Re-imagining democracy in the Mediterranean 1750-1860
Re-imagining democracy in the Mediterranean is an international research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust and directed by Joanna Innes (Oxford) with Mark Philp (Warwick), Maurizio Isabella (Queen Mary) and Eduardo Posada Carbo (Oxford) as the Advisory Board.
Partner Institutions:
- Institut d’Histoire Modern et Contemporaine, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France
- Political Science Department, University of Pisa, Italy
- Casa de Velazquez, Madrid, Spain
- Centro de Estudos de História Contemporânea Portuguesa, Lisbon
- Institute for Neohellenic Research, Athens, Greece
- Blinken European Institute, Columbia University, New York, USA
Re-imagining democracy in the Mediterranean is part of a larger programme of research on the re-imagining of democracy, whose first results were published in June 2013 in Joanna Innes and Mark Philp, eds., Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain and Ireland
For the next phase of the project starting in 2016 see Re-imagining Democracy: the Wider Project – Latin America and the Caribbean
This projects sets out to examine the ways in which the language of democracy, and cognate terms and correlated concepts and practices, developed in the countries of the Mediterranean between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries.
As can be seen from this ngram, the patterns of use of the central term differ dramatically French, Spanish and Italian – providing a striking illustration of the extent to which, for all the eventual apparent convergence, the language was something that developed locally, differently, and in response to distinct events and pressures within these countries. And it is precisely this variety, and these distinctive trajectories and their associated practices and institutional developments that we are concerned to map.
Re-imagining Democracy 