Constitution-making in the Shadow of Empire

The newly multinational American Journal of Legal History is a healthy sign of the field's recent expansion. To help make sure that comprehension is not traded off for comprehensiveness, legal historians might renew their attention to interpretive frames and methods of undertaking projects. This essay offers two tentative suggestions. One concerns a framework for guiding research about the history of governance. The key phrase here is constitution-making in the shadow of empire. The other concerns the way that legal historians define and undertake projects. There, the keyword is collaboration. Drawing on a collaborative project on the international dimensions of early American constitutional history, the essay suggests that legal historians of post-colonial and developing nations could test interpretive frames developed in other disciplines against the real world of the past. Concepts like state-building, credible commitment, and postcoloniality, for example, could guide and in turn be enriched by studying the actual constitutional and legal mechanisms of state formation as they developed over time.