- 2007 edition, 363 pages
- Published by Harper Collins
- Paperback, Format A
- Very good condition. Minor cover wear and twink out on free front end paper.
A Woman in World History. Illustrated and index included.
This is a book about a world in a life. An individual lost to history. Elizabeth Marsh (1735-85) travelled farther, and was more intimately affected by developments across the globe, than the vast majority of men. Conceived in Jamaica and possibly mixed-race, she was the first woman to publish in English on Morocco, and the first to carry out extensive overland explorations in eastern and southern India, journeying in each case in close companionship with an unmarried man.
A creature of multiple frontiers, she spent time in some of the world's biggest ports and naval bases: Portsmouth, Menorca, Gibraltar, London, Rio de Janeiro, Calcutta and the Cape. She participated in land speculation in Florida; was damaged by the Seven Years War and the American Revolutionary War; and linked through her own migrations with voyages of circumnavigation. And as victim and owner, she was involved in three different systems of slavery.
But hers is a broadly revealing, not simply an exceptional, life, Marsh's experiences would have been impossible without her links to the Royal Navy, the East India Company, empire and international trade. To this extent, her career illumines shifting patterns of British and Western power and overseas aggression. Yet the unprecedented expansion of connections across continents and oceans occuring in her lifetime also ensured that her progress, relationships and beliefs were repeatedly shaped and deflected by people and events beyond Europe.
So while imperial players like Edmund Burke and Eyre Coote form a part of her story, so do African slave sailors, skilled Indian weavers and astronomers, ubiquitous Sephardi Jewish traders, and the great Moroccan Sultan, Sidi Muhammad, who schemed to entrap her.
This is a global biography for our globalizing times.
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