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WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A WRITTEN CONSTITUTION IS PRINTED? A HISTORY ACROSS BOUNDARIES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2021
Abstract
After 1750, the rate at which new political constitutions were generated increased relentlessly. By the First World War, written and published devices of this sort already operated in parts of every continent outside Antarctica. Yet for all the scale and speed of this transformation, approaches to the history of written constitutions have often been selective. Although they spread rapidly across maritime and land frontiers, constitutions are still usually examined in the context of individual countries. Although they could function as tools of empire, constitutions have generally been interpreted only in terms of the making of nations and nationalism. And although these are authored texts, written constitutions rarely attract the attention of literary scholars. Instead, these documents have become largely the province of legal experts and students of constitutional history, itself an increasingly unfashionable discipline. In this lecture, I examine the vital and various links between constitutions and print culture as a means of resurrecting and exploring some of the transnational and transcontinental exchanges and discourses involved in the early spread of these instruments. I also touch on the challenges posed to written constitutions – now embedded in all but three of the world's countries – by the coming of a digital age.1
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- The Prothero Lecture
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Historical Society
Footnotes
1
For more extensive discussion and documentation of some of the points raised in this lecture, see my The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (2021). I thank Eric Foner, Hendrik Hartog, Jeremy Adelman, Daniel Hulsebosch, Dan Rodgers, Kim Lane Scheppele and Sean Wilentz for their expert advice and suggestions, and members of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University and Perry Gauci's eighteenth-century seminar at the University of Oxford for comments on earlier versions of this paper.
References
2 Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, Reported by James Madison, with an introduction by Adrienne Koch (New York, 1987). The prohibition on disclosing information was made on 29 May.
3 Maier, Pauline, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788 (New York, 2010), 70Google Scholar.
4 Gloucestershire Chronicle, 2 December 1848.
5 The official English translation was Form of Government enacted by His Majesty the King and the States of Sweden Aug. the 21 1772 (Stockholm, 1772).
6 See Warner, Michael, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1990)Google Scholar; and The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Cambridge, 2000), 361. For the wide levels of access to print in Sweden, see Skuncke, Marie-Christine, ‘Press Freedom in the Riksdag’, in Press Freedom 250 Years: Freedom of the Press and Public Access to Official Documents in Sweden and Finland – A Living Heritage, ed. Wennberg, Bertil et al. (Stockholm, 2018)Google Scholar.
7 For a recent survey of some of these pressures, see Edling, Max M., ‘A More Perfect Union: The Framing and Ratification of the Constitution’, in The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, ed. Kamensky, Jane and Gray, Edward G. (New York, 2013)Google Scholar.
8 See Maier, Ratification, passim.
9 Hulsebosch, Daniel J., ‘The Revolutionary Portfolio: Constitution Making and the Wider World in the American Revolution’, Suffolk University Law Review, 47 (2014), 759–822Google Scholar; and see Hulsebosch, Daniel J. and Golove, David M., ‘A Civilized Nation: The Early American Constitution, the Law of Nations, and the Pursuit of International Recognition’, New York University Law Review, 85 (2010), 932–1066Google Scholar.
10 This letter by Washington crossed continents a further time, being printed in the Calcutta Journal in May 1822.
11 Fraser, Leon, English Opinion of the American Constitution and Government, 1783–1798 (New York, 1915)Google Scholar. The speed of the draft constitution's publication in London was made possible by one of the Philadelphia delegates carefully despatching his own early print copy there.
12 See, for instance, the accusation by the anti-Jacobin John Bowles that the ‘French … paper constitution fell to pieces before they could well get it into their hearts’, in his Dialogues on the Rights of Britons (London, 1793), 11.
13 Armitage, David, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 145–55Google Scholar.
14 For a partial collection, see the remarkable compendium masterminded by Horst Dippel: Constitutions of the World: 1850 to the Present, available in microform in multiple languages.
15 Elise Marienstras and Naomi Wulf, ‘French Translations and Reception of the Declaration of Independence’, Journal of American History, 85 (1999), 1318 n.
16 Though the degree to which this happened was limited and varied across world regions. The determination of many states outside the Americas before 1914 to provide in their constitutions for a monarchy of some sort and still more for parliamentary systems – both institutions alien to the United States – should be noted.
17 The full text of the constitution is provided in Spanish and English in Interesting Official Documents Relating to the United Provinces of Venezuela … Together with the Constitution Framed for the Administration of Their Government (1812), 151–298. The Venezuelan-born intellectual Andrés Bello, at this stage an exile in north London, played a major role in engineering the appearance of this publication.
18 Ibid., 307.
19 A pioneering example is Jacques Vincent Delacroix's widely translated Constitutions des principaux états de l'Europe et des États-Unis (2 vols., Paris, 1791). Compilations of American state constitutions were published in London, Glasgow and Dublin in 1782–3, and in America itself still earlier.
20 I owe this information to Professor Roy Foster.
21 Though Pasquale Paoli's revolution in Corsica in 1755 and written constitution that year did prompt the English radical Catherine Macaulay to include ‘a short sketch for a democratical government in a letter to Signor Paoli’ in her first political publication in 1769.
22 Tønnesson, Kåre, ‘The Norwegian Constitution of 17 May 1814: International Influences and Models’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 21 (2001), 175–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 For these and other publicising techniques, see Writing Democracy: The Norwegian Constitution, 1814–2014, ed. Karen Gammelgaard and Eirik Holmøyvik (New York, 2015).
24 A full translation of the Plan de Iguala is available online on Rice University's digital scholarship archive. In its original form, and like the Cadiz constitution of 1812, this confined religious toleration to Catholics.
25 As reported in the Calcutta Journal, 9 May 1822.
26 On Calcutta's print culture and its mixed policies: Ogborn, Miles, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nair, P. Thankappan, A History of the Calcutta Press, the Beginnings (Calcutta, 1987)Google Scholar. For the Calcutta Journal's commentary on and selective reprintings of (mainly) South American constitutions, see its issues for 7 September 1821, 6 April, 9 May, 9 November 1822 and 14 February 1823.
27 For excellent introductions to these men and their political ideas, see Kieran Hazzard, ‘From Conquest to Consent: British Political Thought and India’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2017); and Bayly, C. A., ‘Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–1830’, Modern Intellectual History, 4 (2007), 25–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 Richard Carlisle writing in The Republican (1820), 229–30.
29 Qualified, because the surge in the publication levels of British constitutional histories from the 1820s onwards can be interpreted in part as a response to the accelerating issue, printing and publicity of new political constitutions in the Americas and sectors of Continental Europe by this stage.
30 Canton Miscellany (Guangzhou, 1831), 32–4.
31 See McLoughlin, William G., Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, 1986)Google Scholar.
32 On Sequoyah and his background, see An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelly (Chapel Hill, 2010), 499–513.
33 Constitution of the Cherokee Nation, Formed by a Convention of Delegates (New Echota, 1827).
34 As reported in the Cherokee Phoenix (the first Native American newspaper) on 20 November 1830.
35 For Pacific-world examples of missionary importation of printing presses from the 1810s being succeeded by indigenous rulers’ experimentation with varieties of charters and constitutions, see my The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen, 284–305.
36 Imagined Communities: Reflecting on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (2006 edn), 67.