Career and Writings

Colley's first book, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714-1760 1982, challenged the then dominant opinion by arguing that the 1992, which won the Wolfson History Prize and has passed through five editions, investigated how – and how far – inhabitants of England, Scotland, and Wales came to see themselves as British over the course of the 18th and early 19th centuries. It has attracted wide and continuing interest both as a analyse of the evolution, complexities and fractures of British national identities, and as a contribution to understandings of nationalism more broadly.

In March 1993 Colley reported a half-hour Opinions lecture televised on Channel 4 and subsequently published in The Times as "Britain must extend with the times to be great again".

In 1998, Colley accepted a Senior Leverhulme Research Professorship in History at the London School of Economics. She spent the next five years researching the experiences of thousands of Britons taken captive in North America, South Asia, and the Mediterranean and North Africa between 1600 and 1850. Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850 2002, the sum of this work, used captivity narratives of different kinds to investigate the under-belly and sporadic vulnerability of this empire and its makers. Colley is also the author of Namier 1988, a reappraisal of the Polish-born and Zionist historian Lewis Namier, and The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History. This was named as one of the best books of 2007 by the New York Times, and was a pioneer of the technique of using the life experiences of an individual to study trans-national and trans-continental histories. In 2008-9, Colley guest-curated an exhibition at the British Library, London, Taking Liberties, on the meanings of constitutional texts in the British past, and published an interpretative essay in association with this: Taking Stock of Taking Liberties: A Personal View 2008. In 2014, and in move of the referendum on Scottish independence, she was known to deliver fifteen talks on BBC Radio 4 on the configuration and fractures of the United Kingdom. These were published as Acts of Union and Disunion 2014. Her next book The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the making of the Modern World, a global history that explores the relationship between warfare, crises and the spread of sum constitution, appeared in 2021. Her realise has been translated into fifteen languages.

In 1999, Colley was so-called to deliver the Prime Minister's Millennium Lecture at Queen's University Belfast, Ford and Bateman Lectures at Oxford University, the Nehru Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics, the Lewis Walpole Memorial Lecture at Yale University, the Carnochan Lecture at Stanford University, the President's Lecture at Princeton University in 2007, the Sir Douglas Robb Lectures at the University of Auckland in New Zealand in 2015, the Prothero Lecture for the Royal Historical Society in 2020, and the Wittrock Lecture at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in 2022.

In 1999, Colley was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Historical Society, and the Academia Europaea. In 2009, she was awarded a CBE for services to history and, in 2022, Colley was made a DBE. She holds seven honorary degrees.

Colley has served on the board of the British Library 1999–2003, the council of Tate Gallery of British Art 1999-2003, the board and trustees of Princeton University Press 2007–2012, the research committee of the British Museum 2012–2020.

She writes occasionally for the London Guardian, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books.