La Méditerranée solide: un espace double en construction

There exists a space of the ‘solid Mediterranean’. This concept was first proposed by the Annales’s co-founder Lucien Febvre in 1944–45, during a course on Europe in the longue durée. The flexible borders of this double space, both conceptual and contextual, remain in construction within the on-going and global reality of the solid Mediterranean’s space. The comparative history of European societies promoted during the interwar period by Marc Bloch, the other Annales founder, contributes to the construction of said space. Examining this space allows us to concretely articulate scales of analysis from the local to the global. The article is based on a comparative analysis of two Italian and Spanish cases that appear to be particular and paradigmatic (‘exceptional normal’, Edoardo Grendi) of – respectively – Italy’s so-called ‘southern question’ (questione meridionale) and the Spanish ‘agrarian question’ (cuestión agraria). Thus the article helps to conceptualize the space of the Méditerranée solide, marked by the complex and long-term Southern European question. The article compares Il Ministro della mala vita (The Minister of the Corruption, 1910) by historian Gaetano Salvemini and Del caciquismo trágico (On Tragical Caciquism, 1913) by republican journalist Pedro Torres. Through these ‘exceptionally normal’ case studies, taken together and explained reciprocally, it is possible to better understand the space of the solid Mediterranean. The social realities of the Spanish cuestión agraria and the Italian questione meridionale, as well as the conditions of local historiographical production on such realities are, indeed, a consubstantial part of the European transnational, global space of the ‘solid Mediterranean’.     

REFORM AND REVOLUTION IN SCANDINAVIA, 1917–1919

The articles in this special issue, entitled Reform and Revolution in Scandinavia, 1917–1919: Entangled Histories and Visions of the Future, deal with the political turmoil in Scandinavia in the late 1910s, accelerated by the First World War and the revolutions in Russia in February/March and October/November 1917 and eventually in Germany in the autumn of 1918. Their special focus is on the political debates about reform and revolution and the related visions of the future of political order and social structures in national contexts and across borders. The articles examine how actors with different agendas in different contexts exploited the opportunities opened up by a window of change. None of the Scandinavian countries were directly involved in the theatre of war, but the whole of Scandinavia was associated with the hostilities in many other ways. The revolutionary processes in Russia affected Finland directly but – reflecting the events spreading from Petrograd – the debates about the legitimacy of the established political order intensified in all Scandinavian countries. The articles demonstrate how the debates and political processes took diverse forms in varying national contexts but were often more dependent on international relations, transnationally interconnected and entangled, than has traditionally been recognized in nation-state-centred historiographies.     

Challenging intellectual hierarchies. Hegel in Risorgimento political thought: an introduction

ABSTRACT

The introduction to this special issue rethinks Italy’s liberal tradition and nineteenth-century Italian political thought in transnational perspective, with particular focus on the role of Italian Hegelianism during the emergence of the modern Italian nation state. Starting from an attempt to recast the transnational dimension of the Risorgimento, this co-authored article relates existing studies of Italian Hegelianism to wider trends in intellectual history elsewhere in Europe. Introducing the different contributions to this special issue, our approach challenges notions of centre and periphery in the history of intellectual flows, and helps to free the history of the Risorgimento from self-incurred exceptionalism.     

Transnational Constructors of Parliamentary Democracy in Swedish and Finnish Constitutional Controversies, 1917–1919

During the First World War, the legitimacy of established polities was challenged everywhere in Europe. Not only the combatant great powers but also smaller states witnessed a resurgence of constitutional disputes and competing ideological conceptualizations of revolution and reform, the will of the people, democracy, and parliamentarism. While these controversies primarily focused on the future of the national polities concerned, historical experiences and discourses accelerated by the war and the Russian Revolution were transnationally interconnected and contributed to discursive transfers between political cultures. Swedish and Finnish socialists were linked by their internationals, liberals were connected by transnational debates for and against ‘Western’ democracy and parliamentarism, and conservative politicians and academics were involved in ideologically oriented networks. This article reconstructs transnational links and discourses in order to understand the exceptionally confrontational dynamics (which, in Finland, partly led to a civil war) and the outcomes of the Swedish and Finnish constitutional debates in 1917–1919. It examines the nature of the transnational connections of eight Swedish and Finnish conservatives, liberals, revisionist socialists, and far-Left socialists, analysing their argumentation on constitutional questions in published works and parliamentary speeches as illustrative examples of the political groups they represented.     

The history of modern and contemporary Italy: Made in France (from the late 1970s to the late 1990s)

Abstract

Over the past three centuries Italy has been the focus of numerous studies by French historians, who have taken advantage of the great wealth of sources available there. While no new synthesis has yet been achieved, we can identify certain main lines of development in French historiography. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s international relations and, especially, the relations between France and Italy were given the greatest attention, before a new focus on forms of sociability and political pedagogy began to be more common. However, the shifting of focus of historical studies to the centres of political decision making often coincided with less attention being paid to social stratification. Beyond these major themes, some researchers have reconstructed ‘global’ historical models, which have been characteristic of the renewal of post‐war French historiography.     

SOCIALIST COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES AND THE SPRING OF 1917

The Russian Revolution of 1917 presented Swedish Social Democrats with a dilemma: how could they use the transnational revolutionary momentum to further universal suffrage, without supporting actions possibly leading to violence? In striking this balance, the use of communications was central. This article uses the concept of the media system to analyse the communicative practices and strategies developed by the Party in the early 20th century, and how these were employed between 1915 and 1917, in relation to the hunger marches and revolutionary pressures. The study shows that the Party had established conscious agitation strategies and an elaborate national communication structure, which enabled coordinated opinion activities. As early as 1915, the Party began using these tools to initiate a national opinion movement concerning the food situation. In 1917, faced with the combination of events in Russia and erupting hunger marches, the Party leadership chose to emphasize security and stability, focusing on events the Party could control, such as the 1 May demonstrations. The resulting development of revolutionary opinion in Sweden during the spring of 1917 and the ensuing political changes reflected conscious media management strategies by the Left, who used the media system to navigate and shape a transnational revolutionary moment.     

Women's history in Italy (nineteenth and twentieth centuries)

This essay surveys the development of women's history in Italy since its origins, examining the principal questions that have driven research and debate from the 1960s to the present, the ways in which women's history in other countries (notably the US) has been influential in Italy, the impact of women's history on other branches of historical research in Italy and its place — or rather lack of place ‐ in Italian universities.     

A new military history of the Italian Risorgimento and Anti-Risorgimento: the case of ‘transnational soldiers’

The article discusses new studies of foreign soldiers in the Italian armed groups of the (Anti-)Risorgimento against the background of recent scholarship on ‘transnational soldiers’, which acknowledges the complexities of foreigners' initial motives for enlistment and of the transnational processes inside the single armies. The article suggests that from the mundane structures of military life to the perceptions of the rank-and-file, many aspects of the soldiering experience in the multinational armed groups on all sides of the Risorgimento actually advanced rather than obviated national boundaries. This paper further demonstrates that the military cultures of the nationalists and the anti-unity forces were much more porous and mutually constitutive than is often recognised. The histories of the ‘transnational soldiers’ in the armed groups of the Risorgimento and Anti-Risorgimento are crucial for a possibly new, comparative history of the armed groups of the (Anti-)Risorigmento. This paper explores approaches of the culturally revived ‘new military history’ and suggests that it provides much still unrealised potential for Risorgimento historiography.     

Natural encounters: climate,weather and the Italian Renaissance

This paper examines a key issue in the history of the climate in the pre-instrumental period, that is, how to use narrative sources which make frequent references to weather events, but which need contextualised interpretation. The paper follows an argument that climatological techniques for deriving temperature indices from chronicles, though they have become increasingly elaborate and refined, nevertheless leave out much that is of interest to the social historian. This paper explores the area of the what-is-left-behind when chronicle narratives are reduced to numerical indices. Investigating a broad range of Latin and Italian chronicles from fourteenth and fifteenth-century Italy, the paper draws three main conclusions: that sensitivity to weather events not only varied greatly among writers (as one might expect) but so too did their use of severe weather to serve the purposes of narrative (through sequencing, metaphor and analogy); that sensitivity to meteorological anomaly changed during the period, especially in the fifteenth century with the spread of prognosticating verses; and that the broadening of chroniclers' interests in weather, both ordinary and extraordinary, and in its effects on everyday, material life may allow a connection to and re-evaluation of the Burckhartian idea of the Renaissance ‘discovery of the world’.     

中国对瑞典国最早的全面记述——述清末写本《瑞典国记略》之历史由来

本文从中国对瑞典认识和记述的历史这一角度,介绍并论述了作者收藏的孤本书籍《瑞典国记略》。文章指出,迄至清朝末年,中国对瑞典的认识经历了如下六个阶段:第一阶段,从明末到清代康熙中期。通过西洋传教士的介绍,对瑞典开始有初步的了解。第二阶段,从康熙晚期到道光初年。主要是清朝官方和个别出洋商人,通过出使他国偶然接触到的瑞典国民并向所在国探问相关情况;或是与瑞典来华商船的直接接触;或是海外经商听闻的间接传说,对瑞典有了中国人自己的记述。第三阶段,道光二十年鸦片战争爆发前短暂的若千年期间。西洋传教士开始重新向中国介绍包括瑞典国在内的世界地理知识。第四阶段,从鸦片战争之后到同治四年。在中国人自己撰述的全球地理总志中,对瑞典有了更为丰富和清晰的记述。第五阶段,从同治六年到光绪中期。留下了一批中国人考察游历瑞典的日记,对瑞典的认识变得非常具体明晰,但还很不系统。第六阶段,光绪中期至清王朝结束。《瑞典国记略》就是这一时期的标志性著述,它是中国对瑞典最早的全面系统的记述。这部书虽然没有在社会上正式刊布,但在中国认识瑞典的历史上,仍具有里程碑式意义。     

Italian religious historiography in the 1990s

Abstract

This article examines Italian religious historiography of the past decade, taking into account the difficulty of this national limitation, given the increasingly frequent arid profitable exchanges among the diverse European traditions. The review first examines some general works and then focuses on certain themes that mark the historiographical trends: ecclesiastical institutions, with particular reference to the period of the Reformation and the Counter‐Reformation; religious complexity, with special reference to heterodox movements, to Jewish culture and to the Islamic presence; and people's religious experiences, with particular emphasis on those of women, in their interaction with both cultural production and social history.     

Doctoral dissertations in human geography from Swedish universities 1884–2015: demographics,formats and productivity

The doctoral dissertation is a key component of postgraduate education that plays an important role for knowledge production and hence the development of a discipline. Swedish human geography currently lacks an overview of dissertations. This article fills this knowledge gap by reporting findings from a unique database covering all doctoral dissertations between 1884 and 2015. The paper focuses on the demographics of the authors (age, gender), the format of the dissertation and explores productivity variations for authors of compilation dissertations. The findings show a notable increase in the number of doctoral dissertations since the late 1960s but a decreasing share of doctoral dissertations in the social sciences since the 1970s. In terms of demographics, we show that while the age of the authors remains relatively stable, the gender-balance has improved considerably. In terms of format, the monograph has rapidly given way to compilation dissertations, which now account for half the number of dissertations. More than 70% of all dissertations are now published in English. Statistical results suggest that the likelihood of completing a compilation dissertation is greater if the doctoral candidate is young and if attending Umeå University. But individual author productivity for compilation dissertations is mainly influenced by unobservables.     

YOUNG ACTIVISTS IN MUDDY BOOTS

The Swedish youth organization Fältbiologerna was founded in 1947 with the mission to inspire learning about nature through outdoor activities. Since then, the members have stayed true to their slogan ‘keep your boots muddy’ through engaging in bird watching and forest excursions; however, in the late 1960s and early 1970s – a period that environmental historians refer to as the ‘ecological turn’ – the organization’s activities were extended to also include political activism. Fältbiologerna increasingly evolved into a fertile terrain for young environmentalists. In this article, we explore how this Swedish branch of modern environmental youth activism came about. Based on a close reading of the members’ journal, Fältbiologen, between 1959 and 1974, we identify four key characteristics that were communicated in the journal during the years of study: adventurous, knowledgeable, influential, and radical. We demonstrate that Fältbiologerna took an increasingly radical position and began to engage in environmental debates and actions, while still holding on to ideals of learning through spending time in nature. Participation in these different activities shaped the young members into environmentalists.