#14 The Gun, The Ship and The Pen: On Written Constitutions with Professor Linda Colley

Linda Colley is one of the world's most eminent scholars of global and imperial history. Professor of History at Princeton, she is a highly respected contributor to public debates around constitutionalism in the United Kingdom, and the recent author of The Gun, The Ship and The Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World. In this conversation, we reflect on written constitutions as they globally evolved through crisis and revolution in the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. In the process, we examine the strange ways in which written constitutions have come to both entrench and redress existing inequalities for women and Indigenous peoples, as well as the threats to written constitutions around the world today, and what might be done to preserve these fallible, yet still essential, paper creations of human beings.