The Gun the Ship and the Pen: What’s behind the world’s constitutions?

In 1755, a rebel leader named Pasquale Paoli successfully wrested control of the island of Corsica from the city-state of Genoa. He then drafted a 10-page document that he called a constitution, laying out a system of government. The people soon ratified it, and Paoli became “general” of the Corsican Republic. The experiment was short-lived and by 1769 the French had taken control of the island, which they have retained more or less ever since. But Paoli’s act launched an era of national constitution-making that persists to this day.

In the intervening 250 years, a written constitution has become part of the script of the nation-state. For example, the world’s youngest generally recognised country, South Sudan, announced its independence in 2011 by adopting a constitution on Day One. How did this confluence come to be? In The Gun the Ship and the Pen, a wide-ranging, beautifully written global history, Princeton historian Linda Colley tackles the first century-and-a-half of constitution-making. She places particular emphasis on the Seven Years’ War, the epic struggle between Britain and France that began the year after Paoli’s writing. Ranging across several continents, this was the first truly global war and heralded an era of expanded military conflict. The scale of the fighting magnified the revenue needs of the main antagonists, as they had to invest in capital-intensive naval power along with traditional land forces. This new “hybrid” warfare had significant consequences for government.

In Colley’s account, wars subjected governments to new pressures whether they won or lost. Britain may have won the Seven Years’ War but its need for revenue from the American colonies soon led to cries of “no taxation without representation”. France lost most of its overseas empire but its decision to ally with the American revolutionaries led to a fiscal crisis and ultimately to the French Revolution.

In turn, the ringing language of equality and freedom in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen led Haitians to take those ideas seriously. Toussaint L’Ouverture’s revolution was followed by several short-lived but innovative constitutions. And in Spain, a liberal attempt to provide for representation for colonial subjects in the 1812 constitution of Cadiz, failed to reinvigorate the empire and lasted only two years.

As nations emerged in the New World from the crumbling Spanish empire, each adopted constitutions, sometimes several in sequence, in a struggle to find institutional stability. In short, victory or defeat in war led to a turn to the pen.

Constitutions were, of course, just one form of writing that emerged during this period, along with the novel, the newspaper and the political pamphlet. Print technology spread these writings within countries and across borders, driven by rising levels of literacy. This diffusion of ideas is one of the themes of the study of modern constitutions – although nominally written in the name of “We the People”, the technology is a transnational one and ideas are borrowed and reworked in radically different contexts.

As acts of institutional design, written constitutions were squarely an Enlightenment project. In Corsica, Paoli located sovereignty in the people and sought to write down a structure of government that would guarantee their freedom and happiness. Encoding universal values into local institutional structures became the task and it drew in leading thinkers of the day, such as Jacques Rousseau and Jeremy Bentham. Colley situates the latter within a fascinating trend of amateur constitution-writing by intellectuals in early-19th-century London. She brings to life how these men were in conversation with nation-builders. Because the world’s financial hub had not been directly touched by war, it drew adventurers and nationalists such as Simón Bolívar, seeking financial and diplomatic support for their projects.

One of the great strengths of Colley’s book is her focus on experiments that occurred outside Euro-America. The main sites of constitutional innovation, from 1755 through today, have been in peripheral places such as revolutionary Haiti or Pitcairn Island, which became the first place to enshrine equal political rights for women in the early 19th century. But innovations also served more malign political projects, such as the subjugation of native populations and the consolidation of authoritarian rule. In many cases, constitutions served nation-building elites seeking to navigate the threat of European colonialism. This was the case with the Meiji constitution of 1889, part of the Japanese modernisation that inspired many other non-Western peoples to seek independence.

No book could capture the whole scope of the phenomenon, and Colley’s emphasis is on elites rather than social movements that sought liberal reforms. In Japan, for example, Colley does not much highlight the rising demands from below for more rights, which persuaded the Meiji oligarchs to consolidate imperial rule through a constitution. This example shows that power more than war is sometimes the prime consideration, particularly when leaders are more afraid of their own people than invasion. But in her willingness to confront these authoritarian experiments, Colley refuses to idealise constitutions. She describes failures as well as successes.

Colley’s narrative is rich and she emphasises the colourful characters who have contributed to constitution-making projects around the world. The authors of these documents are as diverse as the locales, including military men, to be sure, but also adventurers, philosophers, doctors, clerics, explorers and revolutionaries. What unites them is an enduring faith in the written word and its capacity to bring forth a stable system of government. Americans have always taken this for granted but have much to learn from looking back at how similar projects have been imagined in the rest of the world.

The Gun The Ship and the Pen by Linda Colley. Profile Books £25

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