P. 46 “What happened on Saint-Domingue/Haiti also confirms the political impact and disruptiveness of expanding levels of warfare in the 1700s. It underlines, too, the degree to which this was not just a Western phenomenon. In much of west Africa, the middle decades of the 18th century also witnessed a plurality of conflicts. Take Dahomey, a formidable kingdom in present-day Benin, with its own standing army and gunpowder weaponry. In 1724, it soldiers invaded the once powerful coastal kingdom of Allada, sezing over 8,000 captives. Dahomey itself was invaded seven times between the 1720s and 1740s by the armies of the Yoruba Oyo empire. This was based in what is now Nigeria, and sometimes deployed armies of over 50,000 men, There were other conflicts in this huge region. In the declining kingdom of Kongo, a polity which extended into parts of what is now Angola, Gabon and the two republics of Congo, a longrunning civil war reached even sharper levels of violence between the 1760s and the 1780s…. Some Africanist have contended “a great many of the slaves” who were shipped by French slavers into Saint-Somingue in the later 1700s may in effect have been military veterans, men who had ‘served in African armies prior to their enslavement … may have been … speculates the historian John Thornton,… “the key element of the early success” of its revellion in the 1790s against slavery, and that enabled the Black insurgents here to endure and fight back when they were “threatened by reinforced armies from Europe”.”
P. 67 “Celebration of Moses, along with other real and legendary legislators such as Lycurgus, the quasi-mythical lawgiver of ancient Sparta, Charlemagne, Muhammad, Confucius and the Anglo-Saxon King Alfred found enhanced expression from the mid-18th century not only in political, philosophical and scholarly writing, but also in art and in architectural design and sculpture. The growing cult of messianic lawmkers even surfaces in nobels – in Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s utopian bestseller L’An 2440 (1770) for instance… Mercier imagined a 25th century Mesico that has been cleansed of colonial violence by a Black “avenger of the New World”. This hero fights successfully against European predators, but Mercier goes on to describe how “this great man, this renowned legislator, this negro in whom nature had exerted all her force subsequently lays down the dword and instead resolves to display to the nation the sacred code of the laws, devising a federal constitution and becoming in the process a model for his fellow rulers.”
P. 75 Catherine the Great “those at the time and since who dismiss the Nakaz as nothing more than a vain autocrat’s parade of her pretensions to enlightenment have also misread and misunderstood its significance. It was innovative and influential not least in terms of the techniques that Catherine devised in order to advance and promote it. The Legislative Commission that met in Moscow in August 1767 … brought together delegates froman entire, rapidly expanding overland empire… far less power and initiative than America’s Founding Fathers; and, in the end, they accomplished much less… markedly more diverse in terms of social, economic, religious and ethnic background than the men of Philadelphia. About 30% were nobles, but some came from much lower down the social hierarchy… a man needed only to own a house or possess a trade. Women too received some recognition in this Moscow commission, something that did not happen in revolutionary America, or revolutionary France, or in revolutionary Haiti or revolutionary Spanish America. Among those selecting the commission’s members in 1767 were female landowners who were able to vote by proxy … did nothing for Russia’s own slave population, the roughly 50% of its peasant class who were serfs. Catherine had initially planned to use the Nakaz to ease the condition of these people and provide for their gradual emancipation… but these emancipatory projects fell victims to objections from the landowning class, and to her own nervousness about alienating her nobility.. Not all of the Moscow deputies were white, and not all of them were Christian. The empire’s non-Russian peoples, many of whom were Muslims, had been dran on extensively for military service during the Seven Years’ War. They reaped some reward in the Legislative Commission where they were allotted 54 deputies. “Orthodox sits next to heretic and Muslim,” wrote Catherine complacently in December 1767 of the commission’s meetings, “and all three listen calmly to a heathen; and all four often put their heads together to make their opinions mutually acceptable.”
P. 116 The Federalist Papers, these essays are probably best known now for Hamilton’s initial euphoric boast: “It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country… to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
P. 127 The new American political texts also confirmed and accelerated those changes in understandings of the term ‘constitution’ that were already emerging before 1776. It became more common now to argue that political constitutions might – perhaps even should – be set down in a single, easy-to-print document. One sign of this shift is the response of opponents. From the 1780s, conservatives in some of the disparate German lands and in Brityain began to refer derisively to ‘paper constitutions’.
P. 135 Men and women who were interested in this form of political technology were increasingly presented with a choice. Not only could they study and plunder the United States’ own much reproduced and translated texts. Progressively, they were also in a position to secure information about, and read, and rifle the constitutions of other places. Already by the 1790s, savvy publishers had recognised and were beginning to capitalise on this trend.. Began to issue omnibus collections of constitutions… by the early 20th century, indeed, some newly emerging states and regimes were themselves sponsoring and publishing these kinds of collections… what happened in 1922 in the new Irish Free State, precariously established after six years of civil warfare against the British. The Free State government in Dublin commissioned and issued a hefty volume entitled Select Constitutions of the World. With the text of its own new Irish constitution printed prominently in fist place, the book also contained the texts of 18 other countries’ current constitutions.”
P. 138 The 1814 text crafted at Eidsvoll was painstakingly investigated by a Victorian scholar, the Swedish jurist Nils Hojer.. He was able to uncover and identify influences… “and in some cases verbatim translations – from the French revolutionary constitutions of 1791, 1793 and 1795, the American Federal Constitution and several state constitutions, the Polish Constitution of 1791, the Batavian [Dutch] constution of 1798, the Swedish of 1809 and the Spanish of 1812… what these men stoically hammered out as they waited for Swedish armed forces to arrive in their country was emphatically not a pure domestic invention… nor from any single foreign source… printed copies of the new constitution were put on sale in 1814 in Norway’s 25 major post offices and close to 100 sub-post offices… Norwegians were also encouraged to paste pages from these print version of the constitution on the inside walls of their houses thereby – quite literally – domesticating the country’s new politics and making it part of their everyday lives.”
P. 163 The common soldiery of Ancien Regime Europe (and elsewhere) were rarely the downtrodden automata of legend… Nonetheless, it is clear that some French Revolutionary troops were politicised to a quite different level, in part because widely distributed written and printed constitutions now existed to serve as instructional and inspiring scripts. Take Joseph-Louis-Gabriel Noel, a yeoman farmer and quiet family man from the still quieter village of Ubexy in north-eastern France. When he signed up as an infantryman in a local battalion of volunteers in August 1791, he quickly came to represent himself, even in the privacy of his letters home, as a “solider of the constitution”, a child of destiny. .. What he read, saw, heard and was told by his officers convinced him, however, that triumph was assured and not just for France. “It is we,” he rejoiced, “who must attack to send shivers down the tyrants’ spines and free enslaved people.”
P. 164 “The army that Hapoleon let loose on Russia in the summer of 1812 consisted of about 680,000 men, over half of whom were not French by birth. .. one Abdel-Talut. Originally captured in Ethiopia and sold as a slave in Cairo, he was pluched from captivity there by Napoleon’s invading soldiery, and subsequenly exposed to different forms of hardship and duress, taking part in several French military campaigns before dying in frozen agony on the retreat from Moscow.”
P. 193 “By the mid 1820s, Spain’s Atlantic empire had shrunk to just Cuba and Puerto Rico. The new independence constitutions crafted in Argentina in 1826, in Chile and Peru in 1828, and in New Granada, Urguay and Venezuela in 1830 still retained, however, strong traces of the original Cadez model. … because of his invasion of the Iberian peninsula, and because of the complex repercussions of his Bayonee Statute, Napoleon helped to foster the spread of written constitutions into the length and breadth of South America and the spread of knowledge of them into parts of south-east Asia.
P. 207 Pentham “also made contact with Islamic north Africa, especially by way of his ‘adopted son’, Hassuna D’Ghies. Madrasa-educated, multilingual and a devout Muslim, D’Ghies came from a wealthy family in Tripoli. Visiting London in the early 1820s, he quickly made himself known to Bentham and for over a year the two men worked on plans for an Arabic language constitution for Tripoli and for a wider political revolution that might range across north Africa. One result was Bentham’s 1822 essay “Securities Against Misrule”, the first full-length discussion by a Western author of how the new constitutional ideas and apparatus might be adapted to an Islamic polity.”
P. 208 Betham “back in 1789, when drafting a proposal for a constitution for Revolutionary France, he had argued for the extension of its franchise to all citizens ‘ male or female’ so long as the recipients were ‘of full age, of cound mind, and able to read’. Aware that even most of his fellow reformers would likely question ‘Wht admit women to the right of suffrage?’ Bentham pushed the counter-question: ‘Why exclude them? By the 1820s, however… this cause dropped out of his major public statements and writings. Time was short for him now, and there seemed so much that he could do.”
P. 415 (1820s to 1920s) “Unable or unwilling to design and deploy a formal written constitution, British jurists, polemicists and politicians resorted instead and deliberately to another form of print: patriotic and widely distributed and exported histories of their real and imagined political constitution.”
P. 342 James Africanus Beale Horton – surgeon-major and constituionalist
P. 422 “In a deeply uncertain, shifting, unequal and violent world, therse kinds of imperfect but sometimes stirring, diversely useful and easily available texts may be the best we can hope for. As Thomas Jefferson put it in 1802: “tho’ written constitutions may be violated in moments of passion or delusion, yet they furhish a text to which those who are watchful may again rally and recall to the people.” Over 200 years later, much the same point was being acted out by a.. Young woman named Olga Misik who was protecting in the streets of Moscow…A pro-democracy activist, Misik found herself early in AUgust 2019 encircled by riot police, formidable men in body armour, brandishing shields and batons. Her response was to sit down in the street and read aloud passages from the pages of a paperback copy of the Russian constituion. Misik was 17 at this point and still at school… they did not move in and attack.”
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