The Age of Empire formed a historical window of opportunity in which mass media and imperial politics temporarily coalesced to create a new kind of ‘publicity politician’ in a system of ‘transnational media politics’. Mass media expanded the scope of politics, and media politics encompassed political subsystems such as government politics, party politics, and monarchical politics. While Wilhelm II, Bülow, Chamberlain, Rhodes, Leopold II, and Roosevelt were particularly media-savvy or mediagenic, they shaped the system of media politics, setting standards for both their contemporaries and successors. Media became central to the acquisition and exercise of political power. Politicians became media consumers, media influencers, and media objects. Throughout history, political leaders had publicized themselves through various media, but now media management became central to politics, making leaders visible to the public on a global scale impossible before. This heightened visibility was crucial to politicians’ survival in this new era of mass democracy. Media-savviness, mediageneity, or media celebrity alone did not suffice for survival – the publicity politician combined these qualities. The direct mediation of politics contained the seeds of both democratization and de-democratization, and subsequent media developments reinforced this paradoxical potential over the course of the next century.

This chapter discusses how constitutional ideals were reconfigured through the nineteenth century. In the first instance, the democratic aspect of constitutional law was suppressed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Over time, however, states began to use constitutions in instrumental fashion, so that a distinct model of imperialist sensationalism took shape in the longer wake of 1848. This model was designed to extract military capacity from society without stimulating deep internal conflict. In some respects, as European expansion gained pace after 1870, this model imposed conditions of military regimentation in both metropolitan societies and colonized societies, as societies were generally structured in accordance with military imperatives. The chapter also considers how these processes were reproduced in societies exposed to European expansion, such as Japan and China.