Quotes from Linda Colley

Embarking upon war is always dangerous for national leaders because it makes them more than ever at the mercy of events. When domestic opinion is acutely divided, however, war can be politically lethal for its makers.

Hillary Clinton is tough, clever, and formidably well briefed, and has been politically ambitious all her adult life.

Many Americans remain very interested in royal goings-on in general, and not just because of their soap-opera appeal. To a greater degree than any other polity, Britain functions as Americans' defining 'other.'

The immediate impact of British imperial free-trading was often the collapse of local indigenous industries which were in no position to compete, and a consequent destruction of livelihoods and communities.

Much of how Americans have always understood their history, culture, and identity depends on positioning Europe as the 'other,' as that 'old world' against which they define themselves.

America's entire homeland security enterprise positively invites questions even as it strives to reassure.

In the past, the imperialism of the West, like that of the rest, was often difficult - for the doers as well as for their victims - but western states were, nonetheless, usually able to dispatch forces overseas against non-western peoples without any fear of being attacked themselves. That kind of immunity is probably now a thing of the past.

One knows something is important when the powers that be choose not to acknowledge it in public.

Before they became Americans, most white inhabitants of the 13 colonies considered themselves British. It was predictable, therefore, that they would lust after empire, because this was exactly what their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic also did.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, products and tastes developed in America have increasingly influenced lifestyles in Europe, whereas in previous centuries, it was generally the other way around.

I was in Boston, Massachusetts, when Princess Diana died.

Strange, awkwardly written, and even shocking, it broke new ground in more than geographical and observational terms.

British merchants became notably more aggressive and successful in exploring extra-European markets, and Crisp's progress, from a concentration on Mediterranean commerce to involvement in ever more distant seas, perfectly exemplified this trend.

As this suggests, Jamaica was at once brutally divided by racial difference and violence, and in some respects also a cosmopolitan, even tolerant environment.

He worked as one of the two servants allowed Milbourne in his capacity as ship's carpenter: 'servant' in this context meaning an apprentice under training. Both

though, which emerge most sharply from this incident. The workmen's resentment at Milbourne's efforts to add some distinction and ornament to his family's stark lodgings (and perhaps also

In 1784, he will also order his corsairs to capture a US merchant ship, the Betsey. Once they are taken hostage, the Sultan uses the members of the Betsey's crew as bargaining tools, and in 1786 the US Congress agrees to a treaty establishing full diplomatic relations with Morocco.49 There are clear and significant

All successful revolutionary leaders have to worry about how to stabilise the new regimes that they create. After the American Revolutionary War, the likes of Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris had argued for the establishment of a hereditary senate in a still insecure United States quite as fervently as Bolívar did in Venezuela;

This was the innovating constitutional heaven brought into being by Spanish American independence struggles; and, in some regions, the impact was dramatic and long-lasting. By the mid nineteenth century, the political life of large stretches of South America was more inclusive in terms of social class and race – though not gender – than in the United States or much of Europe.

States that have experienced revolutions or have acquired their independence from empires - such as the U.S. or Australia - tend to celebrate their constitutional documents and put them on show in special galleries so that every citizen can become familiar with them. In the U.K., this is not properly done.

Historically, religion has often proved a more lethal and more divisive force than any secular ideology. It has also often been a more divisive force than race.

Historically, individuals possessed of the confidence that privilege and good fortune bestow have often proved conspicuous reformers: think only of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The gulf between imperial ideals and empire on the ground has customarily proved disillusioning not only for colonial peoples but also for some in the occupying power.

As Ronald Reagan demonstrated, it is still possible to progress if not from a log cabin at least from obscurity to the White House. It is also rare.