Trial until 31 March: Constitutions of the World

Oxford users are invited to trial Constitutions of the World (from the late 18th Century to the Middle of the 19th Century Online). The trial ends on 31 March.

This resource provides online access to constitutional documents from all over the world, written from 1776 to the end of the year 1849. It includes about 1,600 constitutions, amendments, human rights declarations, and draughts of constitutions that never came into force, from this period. These early constitutional documents were collected and examined in archives and libraries all over the world, as part of a project by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). Using the original documents, experts from American and European universities reconstructed the authentic constitution texts for each country, and annotated them in their respective original languages. Each volume contains a short introduction, a main part with the edited constitution documents of a country, comments and an index.

The online edition is of particular value, being the first publication to provide easy access to all the previously scattered and in many cases unknown constitutions from the early phases of modern constitutionalism, as edited and annotated constitutional texts. This edition offers uniquely rich and valuable source material, supplying comparative constitutional history of the early period of modern constitutionalism with new perspectives.

Users can search the documents full-text or browse the subject index.

Countries covered to date: Europe (United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Lichtenstein, Russia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Croatia, Slovenia, Czechoslovakia, France, Corsica, Monaco, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Malta) Americas: United States, Chile, Colombia, Panama, Haiti and Mexico.

Please send feedback by 31 March to isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk or leave / view comments on History eResources Desiderata.