Leon Trotsky maintained that war is the locomotive of history, but for Linda Colley, it is the source of codified constitutions. In The Gun, the Ship and the Pen, a well-written contribution to global history, she makes a strong case for a causal relationship between the costs of modern hybrid warfare – that is, having a navy as well as an army capable of joint deployment – and the world-wide diffusion of codified constitutions between circa 1750 and 1914-18.
She regularly dilutes the strong causal claim, however, with qualifying phrases such as “close connections”. Yet the claim drives the narrative. It is intended to attract the reader, which it does, but is it true?
To persuade, Colley provides mechanisms. Modern warfare, it is plausibly suggested, is more expensive than its precursors. Governments must extract more in taxes and enrol or conscript more men to serve in expanded and better-equipped armies and in faster and more formidable ships.
And so, to head off tax revolts, to pay off war loans and to ensure sufficient cohesion for smooth conscription or recruitment, modern governments, including traditional monarchies, began issuing codified constitutions. These promised accountability for revenue-raising through recognising powerful parliaments and granted citizenship to some and, eventually, most male soldiers and sailors.
This argument has the advantage of accounting for the failure to incorporate women as equals in early constitution-making: “War was the primary, though, not the only reason.”
Emulation is another mechanism that diffused codified constitutions, amplified by the printing press and the increased velocity of communications from the 1750s. The American and French revolutions, democratic and republican, inspired demands from below for codified constitutions. Strikingly, the Haitian revolution of 1791 overthrew slavery and produced the first black Jacobin republic.
Yet these democratic revolutions triggered defensive modernisation among traditional monarchies. To avoid going under to domestic republicans, and to avoid their armies and navies being obliterated by Euro-American powers, traditional monarchs – in Japan, the Ottoman lands, Hawaii, Tonga, Iran and Ethiopia – copied them. Picking and mixing among exemplary constitutions, modes of public finance and civil-service systems, they created their own bespoke reconstructions. Japan was the first non-European polity to succeed fully in this enterprise.
Military role
Interleaved in the story is one more war-related mechanism of diffusion: the direct role of military officers and veterans in the drafting and issuing of constitutions.
Pasquale Paoli’s hand-written constitution for Corsica (1755), American veterans in the making of the Philadelphia Constitution (1787), Napoleon (1799, 1804) and Toussaint Louverture (1801) of Haiti are examples in the northern hemisphere, and Simón Bolívar, his Irish aide, Daniel F O’Leary, and Bernardo O’Higgins, the liberator of Chile, in the southern.
Colley rescues other figures from obscurity, including Capt Russell Elliott, who wrote a constitution for Pitcairn Island – the first to grant universal suffrage to men and women.
To keep with her theme, we might suggest that Wolfe Tone would likely have drafted the first constitution of an Irish Republic in the uniform of a French officer.
There is, however, an obvious problem in the argument, one that Colley recognises. Namely, Britain. This global military superpower never adopted a codified constitution and is yet to do so.
Colley goes back to the Cromwellian moment and the Instrument of Government of 1653, a short-lived, non-aristocratic constitution for the Isles. Regrettably, it’s about a century premature for the causal linkage of constitution drafting to modern hybrid warfare.
Then she correctly mentions that English writers wrote constitutions in abundance for others, including Locke’s slaveholders’ charter for Carolina and, more creditably, Jeremy Bentham’s numerous drafts for Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries. Though she does not say so, Bentham also inspired Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore.
Knowing this response is insufficient, we are moved to metropolitan London, the print capital of the world in the 19th century and a refugee haven for revolutionaries who would later compose constitutions in their homelands. For Colley, Britain was therefore an “engine assisting the pace and variety of” coded constitutions elsewhere.
Since the hole in the argument is still not fully covered, Colley invokes the Dutch invasion and coup d’etat of William of Orange. The Bill of Rights (in England) and the Claim of Right (in Scotland), and the absence of their enactment in Ireland, are thin gruel, however, insufficient to be codified constitutions.
Finally, Colley settles on old chestnuts: England had an early powerful parliament and lacked a major standing army on its own soil (the major standing army was later recruited in India), so it becomes an admitted exception. The standing army kept next door is omitted.
Amendment
An Irish-driven amendment would better bolster Colley’s argument. The deadliest armed conflict in these islands since 1700 was the insurrection of the Jacobin United Irishmen in 1798, aided by the French directorate. (The Jacobites, also ignored, are presumably to be left to Scots historians.) The crushing of Irish republicanism led immediately to the Act of Union on security grounds.
This Act of Union was and remains a constitutional statute – its exact salience is currently before a court in Northern Ireland. And the recruitment motive in Colley’s thesis might be worked: British governments were keen to keep loyal the disproportionate number of Catholic Irishmen in their armed forces.
This amendment would improve the application of her thesis to these islands, but I remain unconvinced by the argument in its strong form. War has been connected to and affected every aspect of modernisation, not just codified constitutions.
Codified constitutions inescapably came from ideas – the recovery of classical antiquity, notably the revival of republicanism by Machiavelli and his peers, who are not discussed and who were a key source of masculinist militarism. They are an artefact of democratisation – understood as the end of oligarchic societies – and, as she rightly suggests, of efforts to constrain or block the spread of democratic republics. They also flow from the legal profession and its efforts to regulate arbitrary sovereigns and public officials. They have parents in the Enlightenment and their antecedents can be found not just in classical antiquity, but in the political theories of the middle ages.
This book’s many strengths include the emphasis on constitutions being issued both against and for empires after the 1780s; the treatment of the Cádiz constitution, so influential in the Hispanic world; the recovery of Mexico’s provision of 1821, declaring all residents in New Spain to be citizens, without distinction among Europeans, Africans or Indians; and Andrew Jackson’s cruel expulsion of the Cherokees shortly after they had issued their constitution.
Digressions will keep the reader engrossed, notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an allegory for Napoleon and a portrait of James Africanus Beale Horton. Of Igbo origin, Horton was a pioneering advocate of codified constitutions in west Africa and a medical military officer saved from slavery by the British.
Errors will have to be corrected for the paperback of this vibrant good read.
Among them, James Bryce was not a Scottish jurist but a Belfast-born liberal.
The US constitution had to be ratified by a qualified majority of states, not a majority as suggested.
James Wilson did propose “white and other free citizens” for apportioning districts for the US House of Representatives, but what went in the text of the constitution was “free Persons”, along with the notorious provision to count each slave as three-fifths of a free person.
The Irish Free State’s publication of Select Constitutions of the World in 1922 was not printed to proclaim the “brand new republic”. The Free State was a dominion, as a later passage acknowledges. Colley magnifies her error by suggesting the 1937 constitution made independent Ireland “explicitly a republic”. Bunreacht na hÉireann avoided explicitly doing that. Over a decade would pass before Ireland was named a republic – enacted in 1948, entering into force in 1949.
Brendan O’Leary is lauder professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of A Treatise on Northern Ireland
