Institute for the Study of the AmericasSpeaker: Professor Linda Colley (Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History, Princeton University)The outbreak of revolution in the Thirteen Colonies in 1776, in France in 1789, and in Haiti in 1791, famously gave rise to the creation of substantially new and highly influential written constitutions. Before 1786, no independent state possessed a single document which it termed a constitution. But in the wake of these and other revolutions, written constitutions proliferated. By 1812, there were fifty new constitutions in Europe alone. Over sixty more were drafted before 1850, many of them in Latin America.Yet the degree to which the explosion of new constitutions after 1776 was a trans-national and a trans-continental phenomenon can easily be obscured by exceptionalist and purely national historical narratives. In this lecture, Linda Colley considers the evidence for a more complex and multi-lateral history of constitutions in the Atlantic World between 1776 and 1848, and discusses their profound connections with empire as well as nationalism.