Unintended Nations: France's Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe, and the Post-Napoleonic World

di Alex R. Tipei (Autore)

McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025

In the wake of Napoleon's defeat in 1815, French liberals set out to create an informal empire. Their efforts to cultivate unequal partnerships with Christian, Greek-speaking elites in southeast Europe shaped national identities and structured global civilizational hierarchies over the decades that followed. Unintended Nations tracks a notion of civilization that developed in early nineteenth-century France. Alex Tipei explores the constellation of ideas, beliefs, and practices this concept invoked – what she calls civilization-speak – and charts the cross-continental networks that employed it as an organizing principle. Drawing on archival and printed primary sources in six languages, Tipei maps out the uses of this civilization-speak on both sides of the continent, focusing on France and the lands that make up significant parts of present-day Greece and Romania. She shows how and why French liberals mobilized civilization-speak to, offering an innovative analysis of liberalism and capitalism's relationship to informal empire. Calling into question long-standing assumptions about the rise of nationalism in southeast Europe, Unintended Nations explores how Franco-Balkan exchanges helped define political, civilizational, and biopolitical boundaries in the post-Napoleonic era.

• Autore: Alex R. Tipei
• Editore: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Collana: McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas
• Anno: 2025
• Rilegatura: Hardback
• Pagine: 360 p.
• Dimensioni: 229 x 152 mm
• EAN: 9780228024583

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