In 1838, Captain Russell Elliot landed a British warship on a rocky island midway between Peru and New Zealand called Pitcairn, and found a culture in need of a written constitution. Without such a document, American whalers were threatening the livelihoods of two hundred or so inhabitants. Elliot jotted down “a few hasty regulations to be observed.” Pitcairn’s was the first written constitution to make provisions to protect the environment, including a stipulation to preserve a local endangered bird. It was also the first to give equal voting rights to all men and all women. It lasted with few alterations until the 1930s. When some Pitcairn women emigrated to Australia in the 1850s, they fought for the right guaranteed to them in their constitution. They had it in writing.
In Linda Colley’s new book, constitutions fizzle with the energy of war, navigation and power. They are circulated and argued over, and while the American founders get a look in, she avoids the idea that these documents are gifted to the people by elites. They’re contested and few are as permanent or as apparently liberal as that in the US.
Starting in 1750, Colley shows it was war—on a larger and more expensive scale, fought simultaneously at sea and on land—that gave rise to avid constitution writing. In France, the cost of the Seven Years’ War led to the nation’s bankruptcy in 1787. The violent regime changes that followed would provoke no less than nine official attempts at a new French constitution between 1798 and 1815.
Colley, a professor of history at Princeton, is an adroit storyteller. Her Thomas Paine is a disgruntled and radical tax collector, sitting in the political clubs of Lewes with its boisterous electorate. Her Jeremy Bentham, a sage of myriad constitutional projects, bounds upstairs to his pride and joy (a centrally heated library). This fascinating global history shows that while constitutions are surrounded by an ocean of competing interests and violence, read together they tell a tale of how interconnected the story of political hope has always been.
The Gun, the Ship and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern Worldby Linda Colley (Profile, £25)
