War-war leads to jaw-jaw
THE CONVENTIONAL VIEW OF historians has been that the proliferation of written constitutions in recent centuries around the globe was primarily the result of a tendency towards democracy. Linda Colley offers a starkly different interpretation and rams it home with cogency and panache.
She believes that waves of mainly European hybrid warfare — war pursued by land and sea — were the principal engine behind what she calls “new constitutional technology”. This was not just because wars, like revolutions, brought regimes crashing down, but because warring nation states offered political rights to their citizens (and sometimes to the citizens of those territories they conquered) in exchange for
