The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World by Linda Colley

In Colley’s account, wars subjected governments to new pressures whether they won or lost. Britain may have won the Seven Years’ War, but its need for revenue from the American colonies soon led to cries of “no taxation without representation.” France lost most of its overseas empire, but its decision to ally with the American revolutionaries led to a fiscal crisis and ultimately to the French Revolution. In turn, the ringing language of equality and freedom in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen led Haitians to take those ideas seriously. Toussaint L’Ouverture’s revolution was followed by several short-lived but innovative constitutions. And in Spain, a liberal attempt to provide for representation for colonial subjects, in the 1812 constitution of Cadiz, failed to reinvigorate the empire and lasted only two years. As one after another, nations emerged in the New World from the crumbling Spanish empire, each adopted constitutions, sometimes several in sequence, in a struggle to find institutional stability. In short, victory or defeat in war led to a turn to the pen.