Abstract
This introductory chapter shows the Revolutionary Western Mediterranean to be an understudied region that is critically important in nuancing the conceptions of international politics in the 1790s. The argument here is based on turning the focus from the centers of power to the actors on the periphery. This includes both the diplomatic representatives of the Great Powers, such as France and Britain, as well as the smaller powers, such as Tuscany or Corsica. From there, the chapter embraces contradictions within the application of Counter-Revolutionary and Revolutionary ideologies as causal forces in shaping international politics. In addition to establishing these two elements to the argument, it also briefly examines the historiographic connections between the Mediterranean and the Revolutionary era, focusing especially on the recent global-imperial push.
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Notes
- 1.
This story is revisited in Chap. 4 and is drawn from the British National Archives, FO 20/2, FO 79/10 and HO 528/15.
- 2.
There have been several recent and lively investigations into the world of diplomats and diplomacy. Perhaps most notable is the oeuvre of Jeremy Black, especially British Diplomats and Diplomacy (2001). More recently, Jennifer Mori’s The Culture of Diplomacy, Britain in Europe, 1750–1830 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010) does an excellent job of placing diplomats and statesmen in their proper historical and cultural contexts.
- 3.
Linda and Marsha Frey, “The Reign of the Charlatans Is Over: The French Revolutionary Attack on Diplomatic Practice,” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 65, no. 4 (Dec. 1993), 706–744; “Proven Patriots: The French Diplomatic Corps, 1789–1799” with Linda Frey (St. Andrews, Scotland: St. Andrew Studies in French History and Culture, 2011)—also available online: http://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uklhandle/1 002311881. The work of Viriginie Martin also is extremely relevant here, especially “Les Enjeux Diplomatiques dans le Magasin Encyclopédique: Du Rejet des Systèmes Politiques à la Redéfinition des Rapports Entre les Nations,” La Révolution française, 2012/2, numéro dirigé par Jean-Luc CHAPPEY, L’encyclopédisme dans la presse savante [mis en ligne le 15 Septembre 2012]; Marc Belissa, Fraternité Universelle et Intérêt National (1713–1795). Les Cosmopolitiques du droit des Gens, Paris, Éd. Kimé, 1998, 408–416.
- 4.
In particular, I am inspired here by Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) when she seeks to “move the analysis simultaneously out toward global (and structural) and in towards local and cultural phenomenon…reimagining global structure as the institutional matrix constructed out of practice and shaped by conflict,” 4. See as well Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
- 5.
Finney, Patrick. Palgrave Advances in International History. Houndmills/Basingstoke/Hampshire/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; Fisher, John, and Antony Best, On the Fringes of Diplomacy : Influences on British Foreign Policy, 1800–1945 (Farnham, Surrey/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011); Frank, R. “Penser Historiquement les Relations Internationales.” Annuaire français de Relations Internationales, 2003, 42–65; Mori, Jennifer. The Culture of Diplomacy: Britain in Europe, C. 1750–1830 (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2011)—distributed in the US exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; Mösslang, Markus, Torsten Riotte, and German Historical Institute in London. The Diplomats’ World: The Cultural History of Diplomacy, 1815–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Reynolds, D. “International History, the Cultural Turn and the Diplomatic Twitch.” Cultural and Social History 3, no. 1 (2006): 75–91; Schweizer, K. W, and M. J Schumann. “The Revitalization of Diplomatic History: Renewed Reflections.” Diplomacy and Statecraft 19, no. 2 (2008): 149–86; Trachtenberg, Marc. The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Windler, C. “Diplomatic History as a Field for Cultural Analyses: Muslim-Christian Relations in Tunis, 1700–1840,” The Historical Journal 44, no. 1 (2001): 79–106.
- 6.
Iain Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Furio Cerutti and Rodolfo Ragionieri, Identities and Conflicts: The Mediterranean (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); John Julius Norwich, The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006); Benjamin Arbel and David Jacoby, Intercultural Contacts in the Medieval Mediterranean (Portland, OR: F. Cass, 1996)—these are a few brief examples, not to mention the seminal works of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), and of course Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
- 7.
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Despite its potential overuse, White’s work is useful for understanding the way in which ideas and identities are formed away from the centers of power, and the agency of third-party actors within that formation. Similarly, Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), highlights the way in which a stable geographic boundary served as a catalyst for the formation of national identity.
- 8.
Two noteworthy and recent examples of this broad historiography are Molly Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterranean (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); and Gillian Lee Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). There are numerous other examples as well, though these do an exceptional job of providing an innovative methodological approach. See also Isser Woloch, The New Regime (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), for a perspective not isolated to the Mediterranean, but broadly investigating the changing relationship between state and subject.
- 9.
See Greene’s introduction in Catholic Pirates for a discussion of this theme.
- 10.
Godfrey Fisher’s Barbary Legend: War Trade and Piracy in North Africa, 1415–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957) remains the most comprehensive, if dated, analysis of the Barbary Coast.
- 11.
See Greg Hanlon, Early Modern Italy, 1550–1800: Three Seasons of Change (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). The oeuvre of Jeremy Black also covers this phenomenon, especially in “On the ‘Old System’ and the ‘Diplomatic Revolution’ of the Eighteenth Century,” International History Review 12 (1990): 201–23; and European International Relations, 1648–1815 (New York: Palgrave, 2002); and The Rise of the European Powers, 1679–1793 (New York: E. Arnold; distributed in the USA by Routledge, Chapman, and Hill, 1990).
- 12.
For a brief examination of the historiography surrounding the uniformity or tensions in the years leading up to the French Revolution, see Marc Belissa, “Can a Powerful Republic Be Peaceful? The Debate in the Year IV on the Place of France in the European Order,” in Republics at War, 1776–1840: Revolutions, Conflicts, and Geopolitics in Europe and the Atlantic World, ed. by P. Serna, De Francesco, and Judith Miller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
- 13.
Paul Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Jeremy Black also has numerous books that examine this dynamic from the British perspective.
- 14.
R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959). To his credit, Palmer also included at least one example from the Mediterranean in his study—Corsica’s failed quest for independence in 1769—and a brief discussion of the Constitution of the Anglo-Corsican Kingdom. The latter argument will be addressed in Chap. 5. Palmer also has one of the only scholarly works on the Anglo-Corsican Kingdom. In a short article he argues for using the Kingdom as a lesson for historians to examine not just the successes of history but also the failures. Although compelling, it is not especially relevant for this study. For more on the Atlantic World Paradigm, see Jacques Godechot, La Grande Nation: L’expansion Revolutionnaire de la France dans le Monde de 1789 á 1799 (Paris: Aubier, 1956), as well as the recent discussion by Emmet Kennedy in French Historians, 1900–200: New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France, eds Philip Daileader and Philip Whalen (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
- 15.
John P. Garrigus and David Geggus are at the forefront of this movement. Laurent Dubois is also significant with his Avengers of the New World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) and Colony of Citizens (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
- 16.
“Introduction” in The French Revolution in Global Perspective, ed. by Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 5.
- 17.
Jeremy Adelman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review 113, (2008, 310–40); C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian (Reading, MA: Longman, 1989); and The Birth of the Modern World, 1770–1914 (New York: Blackwell, 2004). Lauren Benton’s work in Law and Colonial Cultures is conceptually similar, though focused much broader in terms of timespan.
- 18.
This is the argument of Peregrine Horden in The Corrupting Sea, where he argues that Braduel established the Mediterranean as a frame of inquiry itself, as opposed to placing the Mediterranean within a broader frame. See as well Horden, “Mediterranean Excuses: Historical Writing on the Mediterranean since Braudel,” History and Anthropology, 16:1, 25–30. I agree in principle with a critique of Braduel, and the goal of Horden’s work blending together the different narratives across the ancient and medieval periods is admirable and even successful. However, the “reflexive realism” that forms the conceptual basis for the work ultimately joins Braudel in lacking analytical relevance in my attempt to bring the Mediterranean in line with a more global perspectives of the past.
- 19.
Paul Schroeder took this broad view with far greater acuity than I could hope to in his seminal Transformation of European Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
- 20.
David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
- 21.
I draw here from the work of Michael Broers, especially Napoleonic Imperialism and the Savoyard Monarchy, 1773–1821: State Building in Piedmont (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997). See also Stuart Woolf, A History of Italy 1700–1860: The Social Constraints of Political Change (London: Methuen & Co., 1979); and Greg Hanlon, Early Modern Italy, 1550–1800: Three Seasons of Change (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
- 22.
Francoise Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
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Meeks, J. (2017). Introduction. In: France, Britain, and the Struggle for the Revolutionary Western Mediterranean. War, Culture and Society, 1750-1850. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44078-1_1
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