It is perhaps no coincidence that the Commonwealth Games took place in Glasgow shortly before the independence vote. Had Scotland voted for independence in 2014, it would have joined the global family of countries – from Australia and Botswana to Vanuatu and Zambia – that have become independent from the United Kingdom. During the Games, Scotland's flag flew alongside those of many nations that had once been governed from London, but which now shouldered the burden (albeit with mixed degrees of democratic stability and socio-economic success) of independence.

At the opening ceremony of the Games, the Scottish anti-imperialist song ‘Freedom Come All Ye’ was sung by a South African performer – drawing a theatrical connection between Scotland's aspirations and those of a nation that had found the courage to democratically renew and reconstitute itself in recent times. Alex Salmond, then the First Minister of Scotland and leader of the SNP, cannot have failed to notice that symbolism. In the dining room of Bute House, the first minister's official residence in Edinburgh, Mr Salmond kept a decorative silver plate commemorating an inter-war meeting of the prime ministers of the Commonwealth nations. It is engraved with the signatures of the prime ministers of Australia, Canada, Newfoundland (which was then a dominion in its own right, having not yet joined Canada), South Africa and New Zealand. The significance of this highly polished sideboard objet d'art was self-evident. It represented the height of the SNP's constitutional ambition: for Scotland to be treated on a par with other independent Commonwealth realms – no more, no less.

As the British Empire slowly and erratically transformed itself into the Commonwealth of Nations, each of these countries faced the challenge of constituting itself as a democratic state. Every one of them, with the partial exception of New Zealand, was given a written constitution at the time of independence, or adopted one soon afterwards, and in most cases these constitutions took the British Westminster model as their basis, and adapted British institutions to local needs. The institutions that were once unique to the unwritten ‘British constitutional tradition’ are now replicated, with an almost uncountable number of reformed variations, derived hybrids and local adaptations, in a global family of written Constitutions from Adelaide to Vancouver and from Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago to Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea.