Constituting the Body of State: Paper, Parchment, and Political Thought in the Age of the American Revolution.
This essay considers the material and visual cultural dynamics through which the modern state emerged during the Age of Revolutions in the Atlantic world. It centres upon the emergent rhetoric of the 'written constitution' in Revolutionary North America and the new United States, arguing that this mode of constitution-making represented not the invention that many claimed it to be, but instead a revision of the relationship between document, statecraft and the body in early modern British empire that built upon seventeenth-century English critics of monarchical power. The continuities between the material substrates of empire and nation came to be masked by a rhetoric of disavowal that posited the US constitutional form as both an innovation and a template for the material entanglements of the modern state.
Added 2026-04-21