PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Part of the book’s brilliance is its identification of this phenomenon of the convergence of styles of regime and political community ... a contribution to the large question of global standardization ... While Europe and its offshore are central, this is not a top-down history, or a simple story of the diffusion of European norms. What Colley offers, reflecting the highest ambitions of global history, is an examination of a system of dynamic interactions of endogenous and exogenous influences, anchored in each locality. She builds her argument out of a system of vividly painted vignettes of a series of episodes of political innovation, each reflecting her close engagement with sources, historiographies, the visual culture and world views local to its part of the world. As a piece of historical thinking, argument and writing, it is magisterial by every criterion, the most impressive outcome, thus far, of what has already been a career of great creativity. It is a measure, equally, of how the discipline of history has changed over the past twenty years ... Colley’s footnotes are filled with generous acknowledgements of her debts, in particular to colleagues, students and visiting scholars at Princeton who guided her attention to Pitcairn, Tunisia or Japan. Dangers lie in extrapolations from eccentric phenomena, and in dependence on others, such that their errors become yours...It is certain that scholars whose work is focused more narrowly will pull at each of the knots of Colley’s argument in the classic ritual dance of splitters vs lumpers. But these perils are also there for historians of the nation state were they honest ... Colley’s liberal analytical lens focuses on the representative apparatus and the propagation of constitutional norms. She largely neglects, though, the political economic dimension of constitutions. One is reminded that throughout her oeuvre, Colley has generally only been interested in economy and society as the ground of politics. Gender, and how women become enfranchised citizens, are prominently discussed here, and there is some glancing attention to race, again though only as question of political inclusion or exclusion. Colley leaves class, however, largely unexamined. But all constitutions are surely expressions of particular social class arrangements?
