Constituting a Settler Empire: Written Constitutions and Reordering the British Empire, 1860-1930

Abstract

This dissertation explores settler constitution-writing in British settler colonies of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I focus on constitution-writing moments in each settler colony. Through them, I argue that a shared settler constitutionalism emerged. This was a vernacular constitutionalism that was produced in multiple places, through a wide variety of sources, and by a diverse group of people who engaged in a shared, if asymmetrical conversation. It contributed to the reordering of an increasingly global British Empire and was at the heart of important strands of British imperial political thought, including liberalism and humanitarianism. Settler constitutions were an important way that the British Empire and settler colonies participated in new forms of global political thinking driven by the proliferation of written constitutions. Constitutions were flexible political technologies that were used to consolidate, expand, and justify the British Empire. They were also a powerful tool to challenge the empire on the very grounds that it attempted to justify its existence. Constitutional history produced a powerful teleological narrative of progress that included both the colony to nation story and the gradual spread of constitutions and democracy from Britain outwards to the colonies. This dissertation challenges these teleologies by following ideas and debates about constitutions through the webs of empire to show how settler constitutionalism operated as a technology of empire and facilitated racialized visions of civilization. Although often viewed as benevolent texts and understood in national frames, constitutions were inherently global texts. They facilitated the expansion and consolidation of exclusionary settler states. Revisiting the history of settler constitutions from this perspective allows for a critical reassessment of a central element of modern politics and the continuing legacies of imperialism and colonialism.