Science Interrupted: Rethinking Research Practice with Bureaucracy, Agroforestry, and Ethnography (Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge) Timothy G. Mclellan
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Preface and Acknowledgements
We began to build the network that made possible the writing of this book by drawing on contacts we had made while working on our previous book, Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, and Ireland. We are grateful to François Jarrige for introducing us to Gilles Pécout and Geneviève Verdo, and for their help in suggesting names to us and facilitating introductions. They pointed us to Fátima Sá in Lisbon and to Stéphane Michonneau in Madrid. John Elliot and Gabriel Paquette also made helpful suggestions. We were delighted to run into Javier Fernández-Sebastián when he was in Oxford for other reasons, and for the long, stimulating discussion we were able to have with him in the early stages of our project. Mauro Lenci in Pisa was already known to us and has been unfailingly helpful. Mark Mazower pointed us towards Paschalis Kitromilides in Athens. At a first meeting in Paris, Marc Aymes and Olivier Bouquet told us we really needed to think harder about whether and how the Ottoman world related to our story. James McDougall met us over lunch in the King’s Arms, Oxford, and made initial reading suggestions.
The Oxford History Faculty helped us put together an application to the Leverhulme Trust for an International Network grant. John A. Davis and John Dunn kindly supported our application. The grant (IN-084) financed three years of meetings across southern Europe, also in Paris, New York, and Oxford. (We greatly regret that Leverhulme has decided to cease offering this kind of funding, without which we could not have undertaken this very rewarding project.) Joanna Innes was Principal Investigator on the project: Mark Philp and Maurizio Isabella served as ‘advisers’, though the term does not adequately convey their intellectual and practical contribution. Eduardo Posada served as network facilitator (and much more).
We are grateful to those who served as our official partners in the network: Fátima Sá in Lisbon, Stéphane Michonneau in Madrid, Pietro Finelli and Mauro Lenci in Pisa, Paschalis Kitromilides in Athens, Victoria de Grazia in New York, and Christophe Charle in Paris. We also received vital practical assistance from Eleni Calligas in Athens, from ISCTE in Lisbon, from Florencia Peyrou in Madrid, from Lily Glenn in New York, and from Gilles Pécout and Julien Vincent in Paris.
In order to build our knowledge and understanding of the Ottoman and Arab world, we organized for two years an ‘Ottoman and Arab reading group’ in Oxford, with some financial support from TORCH (the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities) and from the Maison Française d’Oxford (for which thanks especially to Anne Simonin).
We had a wonderful time meeting dozens of people across all these venues, learning from them, and arguing with them. We learned a lot about different academic cultures and made many good friends. We are also extremely grateful to all those
vi Preface and Acknowledgements
who took part, for their generosity, critical engagement, and good company. At the end of the book, we provide a list of participants’ names.
The book is in truth the work of many hands other than just those of its named authors.
Peter Hill—whom we encountered as a first-year doctoral student, giving a talk about the concept of ‘civilization’ in the literature of the Arab Nahda (literary revival), who went on to be a valued member of the reading group, and attender at some of our international meetings—has also helped with editorial work for the book. Thanks also to Kiran Mehta for her help with the index.
At OUP, Robert Faber expressed encouraging interest in our proposed second democracy volume. We are also grateful to Cathryn Steele, who has seen the book through the Press, and to Raj Clement, Hilary Walford, and Timothy Beck, for their help at various stages of the production process, and for coping with our idiosyncrasies and uneven availability, physical and mental.
Joanna Innes with Mark Philp
PART I. PLACES
1. Democracy in Italy: From Egalitarian Republicanism to Plebiscitarian Monarchy 25 Gian Luca Fruci
2. Democracy in Spain: An Ever-Expanding Ideal 53 Javier Fernández-Sebastián and Gonzalo Capellán
3. Democracy without the People: The Rise of Democratic Liberalism in Portugal 77 Rui Ramos
4. Patris, Ethnos, and Demos: Representation and Political Participation in the Greek World 99 Michalis Sotiropoulos and Antonis Hadjikyriacou
5. Sovereignty, Governance, and Political Community in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa 127 James McDougall
PART II. THEMES
6. Re-imagining the Social Order 155 Joanna Innes
7. Liberalism and Democracy 179 Mark Philp and Eduardo Posada-Carbó
8. Exile, Secret Societies, and the Emergence of an International Democratic Culture 205 Florencia Peyrou and Juan Luis Simal
9. Religion, Revolution, and Popular Mobilization 231 Maurizio Isabella
10. Armed Forces 253 David A. Bell
11. Popular Consent and the European Order
Joanna Innes
List of Maps
1. Napoleonic Europe, 1810 (France and allies in bold) xvi
2. Restoration Europe, 1815 xvii
3. Italy before the French
4. Napoleonic Italy, 1810 xviii
5. Restoration Italy xix
6. Spain and Portugal xx
7. The Greek world, 1833 xxi
8. Ottoman provinces, eastern Mediterranean, c. 1795 xxii
xviii
Biographical Notes on Contributors
David A. Bell is a historian of early modern Europe at Princeton, where he has held the History Department’s Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Chair in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions since 2010. Born in New York City in 1961, he was educated at Harvard and Princeton, and previously taught at Yale and at Johns Hopkins, where he served as Dean of Faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences from 2007 to 2010. He is the author of six books: Lawyers and Citizens (1994); The Cult of the Nation in France (2001); The First Total War (2007; translations into French, Spanish, and Portuguese); Napoleon (2015); Shadows of Revolution (2016); and The West: A New History, with Anthony Grafton (2018). His research has been supported by grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His first three books each won major academic prizes. He is also known for his book reviews and essays in the general interest press, especially the New Republic. He writes also regularly for the London Review of Books, and has contributed to the New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement, Time, and Slate. Bell has done a wide range of services for the historical profession. Notably, he was an elected Council member of the American Historical Association, a Delegate for World History (that is, a board member) at Oxford University Press, USA, and a regular review panel member for the European Research Council, and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. dabell@princeton.edu
Gonzalo Capellán holds a Ph.D. in Modern and Contemporary History with an extraordinary award. He is Associate Professor at Universidad de La Rioja, and was formerly at Universidad del País Vasco and Cantabria, in Santander, where he was appointed Vice-Rector for Campus de Excelencia Internacional. He has been Visiting Scholar at Oxford University, Tufts, and the Institut Sankt Georgen in Frankfurt. He has published many works as an author and editor, for example: Opinión Pública. Pasado y Presente (2008), Lenguaje, Tiempo y Modernidad. Ensayos de historia conceptual (2011), and Conceptos, tiempo e historia (2013), some of these in collaboration with Javier Fernández-Sebastián. gonzalo.capellan@unirioja.es
Javier Fernández-Sebastián is Professor of History of Political Thought at the Universidad del País Vasco (Bilbao, Spain). He has published extensively on modern intellectual and conceptual history, in particular focusing on Spain and the Ibero-American world. He has edited the volumes Political Concepts and Time: New Approaches to Conceptual History (2011), La aurora de la libertad: Los primeros liberalismos en el mundo iberoamericano (2012), La subversión del orden por la palabra (2015), as well as the 10-volume Diccionario político y social del mundo iberoamericano: Conceptos políticos fundamentales, 1770–1870 (2014). In collaboration with Michael Freeden and Willibald Steinmetz, he has more recently co-edited the volume Conceptual History in the European Space (2017). javier.fsebastian@ehu.es
Gian Luca Fruci holds a Ph.D. from EHESS, Paris, 2007. He is Lecturer at the University of Bari, where he teaches History of the Risorgimento and History of the Nineteenth Century. He is the author of many essays and articles on French and Italian political history during the long nineteenth century, mainly focused on two areas of interest: electoral
Biographical Notes on Contributors
democracy and plebiscites, political celebrities and communication circuits. He is co-editor of Discorsi agli elettori, a special issue of Quaderni storici (2004), of Parole in azione: Strategie comunicative e ricezione del discorso politico in Europa fra Otto e Novecento (2012), and of Il lungo Ottocento e le sue immagini: Politica, media, spettacolo (2013). His recent work includes ‘Un sentiment en action: La Fraternité combattante du long 1848 italien’, in C. Brice (ed.), Frères de sang, frères d’armes, frères ennemis: La Fraternité en Italie (1820–1924) (2017); ‘Risorgimento’ and ‘Garibaldi’, in O. Christin, F. Worms, and S. Soulié (eds), Les 100 Mots de la République (2017); ‘Wahlen’, in R. Reichardt (ed.), Lexikon der Revolutions-Ikonographie in der europäischen Druckgraphik 1789–1889, iii (2017); and La moglie di Montanelli: Storia mediatica e politica della costituente nel 1848–49 (forthcoming 2018). gianluca.fruci@uniba.it
Antonis Hadjikyriacou is Assistant Professor of Early Modern Ottoman and Mediterranean history at the History Department of Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. He earned his Ph.D. in History from SOAS, University of London, and he has previously worked and taught at Princeton University, SOAS, the University of Crete, and the University of Cyprus. Between 2014 and 2016 he was Marie Curie Intra-European fellow at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies, Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas in Rethymno, Greece. Entitled ‘Mediterranean Insularities’ (MedIns, <http://medins.ims.forth.gr/>), the project employed Historical Geographic Information Systems methods in analysing Ottoman fiscal data from the point of view of spatial history. His research interests include Ottoman economic and social history, the Mediterranean world, environmental and climate history, and early modernity. He has edited a special issue of the journal Princeton Papers, 18 (2017) entitled Insularity in the Ottoman World. He is currently completing his monograph entitled Insularity and Empire: Ottoman Cyprus in the Early Modern Mediterranean. antonis.hadji@gmail.com/antonis.hadjikyriacou@boun.edu.tr
Joanna Innes is Professor of Modern History and Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford University. She has worked for many years on English social policy, and more broadly political culture, from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, in its British and European context. She has co-organized the collective project Re-imagining Democracy: Europe and the Americas 1750–1850 since 2004, and has been Principal Investigator of the Leverhulme-funded international network ‘Re-imagining Democracy in the Mediterranean 1750–1860’, 2012–15. She was for ten years editor of the journal Past and Present, and has held visiting fellowships and professorships in Australia, Japan, Germany, and France. She is the author of Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2009), and co-editor (with Mark Philp) of Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions. America, France, Britain, Ireland 1750–1850 (2013). joanna.innes@history.ox.ac.uk
Maurizio Isabella is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Queen Mary University of London. He has written on the political and economic culture of the Risorgimento and its connections with European and extra-European national movements. He is the author of Risorgimento in Exile (2009), a study of early Italian liberalism and its connection and exchanges with European and transatlantic debates, and editor with Konstantina Zanou of Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century (2015), which looks at the circulation of ideas and people in the Mediterranean. He is currently working on a history of the 1820s revolutions in southern Europe in a global context. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Re-imagining Democracy in the Mediterranean project. m.isabella@qmul.ac.uk
James McDougall is Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Trinity College, Oxford. He previously taught at Princeton and at SOAS, London. His research focuses on the Middle East, north-west Africa, and the global history of Islam; his publications include History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (2006), Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in Northwest Africa (2012), Global and Local in Algeria and Morocco: The World, the State, and the Village (2015), and A History of Algeria (2017). He is currently writing Empire in Fragments, a history of colonialism and its legacies in France and Africa. james.mcdougall@history.ox.ac.uk
Florencia Peyrou holds a Diplôme d’Études Approfondis en Histoire Sociale et Culturelle (Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne) and a Ph.D. in Modern History (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid). She is Associate Professor at the Department of Modern History of Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Her research has focused on nineteenth-century Spanish democratic political culture. On this topic she has published El republicanismo popular en España (2002) and Tribunos del pueblo: Demócratas y republicanos en el período isabelino (2008). She is currently working on the transnational dimension of nineteenth-century European democratic movements, on which she has published ‘The Role of Spain and the Spanish in the Creation of Europe’s Transnational Democratic Political Culture, 1840–1870’, Social History (2015).
florencia.peyrou@uam.es
Mark Philp is Professor of History at the University of Warwick, previously Fellow and Tutor in Politics of Oriel College, and a Lecturer in Politics in the University of Oxford since 1983. He has written extensively on political ideas and social movements in the 1790s, and on political corruption and standards in public life. His published work includes Reforming Ideas in Britain: Politics and Language in the Shadow of the French Revolution (2013); Political Conduct (2007); Thomas Paine (2007); (ed.), Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion 1797–1815 (2006), and (co-ed. with Joanna Innes), Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland 1750–1850 (2013). He is the General Editor of the Collected Works of William Godwin and in 2012 completed a Leverhulme funded project editing and digitizing Godwin’s diary, <http://godwindiary. bodleian.ox.ac.uk>. He has co-organized the Re-imagining Democracy project with Joanna Innes since 2004. mark.philp@warwick.ac.uk
Eduardo Posada-Carbó is Professor of the History and Politics of Latin America, University of Oxford. He is editor of Elections before Democracy: The History of Elections in Europe and Latin America (1996), and (with Iván Jaksić, eds) Liberalismo y poder: Latinoamérica en el siglo XIX (2011). His publications on the history of elections and democracy include articles in the Journal of Latin American Studies, the Hispanic American Historical Review, Revista de Occidente, and the Historical Journal. He served as network facilitator for the project. eduardo.posada-carbo@lac.ox.ac.uk
Rui Ramos holds a D.Phil. from Oxford and is Senior Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, of which he was Vice-Director in 2011–14, and where he directs a Seminar in Historical Methods in the Inter-University Doctoral Programme in History. He is the author of several books on Portuguese nineteenth- and twentieth-century political and cultural history, most recently Quand le Portugal parlait français (2015). He was co-editor of the Dicionário biográfico parlamentar: A monarquia constitutional (a biographical dictionary of nineteenth-century members of parliament, in 3 volumes), and editor and
Biographical Notes on Contributors
co-author of História de Portugal, which won the Dom Dinis Prize in 2009. In 2013, he was awarded the Order of Infante Dom Henrique for his work as a historian. He is now completing a book on the culture of empire and colonialism in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Portugal, as well as doing research for a history of democracy in Portugal. rui.lopes.ramos@gmail.com
Juan Luis Simal completed his Ph.D., which was awarded the Miguel Artola Prize, in 2011. He teaches History at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. In 2012–14 he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Historisches InstitutUniversität Potsdam, Germany. His research interests include the history of political cultures and exile in Spain, Europe, and the Americas in the nineteenth century. He is the author of Emigrados: España y el exilio internacional, 1814–1834 (2012) and co-editor of Exils entre les deux mondes: Migrations et espaces politiques atlantiques au XIXe siècle (2015). His publications include articles in Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, Ayer, Historia y Política, Journal of Modern European History and Contributions to the History of Concepts juan.simal@uam.es
Michail/Michalis Sotiropoulos is currently working at the Hellenic Parliament while holding an adjunct lectureship on the history of the modern Greek state at the Dept. of Political Science of the University of Athens. After studying political science in Athens and history in York, Paris (EHESS), and Queen Mary, London, where he earned his PhD, Michalis held a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Stanley Seeger Center for Hellenic studies in Princeton University. His research interests lie in what Franco Venturi called a ‘political history of ideas’ with an emphasis on Southern Europe during the long nineteenth century and on the ideas and the processes (revolts, revolutions, secessions, unifications, constitution-making, and state-building) that changed the political culture and eventually the map of the region. In his thesis, which is under publication, he explored these themes by focusing on the role of liberal jurisprudence in the formation of the Greek state, in the reforms that went under way after the 1830s and in the eventual transformation of Greek political structure during the ‘long revolution’ of the 1860s. His most recent project explores the political imagery, language, and ideology of the Greek revolution (1821–8). m.sotiropoulos@qmul.ac.uk
Note on Transliteration
ARABIC
Arabic words and phrases are transliterated using the International Journal of Middle East Studies system <https://ijmes.chass.ncsu.edu/docs/TransChart.pdf> for Classical Arabic, except for a few in North African dialect (for example, makhzen, bled al-siba), which are transliterated using a simplified system without diacritics and based on conventional Gallicized forms (as in McDougall, A History of Algeria). Arabic names are given in a very simplified version of the IJMES system without macrons on long vowels and indicating ʿayn and hamza only when midword. Arabic names and words with familiar English, or, for North Africa, French forms, are given in those forms (for example, Cairo, not al-Qahira; Constantine not Qusantina; sharia not sharī ʿa).
OTTOMAN TURKISH
Ottoman Turkish words, phrases, and names are given in a simplified transliteration system as close as possible to modern Turkish, as used in Baki Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire. This system does not use Ottoman-specific diacritics such as macrons or circumflexes on long vowels, nor does it mark ʿayn or hamza, but it does use diacritics and characters used in modern Turkish. As for Arabic, Ottoman Turkish names and words with familiar English forms are given in these forms (for example, vizier not vezir).
GREEK
Greek words, phrases, and names in the main text are generally given in a simplified version of the Library of Congress system <https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/ romanization/greek.pdf> without diacritics (omitting the macron from the o for omega and transliterating both eta and iota as i). In a few cases where a more familiar or recognizable Anglicized version of the word exists, this is preferred to the above system of transliteration (for example, demos and democratia not dimos and dimokratia). In footnotes, author names are transliterated according to the system described, while titles are given in Greek alphabet.
FURTHER NOTES
Where titles cited in footnotes have used different transliteration systems from those described, these have been left in the original form rather than changed. A single Persian phrase (vekil ar-ra‘aya) has been transliterated as it was in the source the authors were citing.
PORTUGAL
FRANCE
CONFEDERATION OF THE RHINE
AUSTRIAN EMPIRE
ITALY ITALIAN DEPARTMENTS
FRENCHOCCUPIED SICILY
ILLYRIAN PROVINCES
OTTOMAN EMPIRE
SPAIN
NAPLES
Map 1. Napoleonic Europe, 1810 (France and allies in bold)
GERMAN CONFEDERATION
SWITZERLAND
LOMBARDY-VENETIA LOMBARDY
PIEDMONT
PORTUGAL
PIEDMONTSARDINIA
PAPAL STATES
AUSTRIAN EMPIRE
TWO SICILIES
Map 2. Restoration Europe, 1815
RUSSIA
TUSCANY
SARDINIA
TUNISIA
DALMATIA
ALGERIA
TRIPOLI (LIBYA)
EGYPT
SYRIA
FRANCE
SWITZERLAND
PIEDMONT
GENOA
PARMA MODENA LOMBARDY
LUCCA TUSCANY
PIEDMONTSARDINIA
SWISS CONFEDERATION CONFEDERATION OF THE RHINE
AUSTRIAN EMPIRE
ISTRIA
SAN MARINO VENICE
PAPAL STATES
FRANCE
KINGDOM OF ITALY
OTTOMAN EMPIRE
DALMATIA
LUCCA
AUSTRIAN EMPIRE
ILLYRIAN
PROVINCES
ITALIAN
DEPARTMENTS
NAPLES
SARDINIA SICILY
KINGDOM OF SARDINIA-PIEDMONT
KINGDOM OF NAPLES
KINGDOM OF SICILY (king of Naples in exile)
Map 3. Italy before the French
Map 4. Napoleonic Italy, 1810
TUNISIA
FRANCE
SWITZERLAND
PIEDMONT
Milan Turin Asti
PARMA
SARDINIAPIEDMONT
Nice
AUSTRIAN EMPIRE
LOMBARDYVENETIA
Treviso
Vicenza
Padua
Mantua
Alessandria MODENA
Genoa
Reggio-Emilia
Alba Bergamo Como Crema Brescia CurtatoneMontanara
Pisa
LUCCA
Venice
Rovigo
Ferrara
Bologna
Florence
EMILIA-ROMAGNA
SAN MARINO
Livor no Iesi
TUSCANY
Ancona
MARCHES
UMBRIA
Perugia
PAPAL STATES
LATIUM
Rome
Naples
Saler no Abruzzi
Avellino
OTTOMAN EMPIRE
Ragusa
SARDINIA
TUNISIA ALGERIA
Map 5. Restoration Italy
TWO SICILIES CALABRIA
MALTA (British)
SICILY
PORTUGAL
Map 6. Spain and Portugal
Zaragoza Barcelona
CATALONIA
Cadiz
Lisbon
Opor to Salamanca
ANDALUSIA
Madrid
SPAIN
Coimbra
BASQUE PROVINCES NAVARRA
Olympus
IONIAN ISLANDS SOULI
Yannina Missolonghi
Epirus THESSALY ROUMELI
Amfissa
Piraeus
Athens
PELOPONNESE or MOREA
Argos
Tripolitsa Kalamata
Land frontiers of the Greek Kingdom 1833
Ionian islands, under Venetian control to 1797, British Protectorate 1815–1864
Map 7. The Greek world, 1833
Istanbul (Constantinople)
CRETE
MANI
CEPHALONIA
MACEDONIA
SAMOS
CHIOS
PSARA
HYDRA
Smyr na
AEGEAN SEA
ANATOLIA
Ayvalik BULGARIA
Istanbul (Constantinople)
Musul
TUNISIA BAGHDAD ALEPPO CYPRUS
Mediterranean sea
TRIPOLI/ LIBYA
LEBANON (site of Beirut and Kisrawan)
Jerusalem
PALESTINE
Damascus SYRIA/DAMASCUS
Cairo
Map 8. Ottoman provinces, eastern Mediterranean, c. 1795
MOLDAVIA
WALLACHIA
SERBIA RUMELI
Salonica
Yannina
MOREA
ARCHIPELAGO
CRETE
EGYPT
ANATOLIA
BOSNIA
Introduction
Joanna Innes with Mark Philp
This book follows our previous ‘re-imagining democracy’ collection in offering a distinctive approach to the history of democracy—one that owes much to the ‘conceptual-history’ tradition but does not fit entirely within that mould.1
Our concern is with the contexts in which people—in this case, people in lateeighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Mediterranean states—drew upon the ancient, originally classical Greek concept of ‘democracy’, and applied it to their own circumstances, transforming it in the process. In 1780, it was unusual for people to attempt this; by 1860, it was common. Our authors trace the changing use people made of the word, the circumstances to which they applied it, and the institutions and practices that they developed to embody it.
Though a ‘conceptual-history’ approach frames what we do in this book, the extent and character of our interest in context are distinctive. The context that interests us consists above all in the circumstances to which people responded, though it consists too (in more traditional conceptual-history fashion) in the wider grid of words and ideas through which they interpreted their situation. Of course, circumstances cannot be pried apart from words and ideas. Although government and politics do not operate only through language (and still less are social relationships wholly language based), yet language and concepts play a large part in giving these systems meaning, in maintaining them, and in making it possible to contest them. So inevitably we are interested in how people talked and argued about what was happening, whether this was in terms of ‘democracy’ or not. Nonetheless, contributors to this book also spend much time evoking what happened in their own terms.
This concern with what happened reflects a hypothesis: that growth of interest in ‘democracy’ across the Mediterranean region at this time needs to be understood in large part as a response to challenging events. The era of enlightenment was associated across southern Europe with new approaches to representing and
1 Joanna Innes and Mark Philp (eds), Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland, 1750–1850 (Oxford, 2013). For recent reflections on conceptual history, Willibald Steinmetz, Michael Freeden, and Javier Fernández-Sebastián (eds), Conceptual History in the European Space (New York, 2017). For the ‘Iberconceptos’ project headed by one of our authors, Javier Fernández Sebastián, <www.iberconceptos.net>. The editors have contributed a chapter to a volume in the Berghahn ‘European Conceptual History’ series, ‘ “Democracy” from Book to Life: The Emergence of the Term in Active Political Debate, to 1848’, in Jussi Kurunmäki, Jeppe Nevers, and Henk te Velde (eds), Democracy in Modern Europe: A Conceptual History (New York, 2018).
Joanna Innes with Mark Philp
analysing the political and social world, and with attempts to curtail arbitrary power and to ‘reform’ established institutions and practices; analogues of these developments can be found in the Ottoman world. Geopolitical pressures on the region throughout the eighteenth century—a period marked by extensive continental and imperial warfare—played a part in encouraging such new thinking. Yet these pressures pale in significance when set alongside the massive, destabilizing impact of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Those wars inflicted upon the Mediterranean region, in varying mixes and to varying degrees, not just murderous and resource-consuming warfare, and associated economic dislocation, but also in many localities—from Portugal to Egypt—the meltdown and refashioning of traditional institutions, and stunning challenges to prevailing ideologies.
‘Democracy’ was seen during the French revolutionary era more often as a problem than as a solution. Yet, as political actors in multiple places and at multiple levels strove over the following decades to draw on the sets of ideas available to them to reconstruct polities and societies and to fit them to deal with continuing challenges, they increasingly came to see some form of ‘democracy’ as potentially an element in a solution. It was accepted, that is to say, that new kinds of links had to be forged between people and government, and that a new political and social ethos had to be developed. ‘Democracy’ won increasingly wide acceptance as a slogan for that project.
Of course, this growth of interest in ‘democracy’ was not confined to the region. Mediterranean states participated in a wider process of re-imagining the import of the word, and in Britain and Ireland, America and France, the process of reworking it for modern use began earlier. American and French and in due course other (for example, German and Polish) usage affected Mediterranean linguistic practices throughout the period under study, as the following chapters demonstrate. Yet, if a wider set of developments helped to shift the connotations of ‘democracy’, the word had some currency in the region from the start. It derived, after all, from a shared classical inheritance, which instruction made available to the literate. At the start of our period, ‘democracy’ was an essentially foreign word only in nonEuropean parts of the Ottoman and Arab world, where medieval engagement with Aristotle’s politics had left no vital legacy. In those parts, in the period explored here, a foreign word it remained. Though rough Ottoman and Arabic equivalents were devised, and the term surfaced as a loanword in discussions of European developments, applications of the loanword to domestic politics came after— though only a little after—the decades explored in this book.2
By contrast, throughout southern Europe, by the later eighteenth century, the word ‘democracy’ was already in occasional use to gloss local conditions, and in consequence it had already acquired locally specific baggage. Developments outside the region from the era of the American and French revolutions helped raise
2 For Ottoman political vocabularies, and the absorption of European loanwords: Marinos Sariyannis, A History of Ottoman Political Thought up to the Early Nineteenth Century (Leiden, 2017); Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago, 1991); Ami Ayalon, Language and Change in the Arab Middle East: The Evolution of Modern Political Discourse (New York, 1987); Wael Abu’Uksa, Freedom in the Arab World: Concepts and Ideologies in Arabic Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2016).
its prominence, and probably brought it to the attention of some who had never previously encountered it. Yet it was happenings in the vicinity that gave it salience. As the term came into increasingly common use, local differences in patterns of use became more pronounced.
AGAINST COMMON INTUITIONS
When we have talked about this project, we have often encountered (chiefly but not only from those who know little about the history of the region) the intuition that there cannot be much to say about ‘democracy in the Mediterranean’ at this time. That intuition may owe something to an established narrative, according to which democracy—originating in Greece—owes its modern form to developments in America, Britain, and France, from where it diffused as an ideal. In fact, as our previous volume showed, neither the American nor the French revolutions were undertaken in the name of democracy; democratic phenomena and aspirations were more a by-product of these revolutions, and initially an unwelcome by-product. In Britain and France, ambivalence about democracy continued through our period. Thanks in part to the efforts of Alexis de Tocqueville, from the 1830s, government and society in the United States were widely regarded as exemplifying a modern form of democracy, but, with the outbreak of the American Civil War, this became a questionable advertisement.3 In this context, those who advocated democracy in the Mediterranean region, or who at least resigned themselves to the need to come to terms with it, joined in what was everywhere a work in progress.
A second (and probably more powerful) reason for questioning our project is the common notion that Mediterranean states came very late, indeed quite recently, to democracy. And, indeed, during the twentieth century, many spent long periods under autocratic rule: Italy from 1923 to 1945; Portugal from 1926 to 1974; Greece from 1936 and then under wartime occupation, and then again from 1967 to 1974; Spain from 1939 to 1975; in Portugal, Greece, and Spain there were other, shorter-lived constitutional suspensions too. In these latter cases, arguably it took the enticements of the European union to tip the balance in favour of democracy (though, in the early twenty-first century, that environment has put great pressure on democracy in the region).4
Yet all these states had representative institutions to suspend in their times of crisis—and, if Portuguese and Italian franchises were not extended to encompass most adult males until the early twentieth century, Spain and Greece had by general European standards long histories of extended franchises: Spain first experimented with a broad franchise in 1812—and, though that franchise rarely
3 Innes and Philp, Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions.
4 Geoffrey Pridham, The New Mediterranean Democracies: Regime Transition in Spain, Greece and Portugal (London, 1984); Enrique Baloyra, Comparing New Democracies: Transition and Consolidation in Mediterranean Europe and the Southern Cone (Boulder, CO, 1987).
