... a marvel of erudition.

... brilliant.

... a wide-ranging, beautifully written global history.

... a helpful contribution to this growing field.

Personalities perform in the foreground of a series of historical set-pieces, vividly recounted and analysed. A long section presents the Empress Catherine II.

From the mid-18th century to the beginning of World War I, two approaches to transforming the world—warfare and constitutions—played in tandem. The unusual relationship between them is the fascinating and important subject of Princeton historian Linda Colley’s The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen .

Here [the topic of the British Constitution] is rescued, and rather gloriously, by Linda Colley, one of our most imaginative and relevant historians.

Part of the book’s brilliance is its identification of this phenomenon of the convergence of styles of regime and political community.

... a well-written contribution to global history...makes a strong case for a causal relationship between the costs of modern hybrid warfare...and the world-wide diffusion of codified constitutions between circa 1750 and 1914-18. She regularly dilutes the strong causal claim, however, with qualifying phrases such as 'close connections.' Yet the claim drives the narrative. It is intended to attract the reader, which it does, but is it true?.

This thesis is not entirely new—it has been advanced by a school of thought that asserts the primacy of foreign policy in political affairs—but the way in which Ms. Colley tells the story is both absorbing and innovative. Her selection of case studies allows her to bring in a wide range of 'terrains and voices,' as she puts it. They span centuries as well as continents and cultures, and they vary in size from the incipient colossus of the United States to the tiny Pacific island of Pitcairn.

In this wildly ambitious, prodigiously researched work, Princeton history professor Colley, a winner of the Wolfson History Prize, traces how the proliferation of written constitutions coalesced with the rise of hybrid warfare—land and sea—thus protecting the rights of those who were soldiering as well as those affected by violent invasions.

Copiously researched and elegantly written, Colley’s treatise goes beyond the usual Anglo-American focus of constitutional history to show the global impact of the constitutionalist movement. The result is a fresh and illuminating take on these still-living documents..