This collection includes about 1,000 constitutions, declarations of human rights, and drafts of constitutionswhich never came into force, from this period: from the year modern constitutionalism was born,to the end of the revolutionary phase in Europe, the turning point in the development of modern constitutionalism.
These early constitutional documents were collected and examined in archives and libraries all over theworld, as part of a project by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German ResearchFoundation).The editors compiling the constitutional documentsare competent academic researchers working at universities and in archives in North, Central and South America, and Europe.Using the original documents, these experts reconstructedthe authentic constitutional texts for each country, and annotated them in their respectiveoriginal languages. Each volume contains a short introduction, a main part with the edited constitutional documents of a country, comments and an index. In all, this collection contains constitutional documents from about 50 countries of Europe and the Americas. They will be published in volumes for each country.
The complete edition is of unique value, because it makes all constitutions, from the early phase of modern constitutionalism, accessible in a reliable, authentic text version, for the first time. Until now, these constitutions were scattered widely and many were unknown.Constitutions of the World from the late 18th Century to the Middle of the 19th Century is aunique and fundamental source edition and an extensive documentation of constitutional history.