“From the very beginning, Americans have exhibited a taste for expansion, an appetite for empire. One of the fundamental reasons for this is very clear. Like every other western empire that has ever existed, Americans may claim to have inherited the mantle of ancient Rome.”

British academic and historian

Linda Colley is a British academic and historian of British, imperial, and global history from 1700. She is the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University, and has also held professorships at Yale University and the London School of Economics. Her work often uses interdisciplinary methods to examine the making of Britain and its place in wider imperial and global contexts. She is known for scholarship that connects political, cultural, and historical questions across long spans of modern history.