After years of exile in Naples, Paoli returned to Corsica, joined the resistance to Genoese rule, rose to power, served as both a rebel commander and a civilian leader, and wrote and implemented a constitution for Corsica. The constitution written by the eighteenth-century Corsican, Pasquale Paoli, is her first case study. 412).” For historians who have held up the 235 year-old United States Constitution as a model of political modernity, it is far from historically normative.Ĭolley builds her analysis with case studies of constitution writing over two centuries, and which she positions within broad historical contexts, particularly their connection to warfare. Rather than assuring political stability and rights, written constitutions, Colley argues, can be “protean and volatile,” a characterization that she reinforces with the unsettling statistic that in 1991, of the 167 single document written constitutions in existence, “only about twenty. They can be a technology of exclusion and marginalization, particularly “in regard to Indigenous peoples. 9).” In Colley’s assessment, however, for individuals seeking governmental power, they could also provide “valuable performative and presentational opportunities” that could cause exploitation and chaos as often as deliver political stability. 277).” In The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World, Linda Colley seriously qualifies this characterization, arguing that written constitutions emerged as a “political technology” in the mid-18 th century, were often associated with warfare, and “can appear to offer, the prospect of benign and exciting transformations (p. In the conventional metanarrative of modernity, written constitutions symbolize progressive trends, political events that were considered “benevolent and normally acted as a liberating force (p.

Review of Linda Colley, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Liveright Publishing Company, 2021) 502 pp.

The gun the ship and the pen review