Unintended Nations : France's Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe, and the Post-Napoleonic World (Mcgill-queen's Studies in the History of Ideas)

Tipei, Alex R.

McGill-Queen's University Press（2025/08発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 360 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9780228024583
• DDC分類 944.06

Full Description

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.