YouSaid · the spoken record

Linda Colley

lines on the record: 38
first: 2021-11-19
most recent: 2021-11-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That's often forgotten about written constitutions. They provide at their best a source to which you can go with the questions what kind of state is it? What does it value? How is it organized? What are the rights and the duties of its inhabitants? And that's a pretty important and useful thing to do, I believe. It doesn't guarantee a ticket to Paradise. These are not magic bullets, but then we don't live in that kind of world.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and the right to clean air, the right to forest maintenance, things like that are being inserted into constitutions. And I think that's very important. Animal rights too are being inserted into some constitutions. Now, again, you can say, oh, well, look, it's only writing or in digital or in print, that by itself won't enforce anything. But it might because a constitution is a fundamental law. And once you write something down in a constitution as a fundamental law, for a start, you bring it within the influence of law courts. If you're lucky, and you also help to educate people and inform them.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think these documents will have to adapt, not least, because, of course, we increasingly inhabit a digital world. These are documents which were bound up so closely in the past with not just the written word, but the printed word. But most people get now in richer parts of the world such political information as they take in from a screen of some kind. So how do constitutions merge with that kind of technology? But I think too there will be a need to rethink what constitutions cover, you know, increasingly we know environmental provisions are being put into political constitutions, the ones that have been revised or written anew in recent decades.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and independence sentiment is currently on the rise in Wales. So, you know, this could be quite a cumulative crisis. Might that be the crisis which finally forces the powers that be, whatever powers they are in London at the end of it to say, you know, we've resisted a written constitution for a long time, but perhaps we need to think again.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“new and up to date political constitutions without the stimulus of war or some kind of major disaster. What is it going to take to make Americans reform their now rather out of date political constitution around which there is a huge cult but which is substantially out of date and most Americans have never read? I mean, we know this. So can there be constitutional renewal in the United States without some kind of major crisis? If anything is going to create a constitution here in Britain? Well, actually, now that I've posed that question, I think I could suggest some answers. They're not particularly happy ones, but let me suggest a possible scenario. if Scotland in the future succeeds and becomes an independent state, which is within the bounds.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anything made by human beings can easily fail. Success is probably the minority result. And I didn't want to imply anywhere in my book that constitutions invariably powered democracy because they haven't. They still don't in many parts of the world. I didn't want to suggest that this was the only way of doing politics. I think it can be a very good way. But written constitutions and violence over time have been intermingled again and again and again.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All per existential crisis out of which constitutions often come. I mean, if the Germans had successfully invaded Britain in the Second World War, or perhaps in the First World War, I think various things might have happened. Probably the monarchy might well have gone, and possibly if the Germans had then subsequently been driven out and defeated an embarrassed British governing class might have felt obliged to refurbish the state by establishing British politics on a new constitutional basis. But as we know, that didn't happen.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“would like to go further and have a proper British written constitution, but the Chartists are, again, unsuccessful, they're pushed to one side. And what I think most explains Britain's current lack of a written constitution is partly this cult of an unwritten constitution, which narrows vision in certain ways, but also that the British didn't have to try so hard to revise their state. They didn't have another revolution after 1688, which was itself a pretty moderate revolution. They didn't have another British-wide civil war. There wasn't a successful invasion of Britain. So they didn't have the kind”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“indeed precisely because it had been Republicans and revolutionaries who'd flirted with that in England in the Civil War period. Again, that didn't give written constitutions a particularly good reputation among more conservative political actors. So there was that aspect. But I think it's also, well, there's two points. First of all, there are British sympathizers with written constitutions, only they're not in power. There are intellectuals like Jeremy Benson, who writes constitutions for lots of other places. There are more working class activists like the Chartists, some of whom really do want a written constitution. They've got their own charter, which gives them their name.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lots of things were going on. I wanted to make clear, as I do in the book, that in England, at least, there had been early attempts at constitution writing. You can see the instrument of government of 1653 in the midst of the civil wars as a kind of written constitution, which was intended to apply not just to England, but to Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and to England's colonies as well. But obviously the civil wars are defeated. The English Republic goes, the monarchy returns in 1660. And while you get very influential constitutional texts, subsequently, like the Bill of Rights of 1689, there isn't an equivalent of a written constitution.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think he is because I don't think how it Mary Shelley, if you look at the time she lives, if you consider who her contracts are, I mean, she's not only the daughter of the great Mary Wollstonecroft and of the philosopher William Godwin. So she grows up with politics.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“aristocratic privileges. Sometimes he does extend the vote as in the Duchy of Warsaw, part of what is now Poland. Again, it's only to men. Now, these constitutions don't last because, of course, Napoleon himself falls from power in 1815 with the Battle of Waterloo. But what he does do and what does have a permanent effect is that he has introduced in some cases written constitutions into parts of Europe that have not had them before. We've got rid of that, but perhaps we ought to think of another kind of constitution. To replace it. And you see that in parts of Germany, parts of Italy. It's rather like having, you know, injecting something into the body politic. And once it's injected, the body politic has changed somewhat. And it never returns to its previous state, absolutely”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not just French historians or they're very critical of him and see him just as a tyrant and a killer of thousands and thousands of people, a despoiler and so forth. And he was, but not many conquerors are so eager to bestow constitutions where they are conquering. Now, Napoleon has his own reasons for doing that. Usually his constitutions provide for kinds of conscription because he wants more men for the French armed forces. So often he tries to get rid of discrimination against Jews. He tries to get rid of.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he shows lots of things. It's possible to be too cynical about Napoleon. I mean, historians are either madly in love with Napoleon. Obviously, many French historians are.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, not just at this time, but a long time after. It isn't just, of course, extreme political conservatism. And after all, the British are not conceding written constitutions in their own country. I mean, they still haven't, at the beginning of the 21st century. So there's resistance all along the line here. I don't think so. Not if you're an outsider wanting to rule.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Russian politics at this time were one level utterly despotic, but certain patrician women, because they were patrician, because they had titles of great wealth and huge amounts of land, did have, and many Western Europeans point this out, did sometimes have extraordinary levels of freedom for the time. And I mentioned that the Great Convention that Catherine got together to discuss the NACAS, well, some women, again, very powerful women were allowed to vote for representatives to sit in this convention. They couldn't sit there, but they could by proxy influence or some of its”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A constitution. There was a zeitgeist already there in which different nations were involved, different empires. And so that's what I tried to show about Catherine. She's well known to have loved writing. She was a great reader, a great writer, but because of her fairly colourful private life, which films and novels still focus on, there is a tendency to forget her mind, her ideas, and I wanted to stress that aspect of her as well.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She also again had it printed in multiple languages. And it's partly to show her own self as an enlightened tsar, but it's also to show that Russia itself can be, will be, an enlightened new polity, being an example to others. The NACAS is not implemented. But it interested me because it was so much the creation or the compilation of someone female, but also because it showed again that you didn't have to wait for the Americans in 1787 to adopt certain devices about how you create”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She wouldn't do that. She took the throne for herself. So she invented this huge roll code, which she wrote substantially herself, though drawing heavily on books by various enlightenment, intellectuals and reformers, and putting it together with other sources of inspiration. But it was a huge document. She got up morning after morning to write very early about four o'clock in the morning, day after day after day, and damaged her eyesight reputedly in the process. But she was very proud of it. And it is a remarkable document, and she organized a big convention of representatives from across the Russian Empire to discuss the various clauses of this document.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For all sorts of reasons, I was so grateful to Catherine the Great, which not many people can have said in life, I suppose, but she did give me a female peg on which to hang some important arguments and was therefore very welcome in that respect. What she tried to do in the Nakaz was again an element of invention, partly self-invention she was a usurper, effectively. She had been the spouse of the Tsar who was basically got rid of in the early 1760s, first of all ludged off the throne, then assassinated possibly with Catherine's knowledge and will. And the expectation was that she would just be a regent for her son.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something Gerton, you know, quite early period, but once you get written constitutions coming in, of course, they can say the franchise is the possession of all adult males over the age of 21 or 25 or whatever. And there it is. And it acquires the force of law. And so, you know, when the early suffragettes sort of try saying, but, you know, why can't we vote? And they say, well, you know, look at the Constitution. It's written down there. It's in print. Go away. And you do get the early female suffrage activists trying to get round this by saying, oh, well, you know, perhaps the word doesn't mean that because there are, for example, words in Spanish which can be a masculine or female in connotation and you get these rather eager and desperate suffrage activists saying but but perhaps they”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, almost all of them were written by males. Of course. I don't think written constitutions as they emerged where necessarily patriarchal, but what they often did because they spelt things out, because they turned things into words which were then printed and disseminated. They often solidified attitudes which had been there but had been rather more incoate. But now they get spelt out. So for example with the right to vote, there's odd examples in Britain, in other parts of Europe, in Japan of a few, usually very rich women having votes for”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“a hereditary monarch, which is what he wanted, was his way of making a very bold statement Look, I am a black self made monarch, but I'm a monarch like all the other monarchs, and I can make a state in my image with my words. And I think he needs to be looked at as I wrote, as a much more creative and entrepreneurial figure than superficially he may appear.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I felt that Ori Christoph, who was again not necessarily a very nice man, but what he was trying to do like so many constitution makers was invent a state and of course it can seem very baroque and bizarre that he invents titles for nobility and he gets coats of arms drawn for them in Britain he dresses up in royal garb he builds palaces for himself and so forth it all seems very self indulgent and it was but he was living in a world where most states in fact most countries were still monarchies and therefore making himself a monarch”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“was of great importance. They were often not particularly, as we would call them, liberal constitutions. Yeah, they got rid of slavery, at least in print and in writing. But the bulk of ordinary Haitians who of course were largely illiterate were still mainly coerced labor in some way. And the rule established in the new Haiti was very militarized in all sorts of ways, understandably, because this was, you know, the first successful black revolution until way into the 20th century. And it was very much at risk. And so there was a great stress on controlling the people, keeping military power there. Running a tight ship, as it were. But it's an extraordinarily part of this story of the proliferation of these documents and how they're used in different ways, by different forms of power.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the history of Haiti, particularly of the revolutionary period, which breaks out in the 1790s, and then after Haitians begin to be more successful and ultimately drive the French out, you get this string of constitutions, many of which don't last very long. And yes, this is an astonishing political and historical episode. And the different Haitian rulers and leaders who had mainly been men of war, as many constitution writers are, in fact, were often fighting against each other as well as trying to ensure that the French were kept at bay, that other European powers didn't take them over, that the United States didn't take them over. And so issuing these”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I think performative act puts it very well. And it's why print again becomes so important because, as I say, this is a performative act, not just for the domestic consumer, but to send overseas and say, well, you know, the United States has arrived. Look, here we are. But there is that element of performance, counterfeit in many constitutions, in fact, if you look at them carefully.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“or Georgians or whatever. So in a sense that stirring opening line imagines an identity which is not at all secure. And these are creative, almost fictional documents. We tend to think of them as documents of the law, documents of fact. But constitutions are also marketing various fictions and imaginative statements. That's why in a sense they need to be looked at as literature, not just political documents.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that necessarily identity statements very often they are rather desperate invention documents. They're not telling the truth necessarily sync again in the American Constitution and that first line. We the people it sounds so monolithic. It sounds as though, hey, we know who we are. We know what we are. And these are our rules. But of course, this was written at the last moment by one particular founding father, and it was a lie. Americans at the time, well, most of them didn't call themselves Americans yet. And they had different ideas about what they wanted. Some of them were quite happy to continue to regard themselves as Virginians.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“invades. So that's one way in which war feeds into constitutional growth. Even the big powers are put under pressure. But there's other ways too. If you're defeated in these wars, you may feel the need to issue a new constitution to kind of revive your image. If you are a conqueror in these wars, as Napoleon emphatically was, then you may want to spread your own type of constitutions in the areas you conquer. And that's what happens. Napoleon drafts, sometimes personally, a great many constitutions for Spain, for the German lands, for Italy, for Holland, for his own ruthless reasons. He helps to make the written constitution something that is happening on a large scale in Europe, not just in the Americas”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the American Revolution is American resistance to British taxation, taxation caused by the costs of war. And of course the American Revolution leads to American state constitutions and the federal constitution of 1787-9. And similar thing happens in France. It's the costs of France's hybrid warfare that really bankrupts the French monarchy, so they have to call for new political forms of assembly in 1788. This is the origins of the French Revolution, which again leads to scores of new constitutions, not just in France, but in those parts of Europe which France then.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it doesn't necessarily prompt nationalism, but it can certainly prompt constitutions in multiple ways. The most obvious, I suppose, is that some even great powers find the costs of warfare so great that they are put under immense strain. This happens to Britain after the Seven Years' War. It's been very successful in the Seven Years' War, but it's got all these new colonies. It needs ships and armies to control them. How's it going to pay for it? Well, how about levying extra taxes? Well, let's do that on the American colonies. That is not a popular idea. The American colonists don't like it, and one of the long-term causes for”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a term that's still used now by warmongers in the early twenty first century. Obviously, I'm not meaning it in that way. How I meaning hybrid warfare is that for the great powers, especially by the mid-18th century, the great powers in the West anyway, warfare is crossing oceans and continents. So it's no good just having arms.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Warlike, the technology of war, the costs of war are going up. And so you need to think harder about how you're going to organize the state, how are you going to get men at arms in sufficient numbers? How are you going to get taxes? And again, constitutions are partly being fostered by this, by the need to change how you run a state.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you can also use print to send it overseas or over borders and advertise yourself. This is what the new United States does after 1787 when the founders write the Constitution at Philadelphia and they send copies to all the countries in Europe and parts of North Africa that they want to influence and impress and say, look here we are. These are the rules of this new polity. So we've got a rather different kind of political constitution emerging. But it's not just print, it's also the influence of the Enlightenment in part and its necessity by the middle of the 18th century.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you're absolutely right, some people have looked at O Islamic documents and said well they're kind of proto constitutions some people have said well look they had codes of law in ancient times and that's right but the constitutions I'm looking at are much more volatile and mass reproduced documents and that's partly because of course we've got print increasingly spreading in the 18th century we've got literacy spreading though evenly in different parts of the globe and people begin to realize this is not the only reason but people begin to realize that a written document a new kind of political contract you can use print to distribute it within your own”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partly because there is so much about them, these documents have generally been looked at in regard to particular nations, whereas what I was interested in was spread. Why was it that already by the First World War, you got these kind of single document written political constitutions operating in parts of every continent? This had become a global type of political technology, and I wanted to tell that story, and I wanted to tell it in a different, more lively way.”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because of what I wanted to do, as you say, constitutional history which was once a very fashionable topic, particularly on both sides of the Atlantic. But since all around the 1960s, it's come to be seen as a very arid, legalistic area of study. Lawyers legal serious might be interested, but in general, no, not something you wanted to read. Because these things are so important, so vivid, so argued over for centuries. The idea that they're just dusty and specialist documents is quite wrong. I also felt that”
2021-11-19 · Intelligence Squared · Constitutional Rights and Wrongs, with Linda Colley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source