A work of extraordinary range and striking originality, The Gun,
the Ship, and the Pen traces the global history of written
constitutions from the 1750s to the twentieth century, modifying
accepted narratives and uncovering the close connections between
the making of constitutions and the making of war. In the process,
Linda Colley both reappraises famous constitutions and recovers
those that have been marginalized but were central to the rise of a
modern world. She brings to the fore neglected sites, such as
Corsica, with its pioneering constitution of 1755, and tiny
Pitcairn Island in the Pacific, the first place on the globe
permanently to enfranchise women. She highlights the role of
unexpected players, such as Catherine the Great of Russia, who was
experimenting with constitutional techniques with her enlightened
Nakaz decades before the Founding Fathers framed the American
constitution. Written constitutions are usually examined in
relation to individual states, but Colley focuses on how they
crossed boundaries, spreading into six continents by 1918 and
aiding the rise of empires as well as nations. She also illumines
their place not simply in law and politics but also in wider
cultural histories, and their intimate connections with print,
literary creativity, and the rise of the novel. Colley shows
how-while advancing epic revolutions and enfranchising white
males-constitutions frequently served over the long nineteenth
century to marginalize indigenous people, exclude women and people
of color, and expropriate land. Simultaneously, though, she
investigates how these devices were adapted by peoples and
activists outside the West seeking to resist European and American
power. She describes how Tunisia generated the first modern Islamic
constitution in 1861, quickly suppressed, but an influence still on
the Arab Spring; how Africanus Horton of Sierra Leone-inspired by
the American Civil War-devised plans for self-governing nations in
West Africa; and how Japan's Meiji constitution of 1889 came to
compete with Western constitutionalism as a model for Indian,
Chinese, and Ottoman nationalists and reformers. Vividly written
and handsomely illustrated, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen is an
absorbing work that-with its pageant of formative wars, powerful
leaders, visionary lawmakers and committed rebels-retells the story
of constitutional government and the evolution of ideas of what it
means to be modern.
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