Was the global rise of constitution-making inspired by the idea of democracy or by the exigencies of war?
In 1949, the year after Kurt Gödel became a U.S. citizen, Linda Colley was born in the United Kingdom, a country without a written constitution. Colley, one of the world’s most acclaimed historians, is a British citizen and a C.B.E., a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She lives in the United States.
Colley doesn’t see it this way. First, she finds the origins of constitution-writing elsewhere—all over the place, really, and often very far from Philadelphia. Second, she thinks it’s important to separate the spread of constitutionalism from the rise of democracy, not least because many nations that adopted written constitutions rejected democracy, and still do.
This argument also explains the U.K.’s lack of a written constitution. Long after it lost thirteen of its American colonies, in 1781, and long after it abolished slavery, in 1833, Britain continued to support its foreign wars and its formidable military by taxing its remaining colonies, and by recruiting soldiers from those colonies. Nineteenth-century Britons celebrated their unwritten constitution.
During the brutal world wars of the eighteenth century, millions of men carried millions of weapons, sailed hundreds of thousands of ships, and marched with thousands of armies. If most of those men demanded political rights, and political equality, in exchange for their sacrifices, they didn’t always get them. Some constitutions written in the great age of constitution-writing were, like many constitutions written more recently, instruments of tyranny.
The Nakaz circulated well beyond Catherine’s realm. By 1770, it had been translated into German, Latin, French, and English; editions in Greek, Italian, Latvian, Romanian, Swiss, and Dutch soon followed. The translator of the English edition called it a “constitution.” Colley hints at its influence. In 1772, Gustaf III, the King of Sweden, and Catherine’s cousin, had drawn up and printed a new constitution of “fixed and sacred fundamental law.