The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been aptly called the “Age of Codifications.” The same period was also the Age of Constitutions. Although a great deal is known about the migration of prenational and transnational legal sources and ideas that led to national codes of civil and criminal law in Europe and the Americas, much less is known about similar processes on the constitutional level. Constitutional historians have been more parochial than their private law counterparts, most likely because of the relationship between constitutions and nations. In the light of independence, nations immediately needed constitutions to solidify gains and to consolidate state power. The study of these processes becomes national narratives, often in conversation with the former colonial power, which are disconnected from more general or regional trends. As Linda Colley's article in this issue illustrates, it is important to step back to view the constitution-making process from an Atlantic perspective that ties the Americas, North and South, into the area of study. The Age of Constitutions in the Americas must include Latin America and the Caribbean.

Approximately 50 years ago, R. R. Palmer published his two volume masterwork The Age of the Democratic Revolution. Designed as a “comparative constitutional history of Western civilization,” it charted the struggles after 1776 over ideas of popular sovereignty and civil and religious freedoms, and the spreading conviction that, instead of being confined to “any established, privileged, closed, or self-recruiting groups of men,” government might be rendered simple, accountable and broadly based. Understandably, Palmer placed great emphasis on the contagion of new-style constitutions. Between 1776 and 1780, eleven onetime American colonies drafted state constitutions. These went on to inform the provisions of the United States Constitution adopted in 1787, which in turn influenced the four Revolutionary French constitutions of the 1790s, and helped to inspire new constitutions in Haiti, Poland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and elsewhere. By 1820, according to one calculation, more than sixty new constitutions had been attempted within Continental Europe alone, and this is probably an underestimate. At least a further eighty constitutions were implemented between 1820 and 1850, many of them in Latin America. The spread of written constitutions proved in time almost unstoppable, and Palmer left his readers in no doubt that this outcome could be traced back to the Revolution of 1789, and still more to the Revolution of 1776. Despite resistance by entrenched elites, and especially from Britain, “the greatest single champion of the European counter-revolution,” a belief was in being by 1800, Palmer argued, that “democracy was a matter of concern to the world as a whole, that it was a thing of the future, [and] that while it was blocked in other countries the United States should be its refuge.”

Soon after Marc Kojo Tovalou Houénou hurried from his tour of the United States to the French West African colony of Dahomey in 1925 to be at his dying father's side, the French governor there launched an inquiry to find out whether Houénou was the French citizen he claimed to be. Houénou had been born in Dahomey in 1887, but had spent most of his life studying and residing in France. Alhough he had only returned to Dahomey briefly in 1921, with his father's death in 1925, Houénou wanted to claim what he saw as his rightful position as chef de famille or head of his extended family in Dahomey. With this title, Houénou would have gained administrative control over his father's expansive wealth in land and property in several towns in Dahomey, and would have been the official representative for his family, especially in interactions with the French colonial government. However, Houénou was already emerging as a thorn in the side of French colonial authorities because of a series of critical articles he had written in Paris about French colonialism. Therefore, when Governor Gaston Fourn found that Houénou had, in 1915, obtained his French citizenship rights, literally permission “to enjoy (jouir) the rights of French citizen,” why was the governor relieved?

From the 1880s, states and self-governing colonies in North and South America, across Australasia, and in southern Africa began introducing laws to regulate the entry of newly defined “undesirable immigrants.” This was a trend that intensified exclusionary powers originally passed in the 1850s to regulate Chinese migration, initially in the context of the gold rushes in California and the self-governing colony of Victoria in Australia. The entry and movement of other populations also began to be regulated toward the end of the century, in particular the increasing number of certain Europeans migrating to the United States. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Britain followed this legal trend with the introduction of the 1905 Aliens Act, although it was a latecomer when situated in the global context, and certainly within the context of its own Empire. The Aliens Act was passed in response to the persecution of Eastern European Jews and their forced migration, mainly from the Russian Empire into Britain. It defined for the first time in British law the notion of the “undesirable immigrant,” criteria to exclude would-be immigrants, and exemptions from those exclusions. The Aliens Act has been analyzed by historians and legal scholars as an aspect of the history of British immigration law on the one hand, and of British Jewry and British anti-Semitism on the other. Exclusion based on ethnic and religious grounds has dominated both analyses. Thus, the Act has been framed as the major antecedent to Britain's more substantial and enduring legislative moves in the 1960s to restrict entry, regulate borders, and nominate and identify “undesirable” entrants effectively (if not explicitly) on racial grounds.

The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 1965 (CERD), was negotiated at the United Nations (UN) during the years 1962–1965. At that period, the UN was an organization so highly politicized and split that it was almost paralyzed, operatively speaking. Human rights codification was a major field whose advancement came to a standstill as a result of the lack of cooperation between UN member-states. Nevertheless, the UN managed to unite around the denunciation of racial discrimination, and unanimously adopted CERD on December 21, 1965. Furthermore, the period of time that elapsed between the presentation of the initiative and the vote on the final version of the treaty was only 3 years; a rather short period of time, UN experience considered.

Atlanta's human rights community was buzzing, because the United Nations (U.N.) was coming to town. On Sunday, January 19, 1964, the front page of the Atlanta Daily World, the city's oldest black newspaper and the South's only black daily, announced, “United Nations Rights Panel to Visit Atlanta.” The U.N. Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (Sub-Commission), the Daily World explained, was a fourteen nation “body that surveys the worldwide problems of discrimination.” The Sub-Commission had been invited to Atlanta by Morris Abram, a former Atlanta attorney and the lone United States member of the Sub-Commission, to study first-hand the city's well-publicized, efforts to improve in race relations. Sunday morning's Daily World also noted that the U.N. delegation “composed of experts, mostly lawyers and jurists” was in the midst of drafting a global treaty designed to end racial discrimination, and the local paper highlighted Abram's role as the primary drafter of the race accord. “Mr. Abram, as the U.S. expert on the subcommission has proposed a sweeping eight-point treaty,” the article reported. According to the Daily World, the pending race treaty—the treaty that would ultimately become the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD or Convention)—would address “segregation, hate groups and discrimination in public accommodations.”