Re-Mapping Centre and Periphery Re-Mapping Centre and Periphery Asymmetrical Encounters in European and Global Contexts Edited by Tessa Hauswedell, Axel Körner and Ulrich Tiedau First published in 2019 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press Text © Authors, 2019 Images © Authors and copyright holders named in captions, 2019 The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as authors of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International licensee (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Hauswedell, T., Körner, A., Tiedau, U. Re-Mapping Centre and Periphery: Asymmetri- cal Encounters in European and Global Contexts. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/ 10.14324/111.9781787350991 Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at http://creativecom- mons.org/licenses/ ISBN: 978–1-78735–101-1 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978–1-78735–100-4 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978–1-78735–099-1 (PDF) ISBN: 978–1-78735–102-8 (epub) ISBN: 978–1-78735–103-5 (mobi) ISBN: 978–1-78735–104-2 (html) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787350991 Contents 1. Space and Asymmetric Difference in Historical Perspective: An Introduction 1 Axel Körner Part I: Concepts 15 2. Rethinking Centre and Periphery in Historical Analysis: Land-based Modernization as an Alternative Model from the Peripheries 17 Marta Petrusewicz 3. Europe and the Concept of Margin 27 Jan Ifversen 4. After Identity: Mentalities, European Asymmetries and the Digital Turn 44 Joris van Eijnatten Part II: Globalizing Peripheries 61 5. From the Baltic to the Pacific: Trade, Shipping and Exploration on the Shores of the Russian Empire 63 Michael North 6. Republics of Knowledge: Interpreting the World from Latin America 77 Nicola Miller 7. From Manchester and Lille to the World: Nineteenth-century Provincial Cities Conceptualize their Place in the Global Order 94 Harry Stopes v Part III: Ideas and Commodities in Motion 109 8. Turning Constitutional History Upside Down: The 1820s Revolutions in the Mediterranean 111 Jens Späth 9. The Cosmopolitan Morphology of the National Discourse: Italy as a European Centre of Intellectual Modernity 135 Alessandro de Arcangelis 10. ‘The Greatest City the World has Ever Seen’: London’s Imperial and European Contexts in British Public Debates, 1870–1900 155 Tessa Hauswedell 11. Mediating Hybrids: Consumption and Transnationality 176 Hermione Giffard 12. Re-Mapping Centre and Periphery: Concluding Thoughts 188 Ulrich Tiedau List of Figures 191 Notes on Contributors 193 Index 197 vi CONTENTS 1 Space and Asymmetric Difference in Historical Perspective : An Introduction Axel Körner In 1851 the Italian philosopher and statesman Vincenzo Gioberti, argu- ably Italy’s most influential political thinker at the time and a former Prime Minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, self-confidently described England as ‘the Sicily of Europe’: an oceanic island in the continent’s northern periphery, whose connection to Europe was allegedly on a par with Sici- ly’s relationship to the Italian peninsula.1 While from an economic point of view, or within a global perspective, Gioberti’s description certainly did not correspond to the ways in which the British people perceived their own position in the world, the Italian thinker used the comparison to explain Europe’s political and cultural heterogeneity, including dif- ferences between institutions and constitutional developments. For the famous philosopher, there was not only one way of representing Europe’s core, not only one way of being modern.2 Convinced of Italy’s primacy in Europe, an argument based on the country’s cultural and religious legacy as a Mediterranean civilization, Gioberti rejected the idea that Italy had to be taught lessons by seemingly more developed countries. Instead, for Gioberti, political, constitutional or economic institutions had to reflect local and historical conditions.3 While Gioberti used England’s alleged marginality as a relational description to speak about the Italian states prior to their political uni- fication, from today’s perspective recent political developments seem to confirm Gioberti’s assessment of Britain’s position in Europe. Also today, this position depends less on objective facts than on discursive strate- gies, in this case on developments of Britain’s own making. During the campaign leading to the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union in June 2016, the country’s position within the EU was 1 instrumentalized to negotiate and contest a broad range of social, polit- ical and cultural conflicts at home, many of which were only indirectly affected by EU policies. Both examples – Gioberti’s idea of Italy’s primacy as well as Britain’s marginality within Europe – show how discursive con- structions of spatial differences between centre and periphery depend on subjective viewpoints that then serve as instruments in politics. As rela- tional terms these differences construct selves as well as others, based on constantly shifting economic, political or cultural contexts. The semantic content of such notions is determined by transnational exchanges, where a range of different parameters is amalgamated to suit subjective discur- sive interests. This book examines cultural, intellectual and economic exchanges in order to assess how these contribute to the construction of spatial hierarchies. While goods are usually exchanged in two directions, with regard to knowledge historians often assume a one-directional transmis- sion, which is then used to establish an intellectual or political order that assigns particular spaces to positions of either core or periphery. We can identify a typical example of this approach in the field of transatlantic con- stitutional history, where, for instance, the global impact of the American constitution – and consequently the United States’ primacy in the world – is discussed without taking into consideration how republican or federal concepts that originated in European political thought related to the emergence of the United States’ political institutions.4 Taking a different, more critical approach, David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have underlined how the cultural and political experiences of many different peoples and nations have contributed to the American constitution’s emancipatory potential.5 One-directional examinations of constitutional flows tend to undermine the creative force associated with the amalga- mation of ideas into local knowledge and practices. At times this process of amalgamation might turn into what the semiotician Umberto Eco has called ‘aberrant decoding’, where interpretations share close to nothing with the original author’s intentions.6 Providing an example for spatial hierarchies from another context of historical analysis, the musicologist Anselm Gerhard has demon- strated the relative insignificance of geographical and/or political crite- ria for notions of centre and periphery in the development of European art music.7 For the long period from the fourteenth to the first half of the nineteenth century, Italy, and Southern Italy in particular, occupied a prime position in European music, largely a consequence of its institu- tions of cultural representation related to the life of its numerous splen- did courts. Meanwhile, a city like Prague, in the geographical centre of 2 RE-MAPPING CENTRE AND PERIPHERY Europe, and since the Middle Ages a major imperial residence of the Luxemburgs and then the Habsburgs, created a significant international reputation as a centre of musical activity from the mid-eighteenth cen- tury only, symbolized by the original productions of two of Mozart’s great late operas, Don Giovanni (1787) and La clemenza di Tito (1791). It was on the basis of this reputation that the city was subsequently able to attract young conductors and composers like Carl Maria von Weber (from 1813) and Gustav Mahler (from 1885) to lead its orchestras. In recent decades, transnational and global history have con- tributed to a more inclusive understanding of intellectual and cultural exchanges, challenging the ways in which we tend to assign positions of centre and periphery on our mental maps. For instance, Christopher A. Bayly has demonstrated how India’s liberal tradition helped to transform ideas received from progressive Western thinkers in order to challenge imperial relationships.8 During the nineteenth century the number of people affected by similar examples of global exchanges increased, as did the speed at which such connections were established. Meanwhile, chal- lenges arising from globalization that subsequently impacted on existing spatial hierarchies were not a new experience in the nineteenth century.9 As Michael North has argued, during the Middle Ages, from the twelfth century onwards, new commercial connections transformed a vast space from the Mediterranean via the Arabian Sea to the Indian Ocean into a single maritime network.10 This development had dramatic consequences for the ways in which Europeans, as well as particular countries within Europe, positioned themselves within global