Linda Colley

The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen makes a few good points about constitutions in its covered period of 1750 to 1914, but then loses itself in a morass of irrelevant detail about constitution writing. Colley makes two major points which are often obscured by the primacy of the American Constitutional civic religion. First, constitutions are not enacted out of high-minded principals, but instead tend to arise as a response to financial and political stresses, especially the stresses incurred by show more imperialist 'hybrid' wars on land and sea best exemplified by the globe-spanning wars triggered by the French Revolution and ended at Waterloo. Second, most constitutions are ephemeral experiments, being replaced after a few years. Even in the United States, state constitutions are hardly sacred writ, the Alabama constitution seems to have been amended regularly, mostly to keep down African Americans. The longevity and seeming immutability of the US constitution is a massive exception to the usual life of these documents.

And then comes the irrelevant fluff. Colley begins with the 1755 Constitution of the Corsican Republic and the career of its military leader Pasquale Paoli, and then ambles through the lives of people who did constitutional writing across the world. Somewhere about 300 pages in and around Pomare II of Tahiti, I realized that what I was reading was a political version of Lomask's Great Lives: Invention and Technology which I loved when I was 10. Page after page was filled with biographical detail, and almost nothing devoted to the political thought that constitutions represent.

This barest pretense of intellectual history is the most critical flaw of this book. For all that it's brought up, the "constitution" could be an abstruse form of poetry or perhaps some kind of sport. Having declared that constitutions served to stabilize states against internal pressures caused by taxation and conscription, Colley has little to say about political stability in constitutional regimes, except that London was spared both unrest and constitutions thanks to its victory over Napoleon and centrality to global trade.

And this is a shame, because constitutions are fascinating documents full of contradictions. They're utopian designs for a more perfect union, and pragmatic attempts to stabilize unruly minorities. The American Constitution was silent on the subject of slavery and explicitly excluded Indians as part of a settler-colonial project to seize the West. Meanwhile, the post-Bolivarian constitutions of South America enshrined (male) legal equality between the castes, including African slaves, though actual power reminded in the hands of a criollo elite. And as I recall from my serious academic years, a constitution must be created and enacted by a process outside the constitution itself (Jasanoff, Agamben, Graeber? I don't care to track down the exact reference). In a legal society, a constitutional moment is one when the raw power of political violence surges close to the genteel debates of the legislature.

I'm most familiar with this period through Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast, and Colley captures almost none of the drama or weight of the era. This was a time when people were actively redefining the nature of politics in debate, mob violence, and massive wars. Colley brings forward peripheral voices, so points for talking about non-Europeans here, but in a broader sense, the debates of the French Revolution and 1848 between liberals, autocrats, and radicals about who wields power and to what ends, are the same debates that we have today. Good history shows us what people in the past thought, and the sources and consequences of their actions. On this measure, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen fails entirely.

I read this book thanks to a glowing review in the New Yorker. "Nobel prize in history" my ass. I may have to start skipping the book reviews along with the fiction if they're this unreliable. show less

Perfect short guide to the union and tensions in the UK - where they came from and where we might be headed. Written pre-referendum, it talks about Scotland's vote in the future tense, but remains neutral on the matter.

Don't expect more from it than it can give - it's a primer, no more. Well-informed by the looks of it (not a historian but the author is an expert on Britain). Very easily digestible with perfectly sized chapters as it was a BBC radio series first, made in 15 minute segments. show more Don't confuse "digestible" with "bland" though, as it does have some bite. The author is very critical of aspects of the British Empire and the constant tendency to self-mythologise.

If you don't know where to start with Britain, I'd recommend this. It gives a good feel for the history and cuts through many stories we tell ourselves & the world. show less

Took me an abnormally long time to finish this book. It isn't exciting and the author gets really bogged down with side stories but it is all to set the story of the era. It was interesting to read of a woman traveler in a time when women weren't supposed to do that. One of the most interesting topics was her breast cancer and subsequent mastectomy in 1778. . . with no anesthesia. . . . hadn't really thought about mastectomies back then but she wasn't the first!

An individual's desire to migrate, John Berger has written, is often 'permeated by historical necessities of which neither he nor anybody he meets is aware'.

Who was Elizabeth Marsh? A mid-eighteenth century woman, conceived in Jamaica, born in England, growing up in the Mediterranean, and as an adult voyaging (involuntarily) through Morocco, planning to emigrate to Florida, and finally ending up in India. In many ways an unusual life story, yet Colley manages to use her to illustrate the show more wider historical forces of the time, picking up many themes from this first age of globalisation which echo our own time: the world is shaped by networks of connections and commodity flows rather than state boundaries, there are overlapping personal identities, and fears about conspicuous consumption - even a banking crisis. (This comparison is lightly worn, though - the book is really about its own time and not ours, although it did make me think about the comparatively short historical timespan of a world made up of states, however formative that is to our current world view - since this is exactly the period where states were growing in power and the ability to control information, money and people, and this is one of the forces which comes up several times in the story.)

The narrative zooms in and out of different levels very effectively. In one passage, narrating what happens after Elizabeth is kidnapped and taken to Marrakech, we hear they are to be kept as hostages until Britain agrees to establish a consul in Morocco. This draws back into the ruler Sidi Muhammad's foreign policy (to develop links with the rest of the world - he was the first Muslim ruler to acknowledge America's independence); the reasons for it (to develop commerce); and the reasons for that choice (demographic differences with other powers of the time such as China and India); what this represents about the globalisation of the era; and what this says about Sidi Muhammad himself (including his attitude to women, which brings us right back to Elizabeth). All in the space of two or three pages. There are many other asides where Colley adds very illuminating context and background to things that I was already aware of - just why cotton was so important to the world economy, for example, or the importance of minor social ritual to Britons in India.

There were occasional moments when I felt that Colley was squeezing too much into this book, but for the most part, it was very well done: clear, readable and thought-provoking.

What about Elizabeth herself? The sources covering her life are scattered and leave some gaps - indeed, one of the smaller themes of the book is how individual lives end up in the archives. After the kidnapping, Elizabeth's (male) companions petition the powerful to come to their assistance. "Elizabeth Marsh by contrast has no contacts with powerful males at this stage of her life, and so writes only to her parents. Consequently her letters, unlike most of the others, do not survive."

But fortunately, Elizabeth told her own story twice - in a book about her experience of being kidnapped, and another about her peregrinations around India. She did this despite the social pressure against it: one writer of the time had commented "It's very unnatural to love those {women} who ... are of a bold, impudent deportment ... Courage in that sex is to me as disgustful as effeminacy in men". But Elizabeth was forced into it by financial pressures (another interesting thing about this narrative is that it covers the 'precariat' rather than the wealthy, and particularly how they navigated the world by appealing to and developing links with men of power).

Fascinating, and highly recommended. show less