Linda Colley - The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World

ALSO BY LINDA COLLEY

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LINDA COLLEY

Copyright 2021 by Linda Colley

All rights reserved

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Colley, Linda, author.

Title: The gun, the ship, and the pen : warfare, constitutions, and the making of the modern world / Linda Colley.

Description: New York, NY : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a Division of
W.W. Norton & Company, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020041675 | ISBN 9780871403162 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781631498350 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Constitutional lawPolitical aspects. | Constitutional history. | War (International law) | Military art and science. | Implied powers (Constitutional law)

Classification: LCC K3165 .C565 2021 | DDC 342dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041675

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In Memory of my Father

ROY COLLEY

And his Father

HARRY COLLEY

Lives Shaped by War

It was in Istanbul that Kang Youwei witnessed the transformation at work. Sixty years old, a philosopher and a reformer, he had been exiled from his native China on account of his politics, and was persistently on the move. Crossing into the heartland of the Ottoman empire that summer in 1908, he found himself in the midst of turmoil. Rumours had been circulating of a Russian and British takeover of Macedonia, part of Sultan Abdlhamid IIs dominions. Viewing this as further proof of the inadequacies of their government, sections of the Ottoman army had rebelled. They wanted a parliament. Even more, they wanted a reinstatement of the empires first written constitution, which had been implemented in 1876, but then swiftly withdrawn. Kang Youwei arrived in Istanbul on 27 July, the day these army rebels succeeded in getting the constitution formally restored. Pushing his way through the crowds, cut off by language, but not from the excitement, he watched as Half-moon flags hung, people drink, hit drums, sung songs together and danced. People were chanting long live, it did not stop day and night, streets, parks and everywhere were the same it is astonishing. Writing later, he set down the essence of the rebel leaders ultimatum to the sultan: They all bent down respectively and told [him] Every country has a constitution, only Turkey first declared and then abolished it, so people are not satisfied. The ideas of soldiers have changed.

This episode speaks to themes that are central to this book. There is the prominence of military men in this constitutional crisis. There is the fact that it was precipitated by threats and fears of foreign aggression; and there is the behaviour of Kang Youwei himself. Wanting constitutional change in China, he nonetheless saw it as essential to pay close attention as well to political experiments and ideas in other sectors of the world. On the run for sixteen years, proclaimed this mans favourite personal seal: circling the globe three times, traversing four continents. Like other activists who feature in these pages, though to an extreme degree, Youwei took it for granted that a viable political constitution could not be the introspective creation of a single polity. Learning and borrowing from others was indispensable, a position that by the early twentieth century had become the norm.

But it is his account of the arguments used by these military rebels to face down the Ottoman sultan that is most striking. As Youwei tells it, these men insisted that even among the empires common soldiery ideas had changed. They made a still more arresting assertion: that, by now in 1908 every country has a constitution. To an important degree, these claims were substantially correct. Since the mid eighteenth century, new written constitutions had spread at an increasing rate across countries and continents. This had worked to shape and re-forge multiple political and legal systems. It had also altered and disrupted patterns of thought, cultural practices and mass expectations.

Collections of rules of government were nothing new, of course, but went back a long way. Some city states in ancient Greece had enacted them in the seventh century BCE. Codes of written laws emerged in different societies earlier still. Slabs of stone inscribed with the code of Hammurabi, ruler of Mesopotamia in what is now the Middle East, survive from before 1750 BCE. But such ancient texts were generally the work of single authors and potentates. Most were far more concerned to set out rules of conduct for subjects, and fearsome penalties for defying them, than to establish curbs on those in authority or provide for individual rights. Moreover, most early codes and collections were not produced in large numbers or designed for a wide audience. Even when law codes and charters began to be set down on parchment and paper, and levels of print and literacy expanded in some regions of the world, acute limits on circulation persisted. In 1759, the English jurist William Blackstone would complain of the continuing lack of a full and correct copy of King Johns Magna Carta, even though this was a celebrated charter and had emerged five centuries before.

Yet, as this outburst of impatience on Blackstones part suggests, by this stage, the situation was changing. From the 1750s, and in some particularly war-torn countries such as Sweden even before that, widely distributed iconic texts and single document constitutions aimed at constraining governments, and promising a variety of rights, became more numerous and more prominent. Thereafter, such documents proliferated exponentially and in connected waves across multiple frontiers. The quantum surge in the number of constitutions that followed the First World War, and still more the Second World War, lay in the future. Nonetheless, by 1914, devices of this sort were operating in parts of every continent barring Antarctica. In addition, and as emerges from Kang Youweis account of the Young Turk revolution in Istanbul, a written constitution had come to be widely regarded as a trademark of a modern state and of the state of being modern. This book investigates these global transformations, and it connects them to shifting patterns of war and violence.

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This is not how the advance of written constitutions is usually understood. Because they are often looked at through the lens of particular legal systems, and because of patriotic pieties, constitutions are normally analysed only in regard to individual nations. Insofar as they have been viewed as a contagious political genre progressively crossing land and sea boundaries, this has generally been put down to the impact of revolutions, not war. In particular, the emergence of written constitutions has been credited to the success of the American Revolution after 1776, and to the impact of those other epic revolutions that swiftly followed: the French Revolution of 1789, what evolved into the Haitian Revolution shortly afterwards, and the revolts that erupted in the 1810s in one-time Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Central and South America. Since their onset is so strongly linked to these famous revolutions, the essential motive power of these new constitutions is often viewed in selective ways. Their genesis and growing popularity are seen as co-extensive with the rise of republicanism and the decline of monarchy, and associated with a relentless growth throughout the world of nation states and the inexorable progress of democracy.