Fighting the Risorgimento: foreign volunteers in southern Italy (1860–63)

Abstract

Between 1860 and 1863 hundreds of men from all over Europe volunteered for service in the wars of southern ‘brigands’ on behalf of the exiled King Francis II of Naples. In an attempt to correct the often biased interpretation of this involvement (that was attributed simply to a thirst for adventure, romanticism or even psychological disorder) that coloured the accounts by Italian patriots, this essay suggests the need for fresh consideration. It develops three lines of inquiry that focus respectively on the strong impact of Italian Unification on conservative and Catholic opinion and the ways in which these sources portrayed the struggles of the southern insurgents, the clumsy efforts made by the Neapolitan government-in-exile to recruit volunteers and organize armed expeditions against the former kingdom, and the so-called ‘white international’ in which the warriors of the counter-revolution were depicted as combatants in conflicts that were both civil wars and at the same time episodes in a much longer international ideological struggle. In this context, the significance of foreign involvement in defence of the Neapolitan Bourbons takes on a significance that goes far beyond its poor military outcome.     

Suburban Identity in Paul Maitland's Paintings of Cheyne Walk

The aim of this article is to consider the extent to which Paul Maitland's paintings of Cheyne Walk addressed the problem of establishing suburban identity at the end of the nineteenth century. The emergence of the modern suburb during this period presented a particular problem with regard to how this form of urban living might be defined, understood and experienced. As part of a group of artists that could loosely by described as British Impressionists, Maitland was among the first to engage in a close study of this subject. This article situates Maitland's visual project within its wider cultural context, comparing his work with that of associated artists also interested in the suburban subject and in Cheyne Walk in particular and with a range of contemporary texts that addressed the complex problem of Chelsea's place identity, including guidebooks, letters, novels and the work of local historians. Drawing on the methodology of cultural and historical geography, this article highlights the extent to which place identity changes through time and how its formulation is based upon the economic and social structures of those who ‘live’ the place. Adopting and elaborating a range of visual signifiers associated with the modern suburb, including both its rural and working aspect, Maitland's paintings of Cheyne Walk provide a valuable and subtle insight into how this new urban space was being conceptualized at the end of the nineteenth century.     

Social Notes: Oscar Wilde,Francis Bacon,and the Medium of Aphorism

This paper reads Oscar Wilde's aphoristic style in terms of the note-taking practices he develops as an undergraduate at Oxford. It treats his use of small, mobile pieces of language as a strategy for dealing with methodological uncertainty in a time of curricular upheaval. His trademark style is perhaps best understood as a form of social notation, whereby pieces of information behave as actors seeking sociality and recombination, rather than placement in systematic arrangements. One significant unpublished source – the ‘Notebook on Philosophy’ – discloses Wilde's engagement with a surprising aphoristic precursor, Francis Bacon, who deploys the form for similar purposes. In modelling a form of non-teleological informational assembly, Wilde's notebooks also body forth the utopian social life he conceives in his later critical writings.     

Development Reconsidered; New Directions in Development Thinking

This paper offers broad and critical perspectives on current development thinking. A brief summary of different meanings of development and a thumbnail sketch of broad trends over the past twenty to thirty years in relation to major development indicators is followed by a discussion of reasons for the emergence of fundamental critiques of conventional development and developmentalism from perspectives known variously as post-structuralist, post-development and anti-development. Connections are made between these and the literatures on post-modernism, postcolonialism and post-traditionalism. Finally, the implications of these rapid paradigm shifts and changing realities for future research, teaching and action across the South/North divide are considered.     

Legislation and politics in late Carolingian Italy: the Ravenna constitutions

This article considers some overlooked evidence for royal legislation in the dying days of the Carolingian empire, a series of charters known as the Ravenna constitutions. These documents, which deal with the status of Italian freemen, are often analysed as sources for social history but rarely as texts in their own right. Reconstructing the context in which the charters were issued enables us to cast light on political events and royal self‐representation in early 880s Italy; and by drawing attention to the peculiarities of their form, we can use them to reflect more broadly on the nature of Carolingian capitulary legislation and the meaning of its disappearance at the end of the ninth century.