explores recent research, and measures the effect of ocean warming and rising sea levels and temperatures. Grim prognostications, as troubling as the rise of an invigorated near peer competitor in global trade and in the projection of power. We all need to keep ourselves informed. To Rule the Waves is an excellent and sobering introduction to the maritime world of 2022. Joseph F. Meany Jr. Albany, New York The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World by Linda Colley (Liveright, New York, 2021, 512pp, illus, notes, index, isbn 978-1-6314-9835-0; $35.00hc) It’s easy for the modern individual to take a constitution for granted. After all, such charters underpin most modern nations. It’s just as easy to forget that these documents were a rarity only a few centuries ago, begging the question: What drove nations to embrace them? In The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen, Princeton University historian Linda Colley examines the role and relationship that
warfare and transoceanic exchange had in the emergence and spread of modern constitutionalism. For the author, the seed of constitutionalism lay in the mid-eighteenth century amidst the parallel ages of Discovery and Enlightenment. Colley’s central argument is that the period yielded unprecedented demands on expansionist powers. As she states: “The geographical range of many major conflicts—and consequently the demands they posed in terms of men, money and machines—was expanding more dramatically and more rapidly than ever before.” Expanding wars placed heavier burdens on the citizens who had to fund and fight them. In exchange for those added burdens, political leaders granted constitutions that gave citizens a more participatory role in their government. The same leaders who commissioned these inclusive documents treated them as promotional pieces that validated the justness of their régimes. Mentions of rights and liberties lent an aura of nobility to these charters. Thanks to the prevalence of the printing press during that period, supporters could
publish and distribute copies into the hands of people far and wide. Even if the state behind a constitution failed, as with Pasquale Paoli’s in Corsica, the words and ideas could live on through other generations. Paoli’s Corsican republic may have fallen to French invasion, but his charter inspired revolutionaries as far off as Britain’s American colonies. Diplomats, traders, and missionaries shared these documents with sovereigns around the globe, and constitutions soon came to be something of a fashion. Revolutionaries from Toussaint L’Ouverture to Simón Bolivar used constitutions to legitimize their respective nations. Rulers as disparate as Tunisia’s Sadiq Bey and Tahiti’s Pōmare II adopted constitutions as symbols of modernity, touting them in dispatches to European and American capitals. Even Katerina of Russia, an admirer of Montesquieu and Diderot, flirted with the idea of a constitution. Colley does not shy away from the disempowerment these documents could bring. Most excluded women from government, focusing on the male population that
CIVIL WAR AT SEA Collection Management and Appraisals
The Union Blockade in the American Civil War A Reassessment MICHAEL BREM BONNER & PETER MCCORD
www.shipmodel.com | wall@shipmodel.com | 978-281-1166
Model Ships by Ray Guinta P.O. Box 74 Leonia, NJ 07605 201-461-5729
Order online UTPress.org or call 800-621-2736
www.modelshipsbyrayguinta.com e-mail: raymondguinta@aol.com Experienced ship model maker who has been commissioned by the National Maritime Historical Society and the USS Intrepid Museum in NYC. SEA HISTORY 178, SPRING 2022
THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE PRESS 61