Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions, 1780-1860

ISBN-13: 9780198207559 / Angielski / Twarda / 2006 / 384 str.

John A. Davis

Opis

Naples and Napoleon rewrites the history of Italy in the age of the European revolutions from the perspective of the South. In contrast to later images of southern backwardness and immobility, Davis portrays the South as a precocious theatre for political and economic upheavals that sooner or later would challenge the survival of all the pre-Unification states. Focusing on the years of French rule from 1806 to 1815, when southern Italy became the arena for one of the most ambitious reform projects in Napoleonic Europe, Davis argues that this owed less to Napoleon than to the forces unleashed by the crisis of the Ancien Regime. However, an examination of the earlier Republic and the popular counter-revolutions of 1799, along with the later revolutions in Naples and Sicily in 1820-1, reveals that the impact of these changes was deeply contradictory.
This major reinterpretation of the history of the South before Unification significantly reshapes our understanding of how the Italian states came to be unified, while Davis also shows why long after Unification not just the South but Italy as a whole would remain vulnerable to the continuing challenges of the new age

Recenzje

[Davis] has set a benchmark for research on Naples, Napoleon, the Age of Revolutions, and the Southern Question for future generations of scholars to meet.

O autorze

John A. Davis studied modern history at Oxford and taught subsequently at the University of Warwick, where he was Director of the Centre for Social History. In 1992 he moved to the University of Connecticut, where he holds the Emiliana Pasca Noether Chair in Modern Italian History. With David Kertzer he founded the Journal of Modern Italian Studies in 1995, which they continue to edit jointly. Davis was awarded the British Academy Serena Medal in 1996 for his contributions to Italian history, and the Galileo Galilei Prize in 2000. He is a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and a Resident of the American Academy in Rome.