Re-Imagining Democracy in the Mediterranean, 1780-1860

Joanna Innes was educated in Britain and the United States. She has taught at Somerville College, Oxford since 1982. Most of her work focusses on British government, society and culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her book Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain was published by Oxford University Press in 2009. Since 2004, she has co-organised with Mark Philp the 'Re-imagining Democracy' project, which explores changing ideas and practices associated with democracy in Europe and both Americas between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. A first volume originating in that project, focussing on America, France, Britain and Ireland, was published in 2013.

Mark Philp is professor of history and politics at the University of Warwick, and an Emeritus Fellow of Oriel College. He has worked extensively in the field of the history of political thought and late 18th and early 19th century European history, and on political corruption and realist political theory. His recent publications include Political Conduct (2007), Reforming Political Ideas in Britain: Politics and Language in the Shadow of the French Revolution (2013); and, with Joanna Innes eds., Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland 1750-1850 (2013).

Mediterranean states are often thought to have 'democratised' only in the post-war era, as authoritarian regimes were successively overthrown. On its eastern and southern shores, the process is still contested. Re-imagining Democracy looks back to an earlier era, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and argues it was this era when some modern version of 'democracy' in the region first began.

By the 1860s, representative regimes had been established throughout southern Europe, and representation was also the subject of experiment and debate in Ottoman territories. Talk of democracy, its merits and limitations, accompanied much of this experimentation - though there was no agreement as to whether or how it could be given stable political form.

Re-imagining Democracy assembles experts in the history of the Mediterranean, who have been exploring these themes collaboratively, to compare and contrast experiences in this region, so that they can be set alongside better-known debates and experiments in North Atlantic states. States in the region all experienced some form of subordination to northern 'great powers'. In this context, their inhabitants had to grapple with broader changes in ideas about state and society while struggling to achieve and maintain meaningful self-rule at the level of the polity, and self-respect at the level of culture.

Innes and Philip highlight new research and ideas about a region whose experiences during the 'age of revolutions' are at best patchily known and understood, as well as to expand understanding of the complex and variegated history of democracy as an idea and set of practices.

Re-imagining Democracy looks back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and argues this era marked the beginnings of modern democracy in the Mediterranean. These essays, from some of the leading scholars in the field, expose readers to new research and ideas regarding the complex and variegated history of democracy.