The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen

In 1997 Diamond wrote the best-seller, "Guns, Germs and Steel". Nearly three decades later, a similar sounding book (The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen) by Linda Colley shifts the gaze from environmental determinism to political technology (primarily constitutions). The author is a historian and the book is woven around key individuals, which makes the book navigable via personalities. Compared to others of its type, this book is comparatively more in tune with dominant narratives (Haiti features, gendered exclusion explored). If you are interested in a detailed history of constitutions, this is a good resource. If you are looking for more of the "so whats?" of these military and political technological developments, it leaves readers somewhat wanting on this. A few notes:

"... my intention is to track and analyse changing attitudes and strategies over time and geographical space, I look not just at official and successful makers of constitutions, but also at some of the many private actors who attempted documents of this sort, out of anxiety, in the hope of advancing particular political, intellectual and social agendas, or because they were simply addicted to writing and to the written word." (p. 11-12)

"'We sought to make them over to move them into our column', an American academic lawyer would write in 2004, anguishing over the ethics of his country's post-invasion exercise in constitution writing in Iraq, while also recalling its constitution-making for Germany and Japan in the wake of the Second World War. In writing and legislating for others, he went on, the United States had wanted to make these defeated countries: 'take our side in a global war and be useful to us in it.' Making countries over in order to move them firmly into his column and make them useful in the context of global war was very much Napoleon's purpose with the foreign constitutions that he engineered. But his actions in this regard were far more numerous than later American ventures, and there was less agonising along the way." (p. 176-177)

"Naturally, Bentham was in communication with Haiti, the first Black-ruled republic in the Caribbean. 'Whatever may be the difference in [skin] colour', he wrote in 1822 to its president, Jean-Pierre Boyer, a mixed-race veteran of Haiti's wars of independence, it was in the 'true interest of all parties' that these superficial human variations not obstruct the global progress of a common 'identity – in respect of Laws and Institutions'. Bentham enclosed with this message, of course, a scheme for a new Haitian constitution. He 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. 207-208)