One of my favourite parts of the curriculum I teach is the second half of Year 8 (for pupils aged 12–13). We look at early European empire, transatlantic slavery and the age of revolutions. Two books that I have read in the past two years have increased my enjoyment of the period even further: Linda Colley’s The Gun, the Ship and the Pen and Sudhir Hazareesingh’s Black Spartacus.

Linda Colley’s work does a fascinating job of exploring how constitutions and independence movements are often presented in national histories, but this presentation obscures their global significance. She explores the common themes which surround constitution-writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and presents them as a political technology...