Maurizio Isabella
Research project
This project will reassess uprisings in Portugal, Spain, the Italian peninsula, Sicily and Greece in the 1820s, aimed at establishing constitutions and self-government, and inaugurated by military revolts. It will focus on interconnections and exchanges across and beyond the region during the revolutions, looking at the movement of volunteers, travelers, information and ideas between the revolutions, and from Northern Europe and other continents into the Mediterranean. It will explore practices and ideas that shaped these revolutions, and their legacies in the region. In particular, it will look at the role played by secret societies, elections, the experience of war mobilization as well as circulation of information and printed material in politicizing new sectors of society. It will focus also on constitutional culture and the ways in which debates about the theory and practice of a constitutional government defined revolutionary thought.
By so doing, it will shed new light on the origins and nature of early Southern European liberalism, its peculiarities, and its relationship with debates in the rest of Europe and outside it. It will locate them in the context of a global revolutionary South extending from Latin America to Asia. By highlighting the importance of this revolutionary wave, the project will revise our understanding of the age of revolutions, so far almost exclusively understood as centering around the North Atlantic and France, and help us to rethink the origins of political modernity in Europe.
Biography
Maurizio Isabella is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the School of History at Queen Mary, University of London. He holds a Ph.D in History from the University of Cambridge. His main research interests are intellectual, political and cultural history, with a focus on Italy and the Mediterranean in the 19th century, and on transnational connections and exchanges. Currently, he is working on a history of the 1820s revolutions of Southern Europe in global context.
Selected publications
'Religion, Popular Mobilization and Democracy, 1790-1860 ca', in J. Innes & M. Philp
(eds), Re-imagining Democracy in The Mediterranean 1750-1850 ca, Oxford University Press, Oxford. [forthcoming]
'Introduction: The Sea, its People and their Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century', with K. Zanou, in M. Isabella & K. Zanou (eds), Mediterranean Diasporas. Politic and Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century, Bloomsbury Publishing, New York, 2016, pp. 1-22.
'Mediterranean Liberals? Italian Revolutionaries and the Making of a Colonial Sea 1800-1830', in
M. Isabella & K. Zanou (eds), Mediterranean Diasporas. Politics and Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century, Bloomsbury Publishing, New York, 2016, pp.75-94.
'From Southern Italy to Istanbul: Trajectories of Albanian Nationalism in the Writings of Girolamo De Rada and Shemseddin Sami Frasheri 1848-1903 ca', with A. Puto, in M. Isabella & K. Zanou (eds), Mediterranean Diasporas. Politics and Ideas in the Long Nineteenth-Century, Bloomsbury Publishing, New York, 2016, pp.169-185.
'Citizens or Faithful? Religion and the Liberal Revolutions of the 1820s in Southern Europe', Modern Intellectual History, vol. 12, no. 3, 2015, pp. 555-578.
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