Biography:In December 1774, a middle-aged woman with a chequered past, uncertain health and slender means left her husband in Dhaka and embarked on a journey around southern India. She travelled in a palanquin, with an entourage of 40 coolies and a mysterious companion whom she claimed was a cousin but was probably her lover.
The journey took 18 months and made Elizabeth Marsh the first woman to explore the interior of India. It also made her, for the first time, a lady, who dined and danced with officers and enjoyed "lively yet delicate conversation".
This Indian journey was just one of the episodes in which Elizabeth Marsh broke the bonds of geography, gender, propriety and class. Born in Jamaica, in 1735, she was the daughter of an English shipwright and a woman who may, or may not, have been black or of mixed race. Her father, Milbourne Marsh, and her uncle, George Marsh, were cogs in the vast machine that drove the British navy. Initially small cogs from modest social backgrounds, they rose, through industry, talent and string-pulling, to become "pen and ink" men, with George in the key role as private secretary to the First Sea Lord.
Then, as now, a naval background made for a transient life within a close yet far-flung network. It also gave women a degree of independence that was rare for the period. Elizabeth Marsh grew up first in Portsmouth, then in Menorca and Gibraltar. In 1756, when it seemed that Gibraltar might fall to the French, she elected to travel home alone in an unarmed merchantman. Within days the ship was seized by Moroccan pirates and Elizabeth Marsh was dragged overland to the sultan - the only woman in a group of strange and foreign men. Unusually, and most fortunately, he saw her not as an addition to his harem but as a pawn in his political strategy. When Britain offered him naval stores and the promise of trade relations, Elizabeth Marsh was released.
Her person was intact after this ordeal, but not her honour. She was compromised by this perilously close encounter with the sultan and when James Crisp, her fellow captive, begged her to marry him, she had little choice but to agree.
Crisp was a trader, as dynamic as the Marsh brothers and part of an equally far-flung network, one that stretched from the Caribbean to the Shetlands. But his allegiances were very different. While the Marsh brothers owed their keep to the state, Crisp operated on the margins - avoiding tax, seeking new markets and challenging any authority that stood in his way.
When James Crisp's business failed, in 1768, he took off for India, to become, ironically, a salt agent for the East India Company, a position that made him a tax collector in the embryonic government of India. Elizabeth Marsh was left behind with the children to make her own contribution to the family's shattered finances by writing up her Moroccan experience as The Female Captive, the first account by an English woman of life in the Magreb. She then travelled to India to be reunited, perhaps reluctantly, with her husband.
The couple survived the climate in India, and the disease, but eventually fell victim to economic and political forces. James Crisp failed in his attempts to set up a textile business and died in poverty. Elizabeth Marsh devoted her last years to securing the future of their daughter. Having engineered a match with George Shee, a member of the Irish Catholic gentry who would be richly rewarded for his support of the Act of Union, she died in agony of breast cancer in 1785.
Despite this focus on life and experience, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh is not a conventional biography. Instead, it is an inversion of biographical method. While biographies use history to illuminate a life, this uses life as a mirror to history.
The 18th century was a period of rapid and profound change. Colley's thesis is that Elizabeth Marsh was buffeted by great external forces over which she had no control, and that these external forces were very much of their time: the growth of the nation state and the globalisation of commerce, also war, imperialism, migration, slavery and so on. But equally she shows how a determined and able person, even a woman, could set out to shape her own life.
There is a sense throughout the book that the protagonists are shadowy, elusive figures whose faint voice is quickly drowned by authorial intervention. This is partly due to a dearth of material: Elizabeth Marsh left no personal letters, no portrait and no journal after 1776. Her life, as recreated here, is a net that catches the big themes of history but lets slip the person. But perhaps in our own age of rampant and self-regarding individualism, we should welcome a biography that reveals us all to be just a speck on the map of mankind.
Lucy Trench works in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London
The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History By Linda Colley Harper Press, 363pp. £25