The Chinese constitution as a global co-production
While conducting research for my PhD dissertation about Chinese constitutional history at the Tōyō Bunko Library in Tokyo, I came across an unusual book: A colourful Russian tome from 1905, adorned with blue Chinese dragons and a title set in an Orientalizing letter-form. The book was a biography of the Chinese statesman Li Hongzhang (1823–1901) written by one of the most influential Chinese intellectuals of the period, Liang Qichao (1873–1929). Upon closer inspection, I learned that a Chinese student in St. Petersburg had, with the assistance of a local friend, translated the text into Russian and circulated it among a number of Russian politicians, journalists, and literati. Through this effort, the translators sought to persuade Russian elites to embrace political reforms, just as many Chinese intellectuals were simultaneously advocating for China itself.
At that time, I was a member of the research group ‘Towards a Global History of Concepts’ at the University of Heidelberg, where we were engaged in discussions about the global co-production of modern concepts. When I saw this book, it dawned on me that these debates were equally applicable to constitutional history. Conventional accounts usually frame the late Qing empire’s constitutional experiments as efforts by Chinese intellectuals and officials to come to terms with Western constitutional ideas, largely through Japanese mediation. However, although this perspective captures a significant dimension of the process, it by no means tells the whole story.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, some of the world’s largest and most populous polities – such as Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Persia,– were undergoing comparable constitutional transformations alongside China. Chinese thinkers and officials engaged with these shared experiences, sometimes directly, and often through European intermediaries. Chinese political and intellectual actors did not merely receive and adapt foreign models; rather, they actively formulated constitutional ideas by drawing on their own traditions of political thought, on Japanese and Western models, and on their broader observations of the world in which they lived.
From this realization emerged my central argument, which I have subsequently defended in my doctoral dissertation (Moniz Bandeira 2018) and related publications (Moniz Bandeira 2017): the late Qing empire’s attempts to adopt a constitution were not an isolated or derivative episode, but part of a global movement that co-produced the basic elements of modern statehood.
Challenging diffusionist historiography
This finding comes with important implications for how we understand both Chinese history and global constitutional history. Narrating late Qing constitutionalism in a global context allows us to better grasp the Qing government’s choices (Moniz Bandeira 2022), while also enabling a more nuanced assessment of the Japan’s specific role in the formation of Chinese modernity, which otherwise risks being treated as a black box.
On a global level, episodes such as the Russian translation of Liang Qichao’s work question assumptions about the general precedence of European constitutional models. Chinese intellectuals and officials were not passive recipients of ready-made constitutional templates, but exercised agency in crafting their local interpretations of constitutionalism. The adoption of a constitution in China was not a Western imposition: most Chinese actors embraced constitutional forms because they believed these could serve simultaneously as new institutional containers for Chinese political traditions and as effective tools for competing with imperial powers on their own terms. Seen from this perspective, late Qing constitutionalism invites us to rethink narrow definitions of what constitutions are meant to do and why they proved to be such an attractive tool for governance across the world.
While my case study of China challenges conventional diffusionist historiography, it falls within a broader scholarly trend that re-evaluates constitutional historiographies from transcultural and global perspectives. To name only a few examples (and with apologies to others who could not be included here for reasons of space), Linda Colley’s seminal book The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen (Colley 2022) demonstrates how written constitutions spread as a global ‘political technology’ in tandem with conflict and warfare. Aylin Koçunyan has masterfully traced the transcultural origins of the Ottoman Constitution (Koçunyan 2018), while Iza Hussin has explored the relationship between law and mobility through the case of the 1895 Johor constitution (Hussin 2014). Sara Marzagora has studied the fascinating case of Ethiopia (Marzagora 2020), whose first constitution of 1931 drew on the Japanese model, even adapting the claim of an eternal kingship to local conditions. Ivan Sablin has analyzed constitutional and parliamentary entanglements across Eurasia, with particular attention to the Russian imperial sphere (Sablin 2022); in turn, Sablin, Jargal Badagarov, and Irina Sodnomova have reconstructed the making of Mongolia’s first constitution of 1924 as the outcome of intersecting Qing and Russian imperial transformations, Soviet socialism, and vernacular political traditions (Sablin et. al. 2021). In the Japanese context, Takii Kazuhiro has pioneered a volume probing the global history of the Meiji Constitution (Takii 2022), while the global histories of the Japanese parliament have been examined in a related effort (Malitz et. al. 2025).
Rewriting the Global History of Constitutions
How might we frame such research within a broader picture? Given the stark disparities of power in global politics and economy and the ‘asymmetrical density of references’ that characterized the global nineteenth century (Osterhammel 2014), the ‘West’ certainly played a distinctive role as a constitutional model and central node in the transmission of constitutional knowledge of normativity. Yet methodologically, as Caio Duarte and I have argued elsewhere (Moniz Bandeira & Duarte 2021), global history must pay closer attention to (semi-)peripheral networks of knowledge production. Examining the—hitherto understudied—‘margins’ of a global system, and the interactions among them, allows us to grasp the system’s dynamics more fully.
While working on Late Qing constitutional history, I collected a large number of fascinating sources that I was eager to make accessible to a wider scholarly audience. At the same time, I was keen to learn more about the many cases that were potentially entangled with the one I was studying. Out of this dual interest, I developed the idea of publishing a volume of translated primary sources drawn from the different constitutional traditions, each accompanied by a substantial analytical introduction.
The project now comprises more than twenty case studies, spanning the period from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century and penned by experts in the respective areas. In September 2024, we organized a major author workshop with the generous support of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, an event which proved crucial in sharpening the individual contributions and finding shared frameworks. The result of this effort will be the co-edited volume Histories of Constitutionalism: Global Exchanges of Ideas and Entanglements, c. 1850s–1940s, which is currently under contract with Cambridge University Press.
The circumstances under which these polities debated or adopted constitutions varied widely. In places such as Japan, China, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Persia, constitutional projects accompanied far-reaching (post-)imperial transformations. Constitutions served as instruments through which imperial ambitions were sustained, but were also invoked to resist imperialist pressures. In colonial settings such as India and Vietnam, constitutional thought served as a means of contesting colonial rule and imagining postcolonial futures, while in the Americas constitutions accompanied the formation of new states in early postcolonial contexts. Constitutions emerged in moments of crisis, compensated for the weakening efficacy of religious and other traditional forms of legitimation, and were deployed to manage diversity, mobilize nationalism, and negotiate competing political interests.
Taken together, these cases demonstrate that constitutions, as a form of normative knowledge, acquired widely different meanings as they were translated into new settings (Duve 2022). In this sense, the findings corroborate Avi Rubin’s observation with regard to the Ottoman Empire (Rubin 2018): Constitutions cannot be reduced ‘to a single narrative about the development of any certain ideology.’ Constitutionalism was an extraordinarily versatile discourse, and constitutions were a highly contagious political genre in the long nineteenth century (Colley 2022).
Bibliography
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