Dan Snow's History Hit - Written Constitutions with Linda Colley

Episode Date: March 14, 2021

On the podcast today we have the legendary Linda Colley to talk all about her new book examining the phenomenon of written constitutions. From Corsica in 1755 onwards via the United States and into the modern world constitutions represent an attempt by people to write down and codify the laws that govern a state. We discuss how these important documents are, and continue to be, a powerful symbol of statehood; how they represent the cultures and literature of the time and how their increasing importance from the eighteenth century onwards is intimately connected with the gigantic new forms of warfare that arise in the period.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Now, a long time ago, I read a book called Britain's. It was by a historian called Linda Colley, and it was one of the great books that helped cement the 18th century as my favourite bit of history to study. And it helped me make sense of that century, about British identity and about Britain's relationship,

both within Britain and Ireland and with the rest of the world. Fantastic book and Linda Collie is still one of the most distinguished historians in the world. She is Professor of History at Princeton University and it was great to finally have her on the podcast. My first time I finally summoned up the courage to ask Linda Collie to come on the podcast after five years of doing it. I wasn't ready until now, but it was worth the wait. And particularly because she has just published her new book. It's all about written constitutions. And she's done that very rare thing. She sort of created a new field of history where there wasn't really one before. She's looked at the extraordinary phenomenon of written

constitutions, of people trying to write down, trying to codify the laws that govern a state. of people trying to write down, try and codify the laws that govern a state. From Corsica in 1755 onwards via the USA, of course, and into the modern world. And she makes the very powerful point. These constitutions are intimately connected with the gigantic new nature of warfare in the 18th century and its global scale and reach. It is super interesting. I'm loving the book, reading it at the moment. It was fantastic talk to Linda Colley. I hope you enjoy as much as I did. You can go and listen to wonderful podcasts without the ads.

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the team. See you there. In the meantime, though, I hope you enjoy this chat with Linda Colley. Linda, it's a huge honour to have you on the podcast. Thank you for coming on. Pleasure. It's such a clever idea, this. Why did people start writing down constitutions? Like you mentioned that they'd so long did it in Athens. But what was different about this early modern period? What was going on there? Well, I think what's changing in the 18th century, well, various things are changing. First of all, print is really taking off. Literacy is growing, not everywhere, but again, in many parts of the world.

So the idea, not just having a single set of rules of government for members of the elite, but documents that you can communicate to your wider population becomes easier because you've got print, you've got greater literacy. I think, and I argue in this book, is changing natures of war. You can see in diagrams the recurrence of really large, expensive, much more far-flung wars takes off after 1700. What does that mean? Well, because warfare is getting bigger and more recurrent, you often need to raise taxes more, you need to rally more men and maintain, if you can, popular support. And so the idea of these texts grows, I think, as a kind of contract. We will, the rulers guarantee you more rights, perhaps even the vote. In return, things like war service, things like higher taxes, that's the other side of the deal. And that's increasingly spelt out. So part of the reason why you're getting more texts like this is print and literacy. But the crucial thing, I believe, is a rather different quality of war and the demands that it poses. encouraging me to get kind of excited about these enlightenment ideas of kind of modern government and rights, although very, very arbitrarily acknowledged, you know, some groups within

society not having any at all, but anyway, we'll come to that. But on the other hand, it's just a good old fashioned fiscal military state 18th century story about how these states just start to reinvent themselves as just of war machines. But surely some of it, like you look at the French philosophers like Rousseau, they weren't interested in making war, but they were interested in binding our governors to kind of making them act within the law. Well, even Rousseau wavered. I mean, one of Rousseau's fantasies was that he would become a marshal of France. the likelihood of that was not great. But I think even the great French philosophers, the Montesquieus, the Rousseau's, the Voltaire's, the Diderot's, understood that the pressure of war

was increasing. And therefore, in a sense, what they often did was address monarchs and rulers and say, look, you've got to rethink your schemes of government. Here are issues of rights. Here are issues of reforming your state, but also making it more effective that you should be thinking about. And the French philosophers are quite realistic men. And indeed, some of them have close links with the army. Montesquieu was the son of a senior French army officer, married to the daughter of a senior French army officer. So these people understand or have an instinct about what is happening with wars and the burdens this is placing on states, and that perhaps this will be a way to persuade monarchs to take issues of reform more seriously. I don't want to be narrow-minded here, but is the example of England and Britain important here? You look at Montesquieu, and although of course Britain's complicated because it doesn't have a written constitution, but it wasn't just governed by an

arbitrary prince in the 18th century, or was thought not to be. And is the British example where there's a government that is answerable to Parliament, elected through some kind of semblance of a representative electoral system, is that an important example to the French in particular? It is. And of course, one of the interesting things about the British example is that it seems an exception to what I'm arguing, because after all, Britain is constantly at war, but it still doesn't have a codified constitution. But you could argue that actually Britain hits the curve fairly precociously earlier than many other parts of the world, because Britain has its really destructive internal wars much more in the 17th century. You've got the civil wars of the 1640s and 1650s. You've got the Dutch invasion, the so-called glorious revolution of 1688. And it's very interesting to see that with those damaging internal conquests, what do you get? Lo and behold, you get new constitutional texts. The Levellers in the 1640s want a written constitution. 1653 actually implements one for a while, the instrument of government. And in 1688,

you get the Bill of Rights, a phrase that the Americans are going to borrow. So many of the political changes that the French people like Montesquieu tend to admire in 18th century Britain a much stronger parliament. They have actually been assisted in the 17th century, and they've been assisted in part by war and this very precocious constitutional writing, which of course, then the British official line is that, oh, that's all forgotten. No, we've never had a written constitution. Well, it's not quite right. And the kind of de facto constitutional upheavals of the 1690s and the early noughties, early 18th century, when, you know, triennial parliaments, things like that. I mean, the executive found itself quite bound, if not by one particular codified document. Yeah, and there was always a growing set of

constitutional documents in Britain. Indeed, you could argue that one of Britain's problems now, in the early 21st century, is that it has far too many constitutional documents and statutes, but these have not been systematized into a discrete, codified constitution. But that's another argument. But what the British did do increasingly in the late 18th, 19th, early 20th century, as their counterpart to the written constitutions that other states were increasingly generating, was there was a big cult in Britain of constitutional history. If you look at the number of books called constitutional histories issued in London and Oxford and Cambridge and Edinburgh and Dublin, they're shooting upwards really from the 1820s. And studying books about British constitutional history was a kind of poor relation to having a written constitution, because if people wanted to know how the British state was

supposed to be run, people could say, oh, well, go and read that book. Now, that's not remotely the same as a written constitution, but it is serving as a source of dissemination and information, which is part of what, only part of what proper constitutions do. These kind of weird histories, well, not weird, but they became kind of canonical, oddly, didn't they? I was struck reading your book. I found the politics student and the history student within me kind of conflicted. I thought this might be a story about the Enlightenment,

but in fact it was a story about nationalism and about people asking the government for constitutions so that they could be included in this national endeavor of greatness? Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't. I mean, rulers increasingly see or can see written constitutions as something that can work for them and also as a way of almost propagating the image of their state, not only to their own subjects, but to other people. A written constitution really does become an emblem of political modernity, so that when Japan has effectively a revolution in the 1860s and wants to relaunch itself as a modern state, its new gets linked up with the demand for wider suffrage, for can do, not just for their rulers, but for them. And that partly explains the huge size, for example, of the Indian constitution brought together in the late 1940s after they kicked the British out. It's huge, but it's full

of all sorts of provisions, like rights of labour, welfare, all sorts of things. And people have now shown that even ordinary Indians, and even though this is a vast, complex document, there's been a lot of law cases brought by fairly ordinary Indian men and women saying, oh, no, you can't treat me like this because it's in the Constitution. And I'm claiming this right. The degree to which constitutions service power and the degree to which they can be used to constrain power is a very interesting tension that you see again and again. Yeah, it really comes out all the way through your book. I find that fascinating. Cromwell's Intermediate Government, which I think is the first constitution in this wave, but is the US process hugely important here? Why now is it seen as de rigueur? Why was it seen as de rigueur in Japan, in India after partition? Is it the example of America in the 1780s? One of the things I wanted to do in the book was to show, not least my wonderful American colleagues, that this wasn't just a case of America first. You can see the momentum behind constitutions quickening

really from the 1750s. There's an important Corsican constitution in 1755 when Corsica tries to become independent. There's a very interesting Swedish constitution, written constitution in the early 1770s. So America is not the first, but it becomes important, partly, of course, because it's followed this extraordinarily significant revolutionary war with the British, which the Americans have managed to win, a war that is in many ways a global war in the end. So that sort of boosts the significance of its constitution. Also, it's a very interesting constitution. It's a very short constitution, too, really short. And that makes it very easy to publicize in the newspaper press and in pamphlets. And America is a very fast-growing print culture in the late 1780s when its constitution is issued. And not only does the constitution appear throughout the American newspaper press, it also gets picked up paradoxically by the British press. Britain

ships copies to all over the world. London is the world's biggest port. So it's partly that the publicity is superb. It's partly that the American Revolution has dramatized what is going on. And of course, there are remarkable men involved in this constitution making in Philadelphia in 1787, like Hamilton, like George Washington, like Benjamin Franklin. And this really sort of raises the profile. So America begins to establish itself. This is our brand. This is our trademark, the codified constitution. But in historical fact, they were not first. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, I'm talking to the history legend that is Linda Colley. More after this. Okay, Tristan, you've got 50 seconds. Go. Right. So Dan's given me a few seconds to sell the Ancients podcast. What is the Ancients, I hear you say?

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a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Thinking as much as you do about constitutions, it's interesting that in recent times particularly the debate at the moment in progressive circles around things like the filibuster which of course is not in the constitution interestingly but perhaps if you look at the the way elections are allocated within the constitution to be controlled by states rather than the federal government things like that the constitution now appears to many progressives as actually a kind of restraint, a rather recidivist document that's stopping the US government meeting the challenges of things

like the climate crisis or increasing investment infrastructure, whatever it might be. Do you think the era of constitutions might be coming to an end? I think there are new pressures. I mean, there are particular pressures in the United States. When the founders created their constitution in 1787, they were really worried as to whether the union was going to hang together. union was going to hang together. And they wanted to create a document that couldn't easily be altered. So changing the content of the American Constitution is incredibly difficult still. I think it needs the support of about three quarters of the states to make a serious remodeling of the American Constitution. Well, you'd never get that

at the moment. And I think one of the many causes of the increasing paralysis and inefficiency of US government and politics, arguably, is that their constitution is hard to alter. If you compare with another fairly old constitution, the Norwegian constitution of 1814, which is still going, but the Norwegians in 1814 made it quite easy to amend this constitution, and it's been constantly amended. The American constitution has only been amended relatively few times, and it's been very difficult to do so. So I think that's a specific problem for the Americans. Bigger challenges for written constitutions, codified constitutions, you could argue, comes with the rise of digital technology. The people who really started written constitutions spreading in the 18th century took the printed word on paper as the norm. That was how the machine was to work. But increasingly now, most people get such political information as they want and receive from the screen. And it comes from a wide and widening variety of sources. So where does that leave a single document constitution that is supposed to set the rules when people are increasingly being blizzarded by political information

through a screen coming from multifarious, sometimes suspect sources? How should we think about the relationship between constitutions and nationalism? I mean, they feel like profoundly national documents, assertions of a new kind of state. Constitutions usher in a new era of the nation state. What is the impact of one on the other, do you think? It can be very close. Not all states that have made use of written constitutions have been nations by any means. Empires like the Chinese empire in the past, arguably the Chinese empire now, like the Ottoman empire used constitutions. But obviously, as the number of nation states has risen, it has become derogatory for them to have their own constitution, again, to advertise their brand, not just to organize themselves, but to proclaim their existence and to proclaim their parity with other nations. I think it's very interesting and suggested that the Scottish National Party has said that if Scotland secedes and becomes

independent, they will be sure to have a codified constitution, a written constitution. Similarly, when part of Ireland secedes in the early 1920s after the Irish rising, Dublin creates a written constitution almost immediately. And in fact, it publishes this new Irish constitution in a big book, side by side with other nations' constitutions. And this is a deliberate propaganda act. We have now joined the big boys. We are not tied to the United Kingdom and ruled from London anymore. We are an independent state. We have a written constitution. Here we are. You must have read a lot of constitutions in the course of this book. What are some of the things that strike you that they all have in common? Is it that assertiveness?

There is a common assertiveness, but what also strikes me is their extreme diversity, actually, what they choose to say and stress. Because, of course, nations, yes, they want to assert that they're to a degree on a par with other nations, but they also want to stress that they're different, they're distinctive, they're special. to stress that they're different, they're distinctive, they're special. So what they choose to emphasize can be rather different. And indeed, one of the things that really motivated me when I wrote this book, I'd like people who are interested in literature and writing and the use of words to look at these documents, written constitutions, with fresh eyes because they're often seen as rather arid, purely legalistic texts. Nobody thinks of them as being on a par with other modes of the written and printed word usually. But in fact, many of those who wrote constitutions in the past also engaged in other kinds of writing.

They were novelists, they were journalists, they wrote pamphlets, they wrote books. So reading constitutions is part of understanding world literature, if you like, since the 18th century. Some of them are really freaky texts, I have to say. enshrine these universal values for all time, or whether they are actually shackling societies to a decision made by a generation of dead people 100 years ago? Did you come away thinking constitutions are a kind of enlightened development? Or are they often like a kind of ball and chain, like a hugely conservative restriction on our ability to decide how we want to organise society? Well, I suppose the glib answer to because, okay, women had generally been excluded from the political process in most states. But when you get written constitutions coming in,

which say, as they mostly do say before 1900, the vote will go to these men, the parliament will be made up of these men. It makes it much more difficult for women wanting to change things to alter the rules because people say, oh, yes, but these rules are in our constitution. I'm sorry, but that's just the name of the game. Once you put something into print, into words, yes, perhaps, if you're lucky, it will guarantee you rights. But it may also serve to exclude certain groups or exclude certain possibilities. And often constitution writers have wanted to do both. They give with one hand, they sometimes take away with the other. Okay, I said that was my question, but I've got one more. Could you do a giant experiment where you actually work out, have constitutions made any difference either they get modified so much that it's just like not having a constitution or they just get abandoned like

have states that have enacted constitutions outlived other states are constitutions a success i think they have been a success in the sense that if you look at states which issue a written constitution, even if it doesn't last, even if it hasn't been very good and collapses, you never, ever, I think, find a state, there's probably a few exceptions, but not not many you never find states which having had a written constitution then subsequently say well you know what it's a lousy idea we're not going to do it in the future we're just going to have some kind of amorphous set of rules and that seems to me to be indicative thomas jefferson put it very well and I quote this at the end of my book in 1802, though written constitutions may be violated in moments of passion or delusion, yet they

furnish a text to which those who are watchful may again rally and recall the people. And that seems to me to be a reasonably fair and balanced estimate. What's the shortest constitution you came across in all your studies? It probably is the American Constitution. Yeah. Okay. Well, it's always worth a read.

Well, thank you very much, Inder Collie, for coming on to this podcast. It's been a huge pleasure having you, having read your books all my life. What is the name of this latest one? The Gun, the Ship and the Pen. Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World. Go and get it, everybody.

It's brilliant. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Hi everyone, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms,

but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars and then leave a nice glowing review it makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do madness I know but them's the rules then we go further up the charts more people listen to us

and everything will be awesome so thank you so much now sleep well Bye.