RaveThe Washington Post... a wide-ranging, beautifully written global history ... One of the great strengths of Colley’s book is her focus on experiments that occurred outside Euro-America ... in her willingness to confront these authoritarian experiments, Colley refuses to idealize constitutions. She describes failures as well as successes ... Colley’s narrative is rich, and she emphasizes the colorful characters who have contributed to constitution-making projects around the world. The authors of these documents are as diverse as the locales, including military men, to be sure, but also adventurers, philosophers, doctors, clerics, explorers and revolutionaries. What unites them is an enduring faith in the written word and its capacity to bring forth a stable system of government. Americans have always taken this for granted but have much to learn from looking back at how similar projects have been imagined in the rest of the world.
