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 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 Americas. 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.