The era before written constitutionalism — governance by conquest, custom and code:
1. The unification and the Shah state (1743–1846): Prithvi Narayan Shah's Gorkhali unification (the 1768 Valley conquest its symbol) built a Hindu kingdom governed by the king's direct decree, the royal priest-and-court advisory apparatus, and customary law's diversity — a centralized kingship over a multi-legal realm (Comparative Law's four-layer palimpsest, Semester 3, in its oldest stratum);
2. The Muluki Ain (1854): not a constitution but the subcontinent's pioneering national legal code — Jung Bahadur's post-European-tour codification: one text for all cast and community, hierarchy-aware but uniform-promise (Property Law's and Nepali Legal System's recurring ancestor); the Ain's discipline: officials' discretion curbed by written provision — legality without constitutionalism;
3. The Rana system (1846–1951): the Kot Parva (1903 BS) establishing hereditary executive prime-ministership — the king retained, the state captured; governance by sanads, shree-3's decrees and the civil code's machinery; no written limits, no rights, no courts independent of the executive — the century the word "constitution" itself was forbidden currency in public discourse;
4. The reform eddies: the 1940s' martyrs' movement (Shukraraj Shastri, Dharma Bhakta, Dashrath Chand, Gangalal — the four martyrs of 1941) and the Government of Nepal Act, 2004 BS (1948) — the Rana regime's eleventh-hour constitutional gesture: a written document with an "Advisory Assembly" — too little, too late: the revolution of 1951 already organizing.