This week we dive into the fascinating history of global constitutionalism and declarations of independence. Linda Colley of Princeton University, author of the new book The Gun, The Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World, and David Armitage of Harvard University, author of The Declaration of Independence: A Global History, join host Jeffrey Rosen. They explain how constitutions from around the world are intertwined with warfare, globalism and travel, writing, media and communication technologies, and more; and highlight stories of constitution-making by figures from Catherine the Great to George Washington and beyond.
FULL PODCAST
PARTICIPANTS
David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and former Chair of the Department of History at Harvard University. He is the author of many works including The Declaration of Independence: A Global History and, more recently, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas.
Linda Colley is the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University. She is the author of the new book The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- Linda Colley, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World
- David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History
- We the People podcast, "What to the Slave is the 4th of July?"
- Read the U.S. Constitution on the Interactive Constitution
- The Declaration of Independence
This episode was produced by Jackie McDermott and engineered by Kevin Kilbourne. Research was provided by Alexandra "Mac" Taylor and Lana Ulrich.
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TRANSCRIPT
This transcript may not be in its final form, accuracy may vary, and it may be updated or revised in the future.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:00:00] I'm Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, and welcome to We the People, a weekly show of constitutional debate. The National Constitution Center is a nonpartisan nonprofit chartered by Congress to increase awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people. On today's episode, we examine the history of written constitutions around the world. And I'm so excited and honored to be joined by two of America's leading historians who have written pathbreaking books on this important topic. Linda Colley is the Shelby M.C. Davis, 1958 professor of history at Princeton University. She is the author of the new book, The gun, the ship and the pen: warfare, constitutions, and the making of the modern world. Linda, it is wonderful to have you with us.
Linda Colley: [00:01:00] It's a tremendous honor and pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:01:04] And David Armitage is the Lloyd C Blankfein professor of history and former chair of the department of history at Harvard University. He's the author of many books, including The declaration of independence: a global history. And most recently, Civil wars: history and ideas. David, thank you so much for joining.
David Armitage: [00:01:26] It's such a pleasure to be back in Philadelphia, especially with my old friend and colleague, Linda.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:01:31] Wonderful. Well, Linda, your new book has inspired extraordinary praise. Jill Lepore of the New Yorker has said if there were a Nobel prize in history, Colley would be my nominee and she calls your new book incandescent and paradigm shifting. Tell us about the thesis of your new book, the gun, the ship, and the pen.
Linda Colley: [00:01:54] Well, with this book, I wanted really to do two things. There have been codes of law and rules of government written out since ancient times, but I wanted to look at something rather more specific than that. From about 1750, single document constitution that are much more mass produced, start spreading at an exponential rate across continents. By 1914, the onset of the first world war, there are constitutions in everyone of the world's continents. So, I wanted to try and work out why that was. And the thesis that I came up with, and which I still believe in, is that there are links between this array of rather different constitutions and shifting patterns of violence and warfare and invasion. In some cases, states are disrupted, new states are created, like the United States, which then choose to write a written constitution to legitimize it, launch themselves into the future. But at other times, rulers decide to create these new kinds of constitutions because they want more manpower. They want more taxes. And so a constitution becomes a kind of contract between them and their population.
At the same time as wars begin to make more and more demands on people, you also get demands from below. Why should we pay this tax? Why is our government expecting us to do all these things? If we are going to do them, there should be a payback. So again, there's a sort of pressure from below and not just initiative from above. So that was one thing I wanted to do. But the other thing I wanted to do was to take constitutions out of their nationalist box. Take them wider than the expertise of lawyers and legal scholars to look at them as a phenomenon that changes ideas and human behavior and assumption. Really to open up the subject, if I could.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:04:37] Thank you so much for that. David Armitage, Linda Colley's powerful thesis that constitutions were adopted in the 18th, 19th, and 20th century, not so much to guarantee individual rights, but for leaders to ensure more manpower and more taxes, as she said, to ensure mass conscription and reward and entice sustained wartime loyalty, as she puts it in her conclusion. This is striking and provocative, especially for American audiences who are so focused on liberal constitutions. What is your reaction to Linda's thesis and what should we make her argument that far from primarily guaranteeing individual rights constitution making for much of the modern era was a way of ensuring mass loyalty to leaders in war time?
David Armitage: [00:05:27] Well, I think my reaction could be summed up as admiration, delight and almost complete persuasion, as Linda has reminded us through many of major books. Until remarkably recently, the default settings for world politics were not those of peace, republicanism, and the state, but often war, monarchy, and empire and the intertwining of the imperatives of war, the centrality and the salience of monarchy, and the continuity of empire is really the larger armature over which she has stretched this remarkable, detailed, and compelling argument. In so far as constitutions are at that core about consent, we need to ask, well, consent to what, and for what? And in the era of competing epires often led by monarchs, often driven by the imperatives of war, and because driven by the imperatives of enormously expensive war, therefore driven increasingly by the imperatives of taxation, for which one needs consen, the circle closes in so far as constitutions are needed to sometimes compel, often simply to persuade consent, towards ever greater exactions into the pockets of citizens, especially male citizens, and also consent on the part of those citizens often, as Linda shows, overwhelmingly male citizens, to take part in the warlike enterprises of the predatory and competitive monarchs who are fighting on behalf of their states, which are often empires increasing on a global scale.
And increasingly, and this is one of the great innovations of the book, not simply territorially, but also oceanically as well. So, the very important thread, which no doubt will pick up in our conversation is the centrality of naval warfare to the competition between empires from the middle of the 18th century onwards, and the particularly enormous and compelling expenses, which arise from naval warfare, which again, demand greater fiscal exactions, greater needs therefore for consent and therefore the proliferation of what Linda compellingly calls a novel political technology, the novel political technology of the printed constitution.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:07:58] Thank you so much for emphasizing that crucial aspect of Linda's thesis, namely the spread of print technology as a way of enlisting the consent that she describes leaders were attempting to achieve, especially with regard to naval wars. Linda, you begin your pathbreaking book with the story of Pasquale Paoli and his account of Corsica, which was a book written by James Boswell, describing his attempt at constitution making. Tell us about Paoli and why you chose Corsica as an emblematic example to begin. And then perhaps introduce a few other memorable examples. There are so many, including that, of the constitution making of Catherine the Great.
Linda Colley: [00:08:43] Well, I wanted to keep some kind of chronological momentum in this book. And I started with Corsica because Paoli creates is very innovative constitution there in 1755,. He's an army officer, as are many of the heroes of this book. He's trying to make Corsica independent of Genoa, which has been the presiding power for centuries. And he drafts this constitution, which simultaneously gives almost total democracy for men over 25 and allows them to hold office or be elected if they wish, while also demanding them military service to fight Corisca's war of independence, to keep other enemies at bay. This is a constitution that really deserves to be better known. And the reason why it isn't better known as important. When Paoli drafted this constitution, there were no printing presses on Corsica, which was very poor. So the fact that this constitution retrospectively fell down the crack, this is partly because the independence campaign fails--France takes over Corsica in place of Genoa--but it's also that Paoli can't publicize his constitutional schemes, his new constitutional venture in print and send it around the globe. And that is a crucial element of a constitution's success. It's one reason, only one reason, why the American constitution is so successful because the United States has a very advanced press network by 1787.
As for Catherine the Great, she doesn't really write a constitution, but she produces this remarkable document called the Nakaz in the 1760s, which is, at one level, an attempt to reorganize the laws of the Russian empire, but it goes much further, proposing a welfare system, for example, and mass education, all sorts of things. And she can use print to a degree. And this is a massively translated document, which goes across Europe and America and helps to spirit up constitutional ideas. And I wanted to include Catherine partly because before 1914 constitution writing is almost exclusively, a masculine genre. And I wanted a woman in this story. But also Catherine the Great's popular reputation is mainly on account of her real and reputed sex life. I really wanted to underline the point that she had some really important and pioneering ideas.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:12:07] David, Linda argues that the American constitution was more influential around the globe for other constitution makers than was the Declaration of Independence. And yet in your pathbreaking book about the Declaration, you emphasize that it wasn't the individual rights parts of the declaration that proved influential, but its claims about sovereignty and international law. Tell us about the intersection between your book about the Declaration's influence and Linda's about the growth of global constitutions.
David Armitage: [00:12:48] Well, I think we've attempted and in our separate books to do something quite similar, which is to write a global history of very large processes, but using specific documents, particularly printed documents, as the indices or the signs, which help us to locate those very large, sometimes rather abstract, processes as they're treated for instance by our colleagues in political science or in constitutional law. As historians, I think what we want to do is to make concrete those processes, to look at the individuals behind them, to look at these specific instances, and then to build up the larger patterns from them. So in parallel with Linda's enterprise in her book, I tried to track the spread of declarations of independence. And I began the book, hoping to find that there'd been many declarations of independence before 1776, that 1776 was a switching point, maybe an intensification of a particular political genre on its trajectory towards a larger global future, but I was rather dismayed, you may have already inferred that I'm not, at least by birth an American, rather dismayed to discover that there were no declarations of independence so called before 1776.
That, although the 1776 declaration traveled extremely widely and extremely rapidly--within a matter of weeks, it had reached Ireland, France, Denmark, the German lands-- by the middle of August of 1776, it was being translated, commented on, sometimes refuted across the Atlantic, having traveled very rapidly through the networks of print, again, something that Linda emphasizes in her book, and through the rapid circuits of maritime communication. After 1783, that is after the treaty of Paris and the recognition of American independence, it rather drops out of the conversation even in the United States itself. So the, the history of the reception, let's say, of the U.S. Declaration of Independence is much more patchy, much more up and down, much more lumpy at particular moments then as the history of the U.S. Constitution, I think, and also the declaration of independence becomes a genre distinct from and independent of, perhaps intended, independent of the U.S. Declaration of Independence itself. So, many declarations of independence, more than 120 of them, more than half of the current members of the United Nations have a document that they call the declaration of independence emerge in the years after 1776, but not always in direct dialogue or under the direct influence of the U.S. Declaration of Independence itself.
Something that is set at the time, that is, let's say the 50 years around the turn of the 19th century, is that the influence of the U.S. state constitutions was as great, and certainly also contributed to the prominence of the U.S. Constitution itself. And I think that's something very important to bear in mind, of course, Linda talks about this in the book, but particularly in France and then in the larger world influenced by France during the course of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the impact as it were of the collection of constitution is produced in the United States, not simply the single constitution of the United States, that traveling American constitutional package, including the state constitutions is an enormous toolkit or set of templates, which other constitution manufacturers reach for very readily in the 19th century and onwards through there as well.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:16:43] Linda, what so struck me about your book as well as David's is that both of you argue that the primary motivator of the export of declarations and constitutions was not enlightenment liberalism. It was not ideals of individual rights and limited government, but instead you argue the exigencies of war and as David argues the exigencies of sovereignty that led to the spread of these documents. How do you see the relationship between your thesis and David's and what would you say to American audiences who are surprised about the limited influence of enlightenment liberalism?
Linda Colley: [00:17:20] I think it's important in all history not to adopt an either or interpretation and David would agree with that. I don't think it's a question of, well, is it war or is it enlightenment or is it print? It's a mixture of all these things. War and different kinds of violence are often a powerful, immediate spur, but how individuals react to that spur is often governed by that prior reading. You know, many of these actors are influenced by the enlightenment or by the ancient classics or they are authors themselves who've written for print in other purposes. I mean, it was one of the things that really interested me when I wrote the book that constitutions have been compartmentalized. We tend to think of them as the creation of lawyers and bureaucrats, but in fact, many of the constitutional activists I look at are engaged in different forms of literary creativity. They are newspaper owners, in some cases they write books for children. I mean, Catherine the Great did, as well as being deeply interested in enlightenment ideas.
So, I think we ought to see this extraordinary phenomenon over time, post-1750, as a response to multiple stimuli. I would prioritize war, but I would be the first to admit that it's not the only one. I think too, that what David and I have in common is that we, as David says, we trace these documents across continents, across boundaries. And we look at how they influence each other in different locations. And of course there's more and more constitutions and more and more declarations are published and circulate in print. What you do and what you find is that constitution and declaration makers are taking bits from different sources. This is what happens in Norway, when they make their constitution in 1814. They are influenced by the American constitution, but they're also influenced by French constitutions, by Dutch constitutions. And they spin all these things together, as well as adding their own indigenous material. The Indian constitution makers in the late 1940s, doing exactly the same thing. So, these texts are increasingly melange, if you like, of inspiration from different parts of the globe.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:20:28] Thanks so much for that. And your example of Norway is so powerful with the constitution makers struggling to articulate their role with Sweden, which has seized the territory from Denmark, literally cutting and pasting from the different sources, including Madison, but also the European sources in order to create a structure of government. David, given that melange, as Linda puts it, are there any generalizations you can make about what ideas or structures travel globally more effectively than others? Or is it always just a question of taking from what's at hand, given the exigencies of the moment?
David Armitage: [00:21:08] I think I would completely agree with Linda that we should think of these processes as, let's say, promiscuous and pragmatic, especially if we remember that this book very strongly reminds us the exigencies of war of state-building in war, sometimes building new states through warfare and revolution. We should think of the actors as trying to create consent. And that's why printing presses have become so enormously important. We have numerous accounts. For instance, if we just hop to the other side of the Atlantic from Norway for the moment, in Spanish America the invention of the portable printing press and how important that becomes as an engine of revolution, being able to run off multiple copies of your manifesto, your declaration, or your constitution becomes tremendously important in terms of manufacturing consent, but also in those circumstances, you're reaching for precedence. You're reaching for the templates and the models, which are necessary to create the documents you're going to print to circulate and that becomes, probably, quite a profitable sub-genre of print, especially during the Spanish American revolutions where collections of translations, not just of constitutions, but also other handy materials.
A chunk of Thomas Paine here, the American declaration and the French declaration of rights there, all translated into Spanish, all bundled together into a handy paperback flat back, which you can use to write your constitution, declaration of independence, manifesto, whatever you want, from the the gobbets, the pieces that have been thrown together by the translators. That becomes a very prominent genre. And again, Linda writes in the book about how prominent the the parallel genre of collections of constitutions comes very rapidly in the wake of the U.S. Constitution. Interestingly, and I still don't have a good answer to why this doesn't happen, the first collections of declarations of independence don't emerge until the 1950s, which is quite different from collections of constitutions. And I think says something about the different imperatives of constitution making and of declaring independence. Declaring independence is a more punctual activity, something that happens at very specific moments. Whereas constitution making is something which is continuous, especially through processes of amendment and revision.
Thomas Jefferson famously says that the average life of the constitution should be 17 years, I think it is. Those who studied numerous constitutions in the aggregate over time and say that the life of a constitution is about 18 or 19 years before it gets amended or replaced. And there's a famous joke about the French constitution of a reader who goes into the library and asked for a copy of the French constitution and the librarian says, try the periodical section.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:23:59] Indeed. Linda, there's a wonderful moment in your book where Gouverneur Morris, having recently played a central role with the American constitutional convention, is in Paris around the time of the revolution. He is in his hotel room, eager to write a constitution for the French and runs into a guy who bursts in and he's got a constitution he wants to write for the Americans. To what degree does the impulse to export a national constitution matter? And to what degree does the balance of structure and rights actually determine a constitution's effectiveness or instead is the form less important than factors you point to elsewhere in the book, like a culture of constitutionalism, judicial independence, the rule of law, and the like?
Linda Colley: [00:24:43] So, those are huge questions. I included Gouverneur Morris and that anecdote partly because I find Gouverneur Morris such a fascinating figure. And again, he's someone who's who indulges in all kinds of writing and not just writing constitutions. But I also included that anecdote because it shows up a cultural tendency, which has often been forgotten. Because these constitutions are always being printed and issued in collections, constitution writing becomes a leisure enterprise, not just a political enterprise, just as you might say, oh, you know, it's raining today. I think I'll try my hand at a novel. Some people say you know, I don't think, oh, let's see, Sicily has a constitution. You know what I'll do. I'll draft a kind of constitution that might suit Sicily.
And obviously Gouverneur Morris was operating at a rather more serious level, but you get this sense of guys, and they always are guys, in terms of this amateur constitution writing, really thinking that this is something that they can usefully spend their time doing. So that's one point. Can you remind me of the second part of your question? Cause it was very long, very important.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:26:21] It was one that you raised in your book so powerfully, which is that the text itself, the structure of a constitution may tell us less about whether it's effective or not in constraining power and guaranteeing rights than other factors like judicial independence or a culture of devotion to the rule of law. Tell us more about that.
Linda Colley: [00:26:38] Well, the point I wanted to get over there was that constitution can do many things. They may, if you're fortunate, last and ensure levels of democracy, and reign in governments. But of course, very often constitutions aren't good at that. And yet people keep issuing constitutions. So, why? Well, one reason is, as I say, that constitutions do different things. They allow a state to proclaim its identity or desired identity. It helps put a polity on the map. And increasingly too, I think over the long 19th century constitutions come to be seen as a desirable aspect of modernity. If you want to show that not only are you a viable state, but you are a modern state, fully belonging to the 19th century or the 20th century or whatever, increasingly you issue a written constitution. And another aspect of that is how places which are at risk of being taken over by others by Imperial powers, say, also start issuing constitutions, not just for domestic purposes, but to advertise to the world: look, we are a modern state. We are not a place that should be dismissed and colonized and taken over by others.
And you can see that mode of thinking very much in Hawaii, which issues its constitution first in 1840, trying to keep the Europeans, but also the United States at bay, which it succeeds in doing for about half a century. Also, Tunisia, the first maker, that is an Islamic state of a modern constitution, issuing it in 1861. And there's various motives. It's not a particularly democratic constitution. It's not really interested in that. What it wants to do, the Tunisians, is to try and guarantee Tunisia's independence and to repel the French. In the end, of course, it doesn't succeed, but the multiple uses all of these written and published devices is an important part of their spread.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:29:25] Thank you for that. David, given these multiple uses that Linda refers to of constitutions--their publicizing a state as modern, declaring a state's sovereignty, and whatnot. Are there any particular factors you can point to that do make a constitution successful as an engine of liberalism of limitations on state power and a guarantee of individual rights or not?
David Armitage: [00:29:53] I think I would perhaps rather take out the last part of Linda's last answer and not tip it towards liberalism, which I think is a rather contested and maybe sometimes not very useful term for much of the period that her book deals with in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's something of an anachronism, at least before the early 19th century. But to think again about modernity and the international context and the conditions of success there, something that I think we, speaking from a position of someone who lives in teachers in the United States and has many American students, something that we tend to forget when we talk about, say the U.S. Constitution is the international context for it and how tremendously important it was, even in that particular instance to proclaim to the world that the U.S. was entering the international world on equal terms and as a good citizen. The declaration independence did some of that work, but the U.S. Constitution itself, with its references, for instance, to the law of nations, was very much directed to the outside world, an international document as well as the national document.
And so, part of the reason for printing copies of the U.S. Declaration, as indeed of the later declarations that Linda has just been talking about, was precisely so that those copies would travel outside the borders of the particular nation, nation state, or nation state empire to other countries to be translated, to be picked up there, and to be appreciated precisely again, as an index of the modernity and the good conscience of that particular country, which was now going to be ordered, stable, and somewhat something that could be engaged with on the international stage. So, those are terms in relation to security, and let's say interdependence, which are only contingently and certainly not necessarily related either to democracy or to liberalism necessarily through much of the 19th century. So, I noticed, for instance, I was going through George the III's library, the bulk of which is at the heart of the British Library here in London, other parts in Windsor castle. He has copies of the very rapidly produced English translation of Catherine the Great's Nakaz and the documentation of the process that led to the writing and the promulgation of that.
He also has a copy of one of the earliest printings of the U.S. Constitution as well. It was necessary for any politician, any ruler who is surveying the international stage to be ofey and up-to-date with the latest constitutions. And that becomes a very important aspect of the circulation of political knowledge and what we might call the mutual surveillance of sovereigns and monarchs in the 18th and 19th centuries to keep up with their modernization plans. And so, by the middle of the 19th century, it becomes as essential to have good sanitation and a ruthless prison system as an index of modernity, as it is to have a constitution. And certainly democracy is come somewhat behind those ideals. So liberalism, I think is not the main heart of the question until at least the latter part of the 19th century, if we are going to discuss those determining factors for success, longevity, and in particular, for international acceptance and uptake of constitutions.
That's a
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:33:23] wonderful insight into Georgia the III's library. And Linda, you note that the British Museum was founded with the idea that it would be a kind of national university, offering free to all lifelong learners the possibility of learning from global constitutions and others and the American founders hopde to create a national university here to serve a similar purpose, and I must say that the National Constitution Center hopes to fulfill those hopes by putting these documents online and making them available for free to all. What can we learn about the role of women and constitution making? You had mentioned that most of these constitutions were written by guys, and you have a fascinating chapter, "why were the women lost?" noting that although Mary Walton Croft talked about the importance of the Constitution as a standard for all people to rally around, many constitutions in the U.S. and around the globe became more restrictive when it came to women's suffrage and other women's rights throughout the 19th century. Why was that?
Linda Colley: [00:34:25] Well, I think this fits in, perhaps all too neatly, but I think there is a connection with the links between the surge in constitution writing and the pressures of warfare. If you inhabit a world where you assume that women in general cannot, will not fight, that they are not going to be suitable commodities for armies and navies. Then you don't face so much pressure. You may indeed even be averse to the idea of incorporating them within a written constitution. Instead, you can say to your male population, look in return for making yourself available for military service, you will be given the unique privilege of being able to vote. Obviously, your women folk who are not eligible for fighting will not vote. And I think that comes to be widely accepted and I adduced some examples where the opposite applies. There is very few of them, but one of the most picturesque that I was intrigued by was Pitcairn island in the south Pacific, which becomes the very first place in world history whereby a constitution or a document that comes to a regarded as a constitution gives women, in 1838, the same voting rights as men and this endures. But why is it able to happen here?
Well, partly because at that stage there's only a hundred people on Pitcairn island. It's not going to be involved in any wars, though subsequently Mark Twain will write a very, very good short story imagining, well, what happens if Pitcairn islands does go to war? But of course it doesn't. So what you find is that really until the early 20th century, such places that are experimenting with women's suffrage are either very small, like Pitcairn or the Isle of Man, or they are very distant, like New Zealand or the frontier territory in the United States, but big states, big polities, which take the risk of war seriously, they tend to leave women very deliberately out. And I think that's important. Some people say, oh well, written constitutions, just formalize pre-existing female exclusion from political rights, but that's far too simplistic. I think the fact that these written constitution wrote female exclusion into law makes women's ultimate suffrage, much harder to get, because we all know when things are fluid, there's a possibility for change. Write it into law, harder to fight against. So, again, I think women's exclusion can tell us much more about the nature of these written constitutions over the long 19th century.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:38:14] Fascinating. David, tell us about women's rights and the rights of enslaved people and declaration making. In the U.S., woman at Seneca falls invoked the declaration to argue for the suffrage and of course, abolitionists from Prince Hall to Frederick Douglass invoked the declaration to argue for the unconstitutionality of slavery under natural law. Was that the case around the globe board, or as you argue, were declarations invoked more to enshrine notions of international sovereignty rather than of natural rights.
David Armitage: [00:38:47] I think on balance, what you say about declarations as documents of international sovereignty, national sovereignty protection on an international stage. That's certainly the case. That doesn't mean that there aren't important counterexamples to that, or indeed that there aren't revealing histories of the reception of declarations of independence and their language by all the groups as well. So we know that, for instance, the African-American reception of the U.S. Declaration of Independence begins immediately in the summer of 1776, as African-American readers immediately see that the promises of the second paragraph of the Declaration, all men are created equal, are not being applied to them. This of course is exactly the broken promise or the the unfulfilled promise that Frederick Douglass is going so searingly to expose again in his extraordinary speech, "What to the slave is the 4th of July?"
Something that I noticed as an anomally, but it's an explainable one, is the absence, at least until the 1970s, as far as I can tell, again, just speaking of the U.S. context of native American uses of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. I think that has a great deal to do with Jefferson's language of "merciless Indian savages" in quotes, which is in that document, which affectively inoculates any usage of that document for Native American groups when they wish to claim that sovereignty. And there are relatively few groups of indigenous peoples trying to claim autonomy within existing states or settler colonial societies who use the language of independence at any point in later world history. So, it's relatively rare. And again, the makers of declarations of independence are overwhelmingly, at least until the 20th centur, the patent is very similar to constitutionalism, are overwhelmingly male as well.
I'd add one footnote to what Linda just said, and that again, that very important thesis of her book about the the prominent maleness or guyness of constitution writing in relation to military mobilization. I mean something that Linda knows extremely well has been revealed by social historians of warfare in the early modern period and on until the 19th century is of course the enormous impact warfare has on women and the remarkable presence of women on the battlefield, behind the lines, plying laundry, food, sex, and other services to men quite apart from the women, as it were on the home front whose lives are turned upside down by the absence or the maiming or the death of their male colleagues. So, I think there still remains a little mystery because the has to be some way to induce the, if not the consent, at least the assent of women as well, to the proliferation and the expansion, the deepening of the hooks of warfare into society in this period. So, I don't disagree with Linda's thesis, but I think it deepens the mystery about the absence of women in constitution making since they too needed to be persuaded to be complicit in all of the stresses, the strains, and the turbulences of expanding warfare in this period as well.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:42:16] Many thanks for that. Linda, among the pathbreaking contributions of your book is its sustained rebuke to American exceptionalism. A conventional narrative taught in America is that our constitution sprung Zeus-like from the genius heads of the framers, that it provided a shining example of natural rights for the rest of the world and, as the longest surviving written constitution, continues to provide a frame of government in a way that other states have not experienced. You, for many reasons we've discussed, have showed that that's quite narrow. And in fact, you put the American constitution making experience in the context of the broader wars that were going on at the time and efforts to achieve the mobilization and conscription that other constitution makers did as well. Tell us about the ways in which the American experience is more illustrative than exceptional of your thesis.
Linda Colley: [00:43:16] I think what I would say is that each constitution is different. You know, you could write an exceptionalist history of each constitution almost, but it would be incomplete because precisely because written constitutions are made up of words which turn into print which spread across frontiers-- there are so many multiple intellectual influences and there is this pressure of war recurring. And one of the ways I tried to stress that was that everybody who's written about the American constitution says quite rightly, just how many of the founding fathers had a legal education or legal experience? That's absolutely right. But if you look at the number of them who had actually fought on the battlefield or had raised money for the American revolutionary war or administered it some way, the number of those is even higher. And of course the man standing and dominating the Philadelphia convention is the general George Washington who wears military uniform throughout.
So, even here, you can see the emphasis on war and the founding fathers know that perfectly well. They are very worried that, okay, they've got independence, they've driven the British out, but the British are still after all in Canada, they've got Spain. What about France? How are they going to bring these different states together in a way that will stick? How are they going to get them to pay taxes, so that the United States can pay its debts, continue to attract foreign merchants and so on. So, if you look at so many, so much of the correspondence of the founding fathers, sometimes they are exalted, but very often they are anxious and worried. And if you look at the opening essays of what becomes the Federalist papers, the references to war, the threat of war, how are we going to cope? How are we going to stay together? How are we going to build a Navy? Again, David's point of the Navy. You know, we've got no money! So you can focus on the exceptional aspects of this extraordinary document drafted in Philadelphia in 1787, and exceptional and remarkable things are there, but that's only part of the story and looking at the document in wider context does not mean you have to throw the baby out with the bath water, as it were. It just gives you a broader sense of how this text came to be.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:46:39] It's really an extraordinary aha moment when you remind us that these two features that we're taught that the constitution will convention was called for, to raise taxes, to pay the war debts, in fact were a standard feature of constitution making around the globe for centuries. And yet you also remind us that there are exceptional features too. David, what would you say about those exceptional features? You've studied, of course, the Anglo-American constitutional tradition. Is there something distinctive about that tradition from Magna Carta through the constitution, incorporating enlightenment thinkers, like Montesquieu that gained traction around the world and sets it apart from other constitution makers, or is it more important to stress the globalism of these exports?
David Armitage: [00:47:23] I think it's more important to express, well, let's say the cosmopolitanism rather than globalism, which might be a slightly inappropriate term for the late 18th century. You hint at it yourself by mentioning Montesquieu, who was read by everybody. George the III was brought up reading Montesquieu and actually produced an enormous summary precis of Montesquieu. That was a key text for Thomas Jefferson. One of the two most influential texts in the constitution debates, along with William Blackstone's commentaries on the Laws of England. Recovering that cosmopolitan context is precisely, as Linda was saying in her remarks, precisely recovering the context within which the founding fathers so-called operated themselves. There are other studies to be written about how that cosmopolitanism, how that internationalism, how the multilingualism of that moment was written out of American history by exceptionalist historians. But I think it's very important to say that recovery in the international and global context of the constitution, as indeed of the declaration of independence, is not some plot by globalists historians of the 21st century to disrupt everything that's wonderful and exceptional about U.S. history. It is in fact to recover precisely the horizons, the background, and indeed the motives and intentions of those who authored those documents themselves. And also putting back that context of warfare and militarism. We can, I mean, can remember that even that we remember that even emblematically by recalling that the U.S. Constitution was of course thrashed out in secret in Philadelphia, and that secrecy was maintained by armed guards outside Constitution Hall, as well. There was a military presence or ring of steel around that constitution making moment.
I've also noted the wonderful coincidence actually in a recent review of Linda's book that the USS Constitution, Old Ironsides, the one surviving ship from the first federal navy, is almost like an emblem of the U.S. Constitution itself. It brings together warfare, navalism, enormous fiscal pressures that warfare created in the 1790s, that outward looking turn of the American government at that point, and also that when Timothy Pickering sends George Washington a list of the names of potential ships for the federal navy, the first one is the United States. The third one is called the President and the second one is the constitution. Normally, at least until recently, till I read Linda's book, I didn't bat an eyelid about that. But reading into this book, I thought that's really rather extraordinary. That is exceptional. That within less than a decade of the promulgation of the U.S. Constitution, when at that point, there were almost no other national constitutions anywhere in the world, it was an act of extraordinary hubris, one might say ,confidence, one could say in another view, to name one of the key ships, which endures to this day, albeit moored in Boston Harbor, the Charlestown Navy yard. I wouldn't want to put out the USS Constitution in a fight against any modern weaponry. And I tend to feel the same way about the U.S. Constitution that having lasted two centuries may not actually be an advantage. And I think there's been some evidence for that skepticism in recent years, but that may be the subject of another podcast.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:50:55] Well, we'll look forward to convening again for a conversation on that fascinating topic. And for this one, it's time for closing thoughts in this absolutely riveting and deeply illuminating conversatin. Linda, with what thoughts would you like to leave with the people listeners about the relationship between warfare, cosmopolitanism, print, and constitution making?
Linda Colley: [00:51:19] I think I want to leave with a rather different comment that as I say in this book, I came to this topic as an outsider like David. I'm a Brit, we both come from a country which alas, doesn't have a codified constitution. So, to a degree in writing this book, as someone who's moved to the United States, I became a partial convert, but I became an absolute convert to the conviction that these texts, written constitutions, are extraordinary. They are not arid. Some of them are far too long. I have to say, one of the great advantage of the American constitution is that it is short or at least in, in its original incarnation. But they are worth looking at, whatever your interest whatever your nationality, these should be as much scrutinized and explored and thought about as novels if you like.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:52:25] Thank you so much for that. David, the last word is to you. What are your closing thoughts for We the People listeners?
David Armitage: [00:52:32] Well, I think I would agree with Linda that perhaps it takes an insider-outsider's.eye, a friendly critic's eye, to see aspects of American history and American founding documents, whether it's the Declaration or the Constitution that have not perhaps been visible to American historians. And then also to see how extraordinary those documents are when we look at their parallels and other instances of similar documents and what they betoken throughout world history as well. This is all an encouragement to go to go broad, to go wide, to put the U.S. back into the world. I think Linda's book arrives at exactly the right moment for American readers, as well as for readers around the world, to reinsert crucial aspects, defining aspects of the American historical experience into a much wider global context. And I think that fits a much louder agenda for the U.S. in the world at the moment. And it will be interesting perhaps to reconvene this conversation in four years time or 10 years time to see just how these processes have unfolded and indeed what the longer impact of Linda's remarkable book will have been by that point.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:53:43] Thank you so much, Linda Colley and David Armitage, for a memorable conversation about constitution and declaration making around the globe. We will hope to reconvene before four years time and continue our learning together. Dear We the People friends, your homework for this week is obvious: please read Linda Colley's pathbreaking new books, "The gun, the ship, and the pen: warfare constitutions, and the making of the modern world." And David Armitage's, "The declaration of independence: a global history," as well as their many other illuminating books. Linda and David, for shedding so much constitutional and historical light, thank you so much.
Linda Colley: [00:54:27] Pleasure. Thank you.
David Armitage: [00:54:29] Thank you, Jeff.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:54:31] Today's show was engineered by Kevin Kilburn and produced by Jackie McDermott. Research was provided by Mac Taylor and Lana Ulrich. Please rate, review, and subscribe to We the People on apple podcasts and recommend the show to friends, colleagues, or anyone anywhere across America and around the globe who is eager for a weekly dose of constitutional conversation and debate. And always remember that the National Constitution Center is a private nonprofit. We rely on the generosity, the passion, and the engagement of lifelong learners from across America who're inspired by our non-partisan mission of constitutional education and debate. And we so appreciate our global listeners as well. You can support the mission by becoming a member at constitutioncenter.og/membership. Give a donation of any amount to support our work, including this podcast at constitutioncenter.org /donate, or send me an email to let me know that you're listening in, especially from around the world. It's wonderful to get those emails, to realize that people across the planet are hungry for learning together. It's a real privilege to be part of this conversation with you.
On behalf of the National Constitution Center, I'm Jeffrey Rosen.
