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

Linda Colley discusses the aims and methods involved in her recent book The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World (2021), and comments in retrospect on some of its arguments about the connections after 1750 between patterns of conflict, the exponential spread of written constitutions across continents, and the progress (and limits) of rights.

Linda Colley is Shelby M.C.Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University and a Fellow in History at the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Study. Born in the UK, she earned her BA from Bristol University, and her MA and Ph.D. at Cambridge. She subsequently held chairs at Yale and a the L.S.E., before moving to her present position in 2003. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and holds seven Honorary Degrees. Translated into 15 languages, her books include In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714-1760 (1982) Namier (1988), Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (1992), which won the Wolfson Prize, Captives: Britain, Empire and World 1600-1850 (2002), The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (2006), named one of the ten best non-fiction books of the year by the New York Times, and Acts of Union and Disunion (2014), based on fifteen lectures for BBC Radio 4. Reviewing her recent The Gun, the Ship and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World for the New Yorker, Jill Lepore wrote: “If there were a Nobel Prize in History, Colley would be my nominee.”

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.