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The historical study of American constitutional law has long rested on a conceptual framework that divides the past into linear units of analysis. Constitutional time unfolds according to discrete eras defined by changes in political leadership and governance, whereas constitutional space typically appears divided into bordered jurisdictions and regional sections. Despite the prominence of this conceptual framework, scholars have yet to ask how, why, and to what effect it became the paradigmatic mode of study. In the absence of close study, the framework instead appears as a neutral embodiment of the constitutional order. This essay offers a preliminary sketch of how theories of knowledge production, and particularly Louis Althusser's theory of law as an ideological apparatus, can help to move beyond this facile assumption. By returning to a selection of landmark judicial opinions and legal treatises from the long nineteenth century and analyzing their discursive practices in relation to the dominant modes of production, this exploratory essay suggests a striking possibility: that the paradigm that we have assumed to be a primordial part of the constitutional order only emerged in its current iteration in the late nineteenth-century shift from a plantation mode of production rooted in enslaved labor to an industrial mode of production rooted in wage labor. As these sources indicate, leading jurists in America's age of conquest and enslavement regularly analyzed questions of state power and rights by organizing time according to chains of title rooted in dispossession based on race and space according to the geographic circuits of capital. Effective in naturalizing the strict racialized hierarchy integral to the production and circulation of export commodities, this discourse of tethering institutions to the history of property acquisition and the movement of commodities began to shift with the formal abolition of slavery and rise of intensive industrialization, as a new generation of legal academics created a paradigm of institutional time and space that, by erasing material histories of structural inequality, made it possible to reconstitute an old social order redicated on racial classifications of whiteness.

"This is the only, modern comprehensive constitutional history of any state. From the very beginning in 1606, when James I chartered the Virginia Company to establish a commercial outpost on the Atlantic coast of North America, through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the fundamental constitutions of the colony and state have evolved and changed as the demographic, economic, political, and cultural characteristics of Virginia have changed. Elements of the colonial constitution influenced the character of the state's first constitution in 1776, and changing relationships between the people and their government, as well as relationships between the state and federal governments have influenced how the state's constitution has evolved and what that means to the people who have lived and still live in Virginia"--

English origins of American constitutionalism -- Colonial origins of American constitutionalism -- The American revolution -- Establishing new state and federal constitutions -- Constitutional issues in the early republic -- Judicial review, nationalism, and state sovereignty -- Jacksonian democracy and state rights -- Slavery and the constitution -- The constitution and the civil war -- Reconstruction and the constitution -- The industrial state, laissez-faire constitutionalism, and state rights -- The progressive era -- Conservative constitutionalism in the 1920s -- The New Deal and the constitution -- Liberal constitutionalism foundations -- Liberal constitutionalism and equality -- Curbing presidential power -- The revival of constitutional conservatism -- The Supreme Court and conservative constitutionalism civil liberties -- The erosion of constitutional comity -- The conservative court, the constitution, and judicial supremacy -- Presidentialism and the security state -- Constitution war