The central question that Colley asks in her new book is how written constitutions became such a prevalent feature of modern politics and polities. Her answer is in some respects a familiar one, but in other ways it is strikingly original. Although the United States, France, and other countries that served as fulcrums for the age of revolution certainly loom large in the first half of her book, this book is decidedly not a celebratory story of constitutions as instruments of liberation and popular sovereignty. Instead, Colley argues that constitutions were crafted in response to a new kind of “hybrid” warfare in the eighteenth century that occurred simultaneously on land and at sea (28). This development placed unprecedented pressures on states to mobilize manpower and other resources at a time when the rapid spread of print technologies and the political ideas that piggybacked on them necessitated new methods of binding...

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