Asheesh Kapur Siddique (UMass Amherst), "Documenting the Body of State: Paper and the Matter of the US Constitution"

*For Zoom information, please please contact Aylin Malcolm.

Our speaker writes:

Historians conventionally understand the Age of Revolutions as a period of transition from early modern to modern statecraft in the Atlantic world, characterized by a set of political innovations in the nature of government. Paramount among these was the creation of nation states founded on the innovation of written constitutions – beginning with the new United States, whose form of written constitutionalism served as a model for other polities. This talk challenges that narrative. Building upon recent scholarship on the relationship between writing and state formation, I argue that the mode of constitution-making inaugurated in the aftermath of the American Revolution represented not an invention of written constitutionalism, but instead a revision of the relationship between document and statecraft in the early modern British empire. Whereas constitutional authority in the empire was conceived to be materialized in the multiplicity of paperwork produced by government bureaucrats and authorized by archival precedents, the new American constitution divorced power from archival authority. Linking disparate historiographies, I force both a fundamental rethinking of the transition between "imperial" and "national" constitutionalism in the early United States, and the role of writing in this transition.  

About our speaker:

Asheesh Siddique is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and currently holds an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is completing a book entitled Rule Through Paper: Language and Archive in the Early Modern British Empire. This talk derives from a second project which examines concepts of 'written constitutionalism' in American political culture.