Linda Colley Quotes

• Sería erróneo interpretar el crecimiento de la conciencia nacional británica en este periodo en términos de una nueva uniformidad cultural y política impuesta resueltamente a las periferias de la isla por su centro. Para muchos británicos más pobres y menos alfabetizados, Escocia, Gales e Inglaterra seguían siendo reclamos más potentes que Gran Bretaña, excepto en tiempos de peligro exterior. E incluso entre los políticamente educados, era común pensar en términos de doble nacionalidad, no de una única identidad nacional.

  Linda Colley

  Thinking, Islands, Scotland

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• At one level Great Britain at the beginning of the 18th century was like the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, both three and one, and altogether something of a mystery.

  Linda Colley

  Christian, Doctrine, Three

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• A British imperium enabled Scots to feel themselves peers of the Ebglish in a way still denied them in an island kingdom. The language bears that out very clearly. The English and the foreign are still all too inclined to refer to the island of Great Britain as 'England'. But at no time have they ever customarily referred to an English empire.

  Linda Colley

  Islands, Peers, Kingdoms

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• A fundamental reason why Britain was not torn apart by civil war after 1688 was that its inhabitants' aggression was channelled so regularly and so remorsely into war and imperial expansion abroad.

  Linda Colley

  War, Expansion, Torn Apart

  Linda Colley (2005). “Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837”, p.53, Yale University Press

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• Contrary to received wisdom, the British are not an insular people in the conventional sense - far from it. For most of their early modern and modern history, they have had more contact with more parts of the world than almost any other nation - it is just that this contact has regularly taken the form of aggressive military and commercial enterprise.

  Linda Colley

  Military, Taken, People

  Linda Colley (2005). “Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837”, p.8, Yale University Press

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• In the last quarter of the 20th century, Britons have been understandably obsessed with the problem of having too little power in the world. In the third quarter of the 18th century, by contrast, their forebears were perplexed by the problem of having acquired too much power too quickly over too many people.

  Linda Colley

  Gente, Mundo, Pequeños

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• Human beings are many-layered creatures, and do not succumb to the hegemony of others as easily as historians and politicians sometimes imply. Those Welsh, Scottish and Anglo-Irish individuals who became part of the British Establishment in this period did not in the main sell out in the sense of becoming Anglicised look-alikes. Instead, they became British in a new and intensely profitable fashion, while remaining in their own minds and behavior Welsh, or Scottish, or Irish aswell.

  Linda Colley

  Fashion, Mind, Hegemony

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• In virtually every Continental state at this time, aristocracies had to live with the risk that their property might be pillaged or confiscated. Only in Great Britain did it prove possible to float the idea that aristocratic property was in some magical and strictly intangible way the people's property also. The fact that hundreds of thousands of men and women today are willing to accept that privately owned country houses and their contents are part of Britain's national heritage is one more proof of how successfully the British elite reconstructed its cultural image in an age of revolution.

  Linda Colley

  Country, Men, Ideas

  Linda Colley (2005). “Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837”, p.177, Yale University Press

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• Most Britons still lived and died without encountering anyone whose skin colour was different from their own. Slaves, in short, did not threaten, at least as far as the British at home were concerned. Bestowing freedom upon them seemed therefore purely an act of humanity and will, an achievement that would be to Great Britain's economic detriment, perhaps, but would have few other domestic consequences.

  Linda Colley

  Home, Achievement, Humanity

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• En las guerras contra la Francia revolucionaria y napoleónica, como en tantos conflictos posteriores, las mujeres británicas no parecen haber sido más marcadamente pacifistas que los hombres. Por el contrario, y exactamente igual que muchos de sus compatriotas varones, algunas mujeres encontraron la manera de combinar el apoyo al interés nacional con cierta medida de autopromoción. Ayudando al esfuerzo bélico, las mujeres demostraron que sus preocupaciones no se limitaban en absoluto a la esfera doméstica. Amparándose en un patriotismo a menudo auténtico y profundo, se labraron un lugar real, aunque precario, en la esfera pública.

  Linda Colley

  Real, War, Mean

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• An unprecedented number of uniformed males, marching, parading and engaging in mock battles in every region of Great Britain brought a pleasant frisson of excitement into many normally quiet and deeply repetitive female lives.

  Linda Colley

  Numbers, Battle, Males

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• These developments - a massive transfer of land by way of inheritance and purchase, an unprecedented rise in the profitability of land and increasing intermarriage between Celtic and English dynasties - helped to consolidate a new unitary ruling class in place of the more separate and specific landed establishments that had characterised England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland in the Tudor and Stuart eras.

  Linda Colley

  Land, Class, Tudors

  Linda Colley (2005). “Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837”, p.161, Yale University Press

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• Virtually every war fought since the Act of Union had gone badly at some stage, but before 1783 none had ended in defeat. Nor would any major war in which Britain was involved after this date end in defeat. Those who are curious about this country's peculiar social and political stability probably need look no further than this for essential cause.

  Linda Colley

  País, Guerra, Política

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• In the past, the British had signally failed to build an effective structure of royal authority and administration in their American colonies. As a result, no possibility existed of soothing and winning over influential and talented Americans, in the way that influential and talented Scotsmen were increasingly being won over, by giving them increased access to state employment.

  Linda Colley

  Winning, Past, Giving

  Linda Colley (2005). “Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837”, p.136, Yale University Press

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• From the 15th century to 1688, England and Wales, like Scotland, had been peripheral kingdoms in the European power game, more often at war with each other that with Continental powers, and - except under Oliver Cromwell - scarcely very successful on those occasions when they did engage the Dutch, or the French, or the Spanish.

  Linda Colley

  War, Successful, Games

  Linda Colley (2005). “Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837”, p.53, Yale University Press

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• Jacobitism involved much more than a debate about the merits of a particular dynasty. Men and women were well aware that its success was almost certain to involved them in civil war. And the more politically educated knew that the Stuart Pretender was a pawn in a worldwide struggle for commercial and imperial primacy between Britain and France.

  Linda Colley

  Guerra, Lucha, Hombres

  Linda Colley (2005). “Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837”, p.79, Yale University Press

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• Loyal and substansial Catholic service on the battlefield undermined one of the most longstanding objections to emancipation: namely, that since Catholics owed religious allegiance to a foreign authority in the person of the Pope, their political and patriotic allegiance must necessarily be suspect.

  Linda Colley

  Religious, Patriotic, Political

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• Ever since the Reformation, the case of legislation confining Catholics had been constructed primarily to protect a nervously Protestant against what was assumed to be a fifth column in its midst... Ministers believedm with some justice, that Catholics retained an attachment to their exiled co-religionists, the princes of the House of Stuart. After the Battle of Culloden had confirmed Jacobitism's insignificance, however, government attitudes towards Catholicism began perceptibly and logically to relax.

  Linda Colley

  Attitude, Government, Attachment

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• Can it be entirely accidental that the most famous fictional spy of them all, James Bond, Number 007, deadly marksman, intriguer, the ultimate man behind the curtain, sexual athlete and ruthless patriot, is also a Scot, as was the author, whose wish-fulfilment he was?

  Linda Colley

  Athlete, Men, Numbers

  Linda Colley (2005). “Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837”, p.132, Yale University Press

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• For women to be supplying the soldiery with banners, flannel shirts and other material comforts was, superficially, all of a piece with their ministrations to their menfolk at home. Such contributions to the war effort were socially acceptable because they could be seen as an extension into the military sphere of the traditional female virtues of charity, nurture and needlework. Yet in reality what the women were doing represented the thin end of a far more radical wedge. Consciously or not, these female patriots were staking out a civic role for themselves. And many of them relished it.

  Linda Colley

  Militar, Guerra, Inicio

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• In Great Britain, woman was subordinate and confined. But at least she was also safe.

  Linda Colley

  Safe, British History, Britain

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• Reconocer que un ostentoso culto al heroísmo y al servicio del Estado cumplía una importante función propagandística para la élite británica no significa, por supuesto, que debamos descartarlo por artificial o insincero. Todas las aristocracias tienen una fuerte tradición militar, y para muchos patricios británicos la prolongada guerra de la época fue una bendición. Les proporcionaba un trabajo y, lo que es más importante, un propósito, una oportunidad de llevar a cabo aquello para lo que habían sido entrenados desde la infancia: montar a caballo, disparar armas, ejercitar su indudable valor físico y decir a los demás lo que tenían que hacer.

  Linda Colley

  Strong, Horse, Jobs

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• Chilvalry's essential function, Maurice Keen has written, is always to hold up an idealised image of armed conflict in defiance of the harsh realities of actual warfare. By definition, chivalry also reaffirms the paramount importance of custom, hierarchy and inherited rank.

  Linda Colley

  Reality, Essentials, Warfare

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• The pre-war empire had been sufficiently informal and sufficiently cheap for Parliament to claim authority over it without having to concern itself too much about what this authority entailed. The post-war empire necessitated a much greater investment in administrative machinery and military force. This build-up of control had to be paid for, either by British taxpayers or by their colonists.

  Linda Colley

  Military, War, Empires

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