The Many Uses of Constitutions

This wide-ranging and insightful book challenges our understanding of the nature and uses of political constitutions in fundamental ways. We are used to thinking of modern constitutions as something that arise out of popular struggles for freedom – individual, social and national – and self-governance. Examples from the dawn of the Modern age that come immediately to mind are the American Constitution that was framed after the war of independence against British imperial rule – no taxation without representation. And the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the Constitution that was subsequently adopted in the aftermath of the overthrow of the monarchy in 1789 in a violent mass uprising.

But Prof Linda Colley argues rather that constitutions in the modern world have been instruments of rulers, be they emperors, kings, dictators or democrats, to mobilise popular consent for unpopular measures necessitated by financial and human costs of war, violent conflicts and other crises. Scouring the globe from miniscule island societies to vast continental empires and focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, she presents a fresh synoptic narrative to argue her thesis of wars and violence as the midwives, begetters even of modern constitutions. And military and militaristic leaders – be they monarchs like Empress Catherine of Russia, King Gustav III of Sweden or freedom fighters and revolutionaries like George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Pasquale Paoli of Corsica, Simon Bolivar of South America and Khayr al-Din of Tunisa or politicians like Itō Hirobumi of Japan – as being the prime movers of constitutional changes across diverse societies and times.

Many-faceted narrative

Even as constitutions, influenced by Enlightenment values of reason and liberty, put curbs on and empowered those in authority and provided for individual rights, she shows how they also strengthened monarchies and empires and enforced exclusions of and enabled atrocities on minorities, women and indigenous and non-white peoples. At the same time, they were also used by disadvantaged and oppressed groups and peoples as well as by individuals to fight for their rights and freedoms and for democratic and republican governance. Also, written constitutions helped societies and nations to define who they are and what they want to become. Besides, she explores the role of print and the press in democratising, legitimising and influencing constitutions within and across societies and nations in depth. In other words, the origins, causes, purposes, uses, effects of written and printed Constitutions have been manifold.

It may be because I am familiar most with the Indian experience that I find its treatment least satisfactory. (And also deflating as India does not get a chapter or even a section like Corsica and Haiti, Russia, France, the United States, Spain and Spanish America, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Pitcairn and other mid-Pacific islands, Tunisia and Japan). Scattered references to it across the book are subsumed under other perspectives and arguments. And there is no connecting thread of narrative or argument linking them. Nor is it linked in a sustained manner to the main argument of the book, in the way, for example, the Japanese experience in the concluding chapter of the book so triumphantly is.

The earliest reference is to the early nineteenth century modernising liberal nationalist Rammohan Roy as part of an international group of constitution-drafters. Then there is a relatively detailed discussion of Rammohan Roy who is twinned with Buckingham as “transgressors of borders” in the chapter entitled, The Force of Print, as part of the attempt to illustrate the transnational connections and influences in constitution drafting that print and travel made possible. Spanish American constitutions were more appealing than the American, Colley writes, because the duo “wanted to secure improved liberties and legal rights for India’s Indigenous populations” in “an altered British empire.” Later in the same chapter, there is a paragraph on the 1930s compendium Select Constitutions of the World edited by Benegal Shiva Rao, who is described as “a future key player in the making of his country’s independence constitution.” In a subsequent chapter, a reforming Calcutta journalist writing in 1861 is quoted on the implications of the American civil war and “Black republics of Liberia and Haiti” for Indian self-government and freedom from British imperial rule. As part of the influence of Abraham Lincoln and his war on “later emancipatory projects,” there is a reference to B. R. Ambedkar, who is described as “a Dalit” and “the jurist chiefly responsible for designing India’s independence constitution.” The Dastur-ul Amal, an “embryonic constitution,” produced by the rebels in the 1857 uprising against British rule and the Swaraj Bill of 1895 by Bal Gangadhar Tilak are discussed in the section entitled “Japan and an Altered World.” In the same section, Jawaharlal Nehru is quoted to show the influence of Russo-Japanese war on the aspirations of freedom fighters in Asian countries. In the Epilogue, as part of the discussion on the seismic changes in the twentieth century brought about by the two World Wars, the Government of India Act of 1935, framed and adopted by the British imperial government, is described as having provided the basis for “the post-colonial world’s longest-surviving constitution, and a document which once again provided for a republic.”

The Indian Experience

This is surprising because the germ from which a connected argument could have been developed can be found in an article cited by Colley, C. A. Bayly's “Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800-1830”, which was later incorporated in a chapter of his book, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2012). In that book, tracing the political-constitutional lineage over a century and a half, Bayly writes: “In the widest sense, India’s liberal republicanism as much as her tradition of voluntary associations have been resolute forces underpinning and empowering her government and democracy, however rocky the political road has often been and however often scarred by terrible violence” (Page 9). In another footnote, Colley says she has benefitted from a “close reading of C. A. Bayly’s classic, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914.” In a review of Colley’s book, Richard Drayton, Professor of Imperial and Global History, writes, “C. A. Bayly’s Birth of the Modern World (2004), perhaps the book with which Colley’s portrait of global politics is in most full implicit conversation, was both a symbol and key propagator of this turn, with its vision of multi-centric but convergent global processes of change.”

My surmise is that if what Bayly in the concluding chapter of his book calls India’s Sonderweg or “Special Path” did not grab Colley’s attention, it may be because that experience – starting from the politics of gentlemanly political and intellectual debate and petitioning the British imperial government for reforms through the nineteenth century, transformed in the twentieth into a non-violent mass agitation by the Mahatma, and culminating post-Independence, after intense, detailed and prolonged debates in the Constituent Assembly by the victorious leaders of the Indian National Congress and their allies, in the Constitution and the subsequent lasting republican democracy – is difficult to fit into her narrative, without qualifying and modifying her main argument.

Be that as it may, Colley has woven an enormous diversity of people, places, societies, wars, revolutions, interactions and events into a complex web and has written a multifaceted and suggestive work. Writing as a historian, she explores the “protean”, double-edged nature of constitutions with her vision firmly fixed at all times on what actually happened, what was actually the case – the nitty-gritty of empirical fact and evidence, eschewing theoretical and philosophical perspectives. This is predominantly history from above, resolutely “realist” with few concessions to liberal pieties. Coming at a time when constitutions have unrivalled legitimacy universally and are at the same time being questioned from many points of view, there is little doubt that her book will nevertheless compel social scientists, theorists and philosophers, among others, to rethink many of their most basic ideas about them.