by New Labour politicians – as providing apt historical guidance for dealing with present anxieties.

Linda Colley obviously hopes that her new book, Captives: Britain, the Empire and the world (Jonathan Cape, £20), will achieve something similar. She wants, again, "to give historical depth to political arguments". If the internal strains of British identity were becoming all-pervasive subjects for debate a decade ago, the British Empire and its legacies occupy a similar position today.

The history of British imperialism once seemed almost as dead as the Empire itself. Now it's fashionable, hotly contested, and widely seen as having powerful lessons for the present. Colley sees many great powers as "retaining an imperial quality"; but the modern US is "an empire like no other".

Captives uncovers the stories of Empire's forgotten victims: the thousands of British (and Irish) men and women who, operating on the fringes of imperial expansion, found themselves imprisoned, even enslaved, by North African pirates, Native American tribes, Indian and Afghan princes. It recounts a series of vivid, moving, bizarre personal narratives, reconstructed from the memoirs, diaries and letters of those prisoners. But it also makes them parts of a much bigger story, and attempts to "rethink the whole early history of the Empire".

Colley tries, she says, "to throw new light on attitudes to empire in various ways". One is to relate Britain's colonial history to other empires, including non-European ones like the Ottoman power, whose captives many of her subjects became. Another is to challenge "Whiggish" views that Britain's rise to world power was somehow inevitable. In these 17th- and 18th-century colonial ventures, British power was a fragile, uncertain thing, constantly subject to defeats and reverses.

A third shift is to show how unsure, how malleable, were many of the prisoners' senses of their own identity. A few of the captives, especially upper-class military men, "kept a stiff upper lip" throughout their imprisonment. "They couldn't," she feels "admit their vulnerability." But more, especially women and the poor, showed themselves to be "cultural chameleons" or even "went native". They did not, and could not, feel sustained by some "entrenched belief in their own cultural superiority". This, she hopes, "calls into question many standard stereotypes" about Britishness.

Linda Colley's position is an unusual hybrid in other ways beyond her mix of scholarly repute and public standing. She is, on most reckonings, now very much an Establishment figure: holder of prestigious university posts, Fellow of the British Academy, invited to lecture to the Prime Minister, to broadcast often and to join the governing bodies of institutions. But in some eyes, she features not as a pillar of the state, but as one of its would-be wreckers. Some Tory commentators see her hidden hand – and that of her husband, fellow historian David Cannadine – behind Blairite moves towards the "Break-Up of Britain": devolution, Europeanisation, the weakening of traditional institutions, the alleged denigration of Britain's history and identity.

Colley laughs off such accusations and notes that "I'm also attacked from the other side, by people further left" who think she's far too uncritical of Britishness. Certainly, it's a fair guess that Captives, with its emphasis on imperial Brits as victims rather than conquerors, on the weakness of Britain's early attempts at world power, will come under fire from radical "postcolonial" scholars, not least in the US, for downplaying the savagery of British colonialism. Her husband's recent book on Empire, Ornamentalism, has come under just that kind of assault: and although Colley and Cannadine each pursue their own, independent paths, it's hard not to read Captives contrapuntally, in relation to Ornamentalism as well as to Britons.

Colley says that such US-based radical critics "put themselves in a farcical position, of criticising past European empires, without a critique of current imperialisms". Left-wing postcolonial scholars, she feels, tend to play safe, not only avoiding present global issues, but focusing almost entirely on ruling classes and canonised literary works. Such limitations make much of their work "elitist", even "snobbish", she thinks: "I'd like to see them take more risks." Her own "history from below", she hopes, not only provides a counterweight but is a "plea for pluralism" in the new imperial history.

As for the notion that Colley has become a kind of historian-in-residence at the court of King Blair; it is, she insists, "absurd". Her Millennium Lecture on the future of Britishness, with the PM in the front row, was "a one-off". She's not "constantly popping into Number 10" to offer snippets of historical advice, as some seem to believe. She sees herself as neither cheerleader for, nor predator on, a Blairite Cool Britannia: "I don't even know if I'm British any more. I'm transatlantic, I'm European. I don't feel passionate about these things, as some of my critics do – I'm a mongrel."

Despite her criticism of some trends in US thought, and despite the recognition she has in London, the lure of America remains strong. A fair number of scholars make the move from British to American academic worlds or – less often – the other way. It's rarer to have crossed the pond twice, and be planning an imminent third crossing. Yet Colley has done just that: having re-crossed the Atlantic to be Leverhulme Research Professor at the LSE, she'll soon reverse her steps to take up a post at Princeton. Her reasons are clear, and depressing. The "state micro-management" of British higher education is, she laments, "a disaster"; its attempts to control academics' productivity "just so stupid". They mean "it's impossible to undertake big, ambitious research projects" – like Britons or Captives. US academia offers far more freedom.

She has several such big projects in mind. There will probably be a follow-up to Captives looking more closely at one of its micro-stories. There will be a broad-sweep history of 18th-century Britain. And there will, she hopes, be a "global history of the American Civil War", looking at its international impact as a springboard for discussing relationships between a declining British Empire and a rising American one – a theme prefigured at the end of Captives.

If Linda Colley is at all uneasy at combining all her different worlds – academic respectability and popular appeal, Establishment status and mildly subversive reputation, Britain and America – then she doesn't let it show. Her manner may be unassuming, humorous, even self-deprecating, but with an air of immense self-assurance. Her career path may involve a delicate balance between clashing ideas and imperatives, but she's obviously confident she can continue to carry it off.

Stephen Howe's 'Empire: a very short introduction' is just published by OUP

Biography

Born in 1949, Linda Colley studied at Bristol and then Cambridge Universities, doing her postgraduate research at the latter as a student of Sir John Plumb. In 1978 she became the first-ever woman Fellow of Christ's College, later marrying another young historian there, David Cannadine. In 1982 she moved to Yale, becoming Colgate Professor of History. In the same year her first book, In Defiance of Oligarchy: the Tory Party 1714-1760, was published. It was followed by a study of the great historian of Parliament Lewis Namier (1989) and her highly influential investigation of national identities, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (1992). Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850, is published next week by Jonathan Cape. Linda Colley is currently Leverhulme Research Professor at the London School of Economics. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and sits on the boards of the British Library and the Tate Gallery.