Designing Constitutions in Britain’s Mid-Nineteenth Century Empire – Indigenous Territorial Government in New Zealand and Retrieving Constitutional Histories

Written Differently: A Survey of Commonwealth Constitutional History in the Age of Decolonisation

“…84 Mark Hickford recently argued that constitutional history is essential to understand territorial and constitutional design New Zealand and refreshingly seeks the local and indigenous history to do so over the usual preference for canonical texts from the English afar. 85 Countries while not formally members of the Commonwealth like Burma, Ireland, territories in the Near and Middle East along with the many "indirect" lands affected by British imperial power need to be drawn back into the Commonwealth story and vice-versa, especially since their complicated constitutional histories and links with the British Empire and Commonwealth states need telling. 86 Indeed it is easy to forget how often Commonwealth constitutional practice lingered despite outward rejections -almost wholly for practical historical reasons.…”

The Incoherence of Empire. Or, the Pitfalls of Ignoring Sovereignty in the History of the British Empire

“…41 With an approach very similar to that adopted in this article, Mark Hickford offers a detailed account of the multiple constitutional idioms in play in practice in one particularly contested polity, New Zealand. 42 Tightening the diffuse literature on the 'British world', Stuart Ward's recent epic study charts the end of global Britishness conceived as a 'civic identity', and in so doing frequently acknowledges the associated political languages (and, by extension, institutions). 43 Lauren Benton's work has highlighted the role of plural forms of law, showing that 'multisided legal contests were simultaneously central to the construction of colonial rule and key to the formation of larger patterns of global structuring'.…”