It has become a commonplace that Britain, unlike most other states, does not possess "a written constitution." From the 1700s, a succession of politicians, jurists, political theorists and journalists have argued that the slow, piecemeal growth of Britain's system of government reflects a distinctive preference and genius, and that - unlike others - the British do not do deliberate constitutional design. Yet there is an important sense in which such arguments are at once selective national mythology and profoundly ahistoric. In this lecture, Linda Colley discusses why.

Linda Colley, the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University, is an expert on Britain since 1700. She favors cross-disciplinary history, and in both her writing and her teaching examines Britain's past in a broader European, imperial, and global context. Her first book, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714-1760 (1982), challenged the dominant view by arguing that the Tory party remained active and potent during their years out of power. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (1992), which won the Wolfson Prize for History, shows how the inhabitants of England, Scotland, and Wales came to see themselves as British over the course of the 18th century. More recently, Professor Colley researched the experiences of the thousands of Britons who were taken captive in North America, South Asia, and the Mediterranean and North Africa between 1600 and 1850 as the British Empire expanded, resulting in Captives (2002), which uses captivity narratives to investigate the vulnerability of the empire, the complex relations between the imperialists and the societies they sought to invade, and the flexibility of individual identity.

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