And so I ask again: who was this book written for? That lack of clarity only obscures, to me, what the purpose of this text is at all. As such, a topic of this magnitude (and Colley’s reputation) suggests a serious academic study, but the text and depth more closely resembles a popular historical narrative. With that scope and limitation, you can only get so detailed. That itself was interesting to a certain extent, in the same sense that Wikipedia articles are full of interesting tidbits and are often rabitholes to more detailed resources, I feel as though this book suffers for trying to distill a head academic subject spanning multiple centuries into around four-hundred pages. RN: To plunge immediately into the spicy takes, I’m going to pose a question: who was this book written for? While I overall enjoyed the content of Colley’s narrative, it read a little to me like a Wikipedia page on war, revolution, and political theory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We had all read Colley’s most notable work, Britons, in a British history seminar in college, so when Bryan and Kevin independently texted each other about this new work of scholarship, it seemed a natural fit for discussion! This month, Bryan, Kevin, Jeff, and Ryan review The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World, by famed Princeton historian Linda Colley. It’s time again for the Concerning History Book Club, where we recreate the experience of the engaging book discussions we’ve had throughout the years in classes and with each other.
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