Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions

"In most histories of what is often called the Age of Revolution, specifically from the French Revolution in 1789 to the Revolutions of 1848, Southern Europe is largely absent or plays, to say the least, a very marginal role. This book is a new history of the revolutions of the early 1820s, when the desire for freedom and emancipation found expression in uprisings in Portugal, Spain, the Italian peninsula, Sicily and Greece. While each of these revolutions had its peculiar features and belonged at the same time to a global revolutionary South extending from Latin America to Asia, this book will highlight the converging features, exchanges, and connections among them. The book explores practices and ideas that shaped these revolutions, such as the role played by secret societies, elections, the experience of war mobilization as well as transnational circulation of information, individuals, and printed material in politicizing new sectors of society. Maurizio Isabella challenges what he sees as enduring notions of these revolutions as weak or elitist in nature and argues that while their fate was determined by the intervention of more powerful foreign countries, they actually enjoyed considerable popular support in highly ideologically divided societies. The book then revises our understanding of the Age of Revolution, which until now is almost exclusively understood as cantering around the North Atlantic and France, and helps us to rethink the origins of political modernity in Europe"--

Maurizio Isabella is professor of modern history at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Risorgimento in Exile and the coauthor of Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century.