The Making of Empire

Abstract

The British constitution has always been an imperial constitution. To deny that this is a common, if mistaken, position in the civil war over its true nature. The institutional structure and ideological discourse of the British constitution always extended beyond the pale of England and the English people. This chapter will make two parallel arguments in support of its claim that the British constitution was always an imperial constitution. First, the British constituted themselves and their empire through institutions of government sustained by a single system of law. The reconstitution of any part of the empire necessarily altered the British constitution in England-often imperceptibly, though at times radically. Second, the British and their subjects constantly argued over the nature of their common constitution: its past, present and future. This global constitutional discourse connected metropole to colony in a complicated network of ideological debate as civil war set off in the seventeenth century grew into an increasingly global contest that shaped the ideological and institutional evolution of England’s expansion into the British empire.