Sovereignty in a Sea of Empires

• Department of History

Lecture by Giuseppe Grieco (City, University of London) in the framework of the EUI Intellectual History Working Group.

This paper offers an intellectual history of the interaction between the Two Sicilies and empires in the central Mediterranean in the age of revolutions. By taking the Two Sicilies as its starting point, this paper will bring to light until now neglected Southern currents of cosmopolitan and anti-imperial international thought. These visions reveal the faith of Southern thinkers in the progress of the Two Sicilies and in its ability to compete in a world dominated by great powers and empires.

The central Mediterranean represented a semi-colonial and inter-imperial site in between the European states-system and the colonial world. Focus on this liminal space demonstrates the existence of types of imperial rule beyond colonialism at the margins of Europe. Moreover, it unveils hitherto unknown intellectual efforts to recast the international legal and economic order upon principles of justice and inclusivity toward lesser polities.

In the early nineteenth-century, empires eroded Duo-Sicilian sovereignty, and pushed the kingdom to the margins of the international system, as they did with extra-European regions. In this context, Duo-Sicilian thinkers developed new theories of political economy and international law to defend the sovereignty of the kingdom, challenge imperial hierarchies, and contest double-standards in international relations. Neapolitan and Sicilian thinkers reimagined the Mediterranean as a cosmopolitan space where industrial progress, commerce, and maritime law would promote equity among peoples, and challenge the existing imperial foundations of global order. They reinvented international law as an emancipatory project that denounced colonialism and legal Orientalism, while advocating a just global order in which lesser states could prosper among empires.

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