“To be sure, political unions between European countries have often failed in the past, but usually only after relatively brief periods. Denmark and Iceland separated after 130 years; the unions between Spain and Portugal and between Sweden and Norway each lasted less than a century.”

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.