This volume investigates competing ideas, images, and stereotypes of a European ‘East’, exploring its role in defining European and national conceptions of self and other since the eighteenth century.

Global Perspectives in Modern Italian Culture presents a series of unexplored case studies from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, each demonstrating how travellers, scientists, Catholic missionaries, scholars and diplomats contributed to understandings of various global issues during the age of early globalization.

The book is an analysis of the political thought of English radical Thomas Spence (1750–1814). Spence is here shown to be a sophisticated, modern thinker, who adopted the poor "swinish multitude" as the privileged interlocutor of his transnational "Plan" for the abolition of private landownership.