... a marvel of erudition ... That might not sound an immediately appealing subject, but Colley uses her constitutions to explore war and diplomacy, mass literacy and high finance, imperial ambition and national identity ... Where did all these constitutions come from? Most historians emphasise literacy and liberty, seeing constitutions as the product of high-minded, slightly bloodless political salons. Colley’s approach is more imaginative ... All this might sound a bit esoteric, but Colley’s book has plenty of memorably colourful details ... fascinating.

... brilliant ... In this compelling study of constitutions produced around the world between the mid-18th century and the outbreak of the first world war, [Colley] upends the familiar version of history at every turn ... There is much more going on here than a level-headed reassessment of the realpolitik that sits behind the evolution of liberalism and democracy. By weaving together warfare and 'lawfare', The Gun, the Ship and the Pen draws attention to a perennial problem in the study of citizenship: who is in, and who is left out ... As with all great history books, the big picture is here, but so is the telling detail, the astute comparison, the arresting and memorable turn of phrase, the suggestive moral for our own times. There are some amazing discoveries ... Fresh insights are suggested for pivotal moments ... A superb retelling of the past, The Gun, the Ship and the Pen will surely make us rethink our present and future.

... 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.

... a helpful contribution to this growing field ... Although Colley’s discussion of precisely how warfare precipitated constitutional development is somewhat unsystematic, she does lay out some important connections between warfare and constitutional development ... Unfortunately, despite the geographical breadth of The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen, Colley fails to explain how constitutions changed across time and space ... Nonetheless, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen has important lessons for anyone interested in political development today. One is the value of taking a long-term perspective when trying to understand contemporary events ... At a time when many are questioning the future of democracy, it is worth remembering how important and precious these things are.

Personalities perform in the foreground of a series of historical set-pieces, vividly recounted and analysed. A long section presents the Empress Catherine II ... Nothing will make me like that evil woman, but Colley’s long and thoughtful retelling of her political development, raking the world for wisdom in the midst of lethal conspiracies and crazy speculation about her sex life, is compelling. Her evocation of Haiti is another brilliant set-piece, as she evaluates the constitutions devised by that phenomenal generation of black leaders after Haitian independence ... One of the virtues of this book is that it isn’t Eurocentric ... Colley shows, shrewdly enough, how rulers desperate for cannon-fodder devised a connection between soldiering and the new idea of citizenship ... Colley’s book proves that constitutions can sprout from all kinds of earth.

From the mid-18th century to the beginning of World War I, two approaches to transforming the world—warfare and constitutions—played in tandem. The unusual relationship between them is the fascinating and important subject of Princeton historian Linda Colley’s The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen ... This carefully crafted exploration shows how constitutions have helped to bring about an extraordinary revolution in human behavior, ideas and beliefs. Though constitutions are flawed, Colley writes, 'in an imperfect, uncertain, shifting, and violent world, they may be the best we can hope for.'

Here [the topic of the British Constitution] is rescued, and rather gloriously, by Linda Colley, one of our most imaginative and relevant historians ... There are many stories and people in Colley’s book and these were just a few of them. Rarely is a history so satisfyingly broad in outlook while avoiding abstraction and generalisation. It is rich, enjoyable, enlightening and imaginative. Colley takes you on intellectual journeys you wouldn’t think to take on your own, and when you arrive you wonder that you never did it before.

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?

... a well-written contribution to global history...makes a strong case for a causal relationship between the costs of modern hybrid warfare...and the world-wide diffusion of codified constitutions between circa 1750 and 1914-18. She regularly dilutes the strong causal claim, however, with qualifying phrases such as 'close connections.' Yet the claim drives the narrative. It is intended to attract the reader, which it does, but is it true? ... There is...an obvious problem in the argument, one that Colley recognises. Namely, Britain. This global military superpower never adopted a codified constitution and is yet to do so ... Since the hole in the argument is still not fully covered, Colley invokes the Dutch invasion and coup d’etat of William of Orange. The Bill of Rights (in England) and the Claim of Right (in Scotland), and the absence of their enactment in Ireland, are thin gruel, however, insufficient to be codified constitutions ... This book’s many strengths include the emphasis on constitutions being issued both against and for empires after the 1780s ... Digressions will keep the reader engrossed ... Errors will have to be corrected for the paperback of this vibrant good read.

This thesis is not entirely new—it has been advanced by a school of thought that asserts the primacy of foreign policy in political affairs—but the way in which Ms. Colley tells the story is both absorbing and innovative. Her selection of case studies allows her to bring in a wide range of 'terrains and voices,' as she puts it. They span centuries as well as continents and cultures, and they vary in size from the incipient colossus of the United States to the tiny Pacific island of Pitcairn ... A particular strength of The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen is the way in which Ms. Colley weaves in fascinating facts and vignettes ... There is some over-claiming ... There is also a fair amount of contextual information, such as the Tokyo streetscape at the promulgation of the 1889 constitution, that reads interestingly but doesn’t really advance the argument. The space might have been put to better use to fill some of the gaps in the analysis: They are inevitable in a book of this kind ... The worst that Ms. Colley’s critics can say, therefore, is that her argument is even stronger than she makes it.

In this wildly ambitious, prodigiously researched work, Princeton history professor Colley, a winner of the Wolfson History Prize, traces how the proliferation of written constitutions coalesced with the rise of hybrid warfare—land and sea—thus protecting the rights of those who were soldiering as well as those affected by violent invasions ... A sweeping, unique, truly world-spanning political and military history.

Copiously researched and elegantly written, Colley’s treatise goes beyond the usual Anglo-American focus of constitutional history to show the global impact of the constitutionalist movement. The result is a fresh and illuminating take on these still-living documents.