The experience of exiles was fundamental for shaping Italian national identity. Risorgimento in Exile investigates the contribution to Italian nationalism made by the numerous patriots who were forced to live in exile following failed revolutions in the Italian states.
Examining the writings of such exiles, Maurizio Isabella challenges recent historiography regarding the lack of genuine liberal culture in the Risorgimento. He argues that these 'emigres' involvement in debates with British, continental, and American intellectuals points to the emergence of Liberalism and Romanticism as international ideologies shared by a community of patriots that stretched from Europe to Latin America.
Risorgimento in Exile represents the first effort to place Italian patriotism in a broad international framework, revealing the importance and originality of the Italian contribution to European Anglophilia and Philhellenism, and to transatlantic debates on federalism. In doing so, it demonstrates that the Risorgimento first developed as a variation upon such global trends.
Industry Reviews
This is a truly global history of the early nineteenth century, which brings together events in Italy, Greece, northwestern Europe and Latin America in a completely novel way * Christopher Bayly, University of Cambridge *
This is an impressive case study of the intellectual development of Italian exiles in the period 1815-35, ambitiously placing them in a transnational, even world context. In the field of Risorgimento history, it breaks new ground in reassessing pre-Mazzini activism and its impact on later generations. In the field of post-Napoleonic Europe, it provides a methodology for exploring diverse aspects of the anti-Metternich discourse and how those strands were intertwined together: it will be essential reading for historians of this period. Based on an impressive command of sources in French and Spanish (as well as the author's native Italian) the work also has a broader resonance for any historian wishing to consider transnational intellectual currents, their possibilities and limits, and even offers lessons for the present-day European Union. The quality of writing and the breadth of research in this work make it a real scholarly achievement. * Gladstone Prize Committee *
A book of originality and depth. In a meticulously researched and argued study, Isabella shows how international in reach the Risorgimento was and the extent to which political ideas about the nation were formed in a constant conversation between foreigners and Italians, between exiles from Italy and intellectuals in their host countries. In the process, he offers us a more positive view of the Risorgimento than the one often advanced * Lucy Riall, Times Literary Supplement *
Isabella's analytical approach to the intersecting histories of exile, liberalism, and nationalism offers valuable new insights into the transnational exchanges and conflicts that shaped influential strands of early nineteenth-century Italian thought * American Historical Review *
What emerges is the European and modern face of the Risorgimento as an integral part of the great ideological and political currents of the time ... thus it transpires that the ultimate, specifically liberal outcome of the Risorgimento has deeper roots than had been thought ... a serious and important book, written with both passion and thoughtful conviction * Giuseppe Galasso, Corriere della Sera *
Isabella offers us a serious, provocative, and bold book that challenges the received notions about nineteenth-century nationalism and the sites of national identity making * Marta Petrusewicz, The Journal of Modern History *
Isabella has written a complex and challenging volume on the development of liberalism ... It ranks as an important study of liberalism as an emerging European ideology in the post-Napoleonic era * Frederick Rosen, Journal of Utilitas *
Historians, scholars in comparative politics, and political theorists ... will find Risorgimento in Exile a compelling intellectual history and case study with ranging application in the study of revolutionary liberalism and transnational systems * Nations and Nationalism *
An important contribution to a growing historiography engaged with rethinking Italian modernity ... Broadly conceived, Isabella furnishes a sort of genealogy of nineteenth-century liberalism and nationalism; more particularly, he offers a view of the Italian participation in this process and insists that the earliest Risorgimento thinkers generated a dialectical synthesis of both Enlightenment and Romantic thought * Journal of Modern Italian Studies *
This important and tightly argued book ... is a welcome addition to a growing body of historiography that is rewriting the history of the Risorgimento ... A feat that is rarely found in first books * Silvana Patriarca, Storia del pensiero economico *
By illustrating at planetary level its cosmopolitan dimension, the book succeeds in locating the events of the Italian Risorgimento at an international level. By so doing, through the individual histories of those who had to leave the peninsula, it contributes to retrieving the complexity of the network of individual bonds and the exchange of ideas associated with the construction of the project of national unification * Patrizia Audenino, www.altreitalie.it *
A convincing and passionate work of historiography * Historical Journal *
An essential work to understand the great political and ideological currents as well as the construction of national identities of the nineteenth century * Laboratoire Italien *
