New history books reviewed
DAVID ARMITAGE hails an “enthralling, illuminating and inspiring” work of scholarship, which explains how the advent and spread of written constitutions shaped the modern world
If you’re building a navy from scratch, much can hang symbolically on what you call your ships. When George Washington received a list of names for new frigates in 1795, the United States came top, followed by the Constitution. (The President was third.) The first was predictable; the second, perhaps less so. The eponymous American document had been ratified only seven years before and was among only a tiny handful of similar instruments anywhere in force. As Linda Colley reminds us in her dazzling new book, constitutions were still rare and fragile in the late 18th century and would take another hundred years to blanket the world. She argues that what propelled the spread was war, not least naval war. In light of her findings, the USS Constitution’s moniker seems easier to explain, and even a bit overdetermined.
That striking link between warfare and lawfare in the history of constitutions is only the grandest of many fresh arguments in
The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen. Colley conducts a vivid worldwide tour of “a contagious political genre” from roughly the Seven Years’ War to the First World War, with glances both backwards (to Interregnum England) and forwards (to present-day South Africa and Russia). Her aim is to liberate constitutions from the national – indeed, often nationalist – silos to which they have usually been consigned. She asks not just what the documents said but what their composition and circulation, their imitation and veneration, can tell us about such matters as forming states, popular politics and the meanings of modernity. The result is one of the most enthralling, illuminating and inspiring works of global history in decades.
Again and again, Colley’s connective, transnational approach reveals striking patterns and raises novel problems. Why were so many early constitutional entrepreneurs Protestants, and often Freemasons?