The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Trendy World

New York Occasions E-book Overview • Editors’ Selection

Vivid and magisterial, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen reconfigures the rise of a contemporary world by way of the appearance and unfold of written constitutions.

A piece of extraordinary vary and placing originality, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen traces the worldwide historical past of written constitutions from the 1750s to the 20th century, modifying accepted narratives and uncovering the shut connections between the making of constitutions and the making of battle. Within the course of, Linda Colley each reappraises well-known constitutions and recovers these which have been marginalized however have been central to the rise of a contemporary world.

She brings to the fore uncared for websites, similar to Corsica, with its pioneering structure of 1755, and tiny Pitcairn Island within the Pacific, the primary place on the globe completely to enfranchise ladies. She highlights the function of surprising gamers, similar to Catherine the Nice of Russia, who was experimenting with constitutional methods together with her enlightened Nakaz a long time earlier than the Founding Fathers framed the American structure. Written constitutions are normally examined in relation to particular person states, however Colley focuses on how they crossed boundaries, spreading into six continents by 1918 and aiding the rise of empires in addition to nations. She additionally illumines their place not merely in legislation and politics but in addition in wider cultural histories, and their intimate connections with print, literary creativity, and the rise of the novel.

Colley exhibits how―whereas advancing epic revolutions and enfranchising white males―constitutions often served over the lengthy nineteenth century to marginalize indigenous individuals, exclude ladies and folks of shade, and expropriate land. Concurrently, although, she investigates how these gadgets have been tailored by peoples and activists outdoors the West looking for to withstand European and American energy. She describes how Tunisia generated the primary trendy Islamic structure in 1861, shortly suppressed, however an affect nonetheless on the Arab Spring; how Africanus Horton of Sierra Leone―impressed by the American Civil Struggle―devised plans for self-governing nations in West Africa; and the way Japan’s Meiji structure of 1889 got here to compete with Western constitutionalism as a mannequin for Indian, Chinese language, 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, highly effective leaders, visionary lawmakers and dedicated rebels―retells the story of constitutional authorities and the evolution of concepts of what it means to be trendy.

80 black-and-white illustrations