Constituting Empire

“Hulsebosch offers superb accounts of constitution-writing in New York. . . . [His] brilliant book will have a profound impact on our understanding of the American Revolution and the early history of state-making in the federal republic.” — Law and History Review

“A pleasure to read. . . . [Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World] is an important book for legal historians, but it should also be an enjoyable book for a much wider audience.” — American Historical Review

“An interesting and important dimension to the old Progressive historical perspective that explains how a divided people became one.” — Journal of the Early Republic

“Provocative. . . . Hulsebosch has successfully placed early American constitutional history in two critical contexts: the social history of mobility as well as the intellectual paradigm of empire. The result deserves to be read by both social historians and legal scholars of this period.” — William and Mary Quarterly

“Hulsebosch brilliantly describes [how] the constitution of the British Empire was rarely settled and almost always hotly contested. There were, Hulsebosch tells us, many constitutions of empire in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, at least three of which played themselves out in the American Revolution.” — Harvard Law Review

“A sophisticated and insightful analysis of American constitutional theory and the development of law as the expression of that theory within a conceptual structure rooted in the understanding of empire.” — Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

“Hulsebosch’s volume offers fresh and provocative new insights on the spatial and constitutional workings of North American colonialism over a broad swath of time. . . . [Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664-1830] is a highly successful book that deserves wide reading.” — Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

“[An] original and fascinating study. . . . Nothing less than a tour-de-force. Its careful scholarship sustains a powerful and original set of arguments about the imperial framing of American constitutionalism. . . . Hulsebosch’s blending of cultural, political, and legal analysis also points the way to understanding the place of the Anglo-Atlantic story within the broader history of constitutions and empires.” — Law and Social Inquiry

“A capacious and beautifully written history that sweeps us from the province to the empire, describing how each defined the other through the legal struggles of people on the ground. Hulsebosch provocatively evokes how a cohesive modern constitutionalism — with its complex mediation of the local, the national, and the international — emerges out of that relentless dynamism.” — Christine Desan, Harvard Law School

“Hulsebosch changes the conventional wisdom about the competing imperial and colonial versions of the constitution in a way that is utterly persuasive. His argument is that there were multiple versions of the constitution both in the colonies and in England and that tensions among these, on both sides of the Atlantic, helped shape the emerging conflict. Hulsebosch’s handling of the historical evidence is impeccable, and his writing is crisp and clear.” — Larry D. Kramer, Stanford Law School