I am extremely grateful to the Annales for providing this opportunity to discuss my work in such a prestigious forum. I feel immensely privileged that such a distinguished group of historians have taken the time to engage with my ideas so carefully, generously, and perceptively, making a number of important points and raising broader questions about methodology and about the age of revolutions. The contributions of Lucy Riall, Juan Luis Simal, Sakis Gekas, and Pieter M. Judson focus on the relationship between southern Europe and its global revolutionary context, and more generally on the place of the uprisings that took place over the 1820s in Portugal, Spain, the Italian peninsula, Sicily, and Greece in the chronology of the age of revolutions. They also interrogate the usefulness of the category of “South” (Riall and Simal), the place that the Greek revolution, arguably the most eccentric of this wave, holds vis-à-vis the others (especially Gekas), and finally the nature of popular politicization in the countries undergoing revolution (Gekas, Judson, and Riall). Therefore, most of their comments, directly or indirectly, relate to space as a category of analysis and as a historical problem.

My decision, in the introduction to Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions, to place southern Europe in a global revolutionary context, and specifically a Southern one, was intended precisely to suggest the possibility and indeed desirability of understanding these movements within a larger space, even if I did not go on to analyze such a space in the body of the book.Footnote ¹ As Simal remarks, I could have elaborated further on such connections and entanglements. What I was seeking to highlight was the territorial nature of these upheavals, which took place in a shared space that brought together revolutionary events in the Ibero-American world, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and in the Ottoman Empire. In all these empires and states alike, territories reclaimed their autonomy and challenged existing internal and external political boundaries. But in the 1820s multiple connections existed between southern Europe, the Mediterranean, the Ibero-Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. These stemmed, first of all, from the circulation of mercenaries, freedom fighters, diplomats, and imperial agents between the Mediterranean and the Black and Red Seas, and between these seas and the oceans beyond. Volunteers moved from Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Naples to Latin America.Footnote ² The British imperial officers in the Mediterranean I discuss in my book belonged to a larger network. Thomas Cochrane commanded revolutionary fleets in Chile and Brazil as well as in Greece. Other British imperial agents moved between the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean, testing or adopting similar policies. Lord William Bentinck worked in both Sicily and Bengal, Sir Thomas Maitland served as an imperial official in Saint-Domingue, Ceylon, Malta, and the Ionian Islands, and Leicester Stanhope was at once committed to the reform of the British Empire and an influential philhellene.

Second, the circulation of news from southern Europe to the rest of the world points to the broadening of the public sphere across the various continents. Events in southern Europe were discussed not only in France and Britain but also in Latin America, North America, and Asia, where revolutionaries and reformers interpreted them in light of their own political agendas. The Greek revolution had a real global resonance.Footnote ³ In Latin American and Indian cities alike, journalists, clerics, military officers, reformers, priests, and civil servants organized banquets in honor of Greek independence and the Neapolitan and Portuguese revolutions. Southern European events were covered both in newly independent South American republics like Colombia and in the reformist press of British India, including in the Calcutta Journal of Politics and General Literature. In India, the appeal of Portuguese, Spanish, and Neapolitan events stemmed from the “absence of bloodshed, despite the radical nature of the reforms.”Footnote ⁴ Although historians rarely consider them within their global and imperial frameworks, revolutions broke out in the Asian dependencies of Portugal and Spain, Goa and the Philippines, where newspapers reported on events taking place in both Europe and the Americas.Footnote ⁵ My adoption of the term “global revolutionary South” therefore aimed to highlight that in the 1820s the revolutionary initiative did not belong to the North Atlantic, but to an alternative space. This admittedly ahistorical designation was not meant to signal an explicitly postcolonial methodological stance, but simply to point to the revolutionary space south of, and beyond, the North Atlantic, one that in different ways was responding and reacting to a geopolitical context influenced by the imperial powers formally or informally exerting their authority over Portugal, Spain, the Italian peninsula, and the Ottoman Empire, but also over Latin America and Asia.Footnote ⁶

All spatial scales obviously offer advantages and disadvantages. While I did want to move beyond the national, I do not believe that the geographical unit I chose was the only one possible. In fact, several alternative scales could be adopted for each of these revolutions. Spain, Portugal, and Greece, for instance, might effectively be considered within their imperial frameworks (already partially explored by other historians). A focus on bilateral relations between two specific revolutionary spaces would also be useful: Portuguese and Spanish, Spanish and Italian, Italian and Greek. I did think, however, that the scale of southern Europe offered particular advantages, and was justified for one important reason: this geographical perspective was the one adopted by contemporary actors themselves. Judson, Riall, and Simal rightly argue that the “European periphery,” a term I use myself, is a problematic category that collapses in the face of the revolutionary moments I discuss. As Judson notes, my approach and the evidence I provide in fact end up “de-peripheralizing” a key region of Europe. It was however an implicit assumption of the protagonists and contemporaries of these events that they belonged to a space which, due to the despotism of its institutions, lagged behind northern European countries in terms of progress. The perceived weakness of their countries’ position also stemmed from the fact that the south had been subjected to conquest, invasion, and political control by those same northern powers. At the same time, the revolutionaries of the 1820s proudly proclaimed that their countries were finally at the forefront of the struggle for liberty, and thereby historically redefined themselves as a vanguard in light of their own revolutionary initiative. Crucially, they did so by defining themselves as a South opposed to a powerful, oppressive European North. I elaborate on their use of this category in my book, an analysis bolstered by Simal in his own piece with more references to the writings of the period.

Revolutionaries in Portugal, Spain, Piedmont, Naples, and Sicily thus viewed precisely the space extending from Portugal to Greece as a South, as did many who celebrated these events in France and Britain. Admittedly, the exact boundaries of this space could fluctuate. The Greeks rejected the label, seeking to distance themselves for political and diplomatic reasons, and looking to gain the support of powers hostile to the events unfolding in parallel to the west of their own revolution. The 1825 Decembrist revolt in Saint Petersburg was undoubtedly connected to these events, even though for most southern revolutionaries it did not belong to their own wave of uprisings. In terms of the revolutionary imaginary, however, Russia was very much part of the same revolutionary space. It was evoked, feared, and called on to intervene in favor or against these movements by revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries alike, and dominated the rumors and false reports that spread from Portugal to the eastern Mediterranean. I will elaborate further below on the importance of Russia.

It was first and foremost the awareness of these other revolutionary events unfolding almost simultaneously, and in particular of their first steps, that enabled contemporaries to develop the notion of a regeneration of the South. This does not mean that they thought they were replicating a single revolutionary model thanks to the serial reproduction of texts and events.Footnote ⁷ Rather, what I have argued in my book is that each movement developed its own “revolutionary script” independently, but did so by relating it to the others. According to Keith Baker and Dan Edelstein’s influential model, a revolutionary script is a set of practices and narratives employed to justify, enact, and accomplish a revolution in relation to previous revolutionary events. While Baker and Edelstein highlight the diachronic nature of these scripts, affirming that revolutions were always defined in relation to earlier ones, I would argue that in the 1820s the synchronic dimension was just as important as the diachronic one. Insurgent army officers in Portugal, Spain, Piedmont, Naples, and the Ottoman Principalities declared revolution in front of public audiences not only by rejecting the French revolution and by recalling their national struggles against Napoleon. They also justified their revolutionary acts with reference to other officers such as Rafael del Riego in Spain, or by citing the deeds of military leaders in other southern countries at the same moment. They all conceived of their revolutions as national but fundamentally peaceful insurrections that did not pose a threat to the international order. Among Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian insurgents this loosely shared revolutionary script emerged through the circulation of rumors, manifestos, and news.Footnote ⁸

The protagonists’ relational understanding of their own insurrections represents just one of the ways these events were connected to each other. Commercial routes and migratory patterns between existing diasporic communities, along with the circulation of constitutional texts, news, refugees, and volunteers created a dense web of connections, some of which predated the revolutions and belonged to early modern patterns of mobility only partly reshaped by the upheavals, and some of which were entirely new.Footnote ⁹ An effective metaphor to describe the connections and exchanges that spread from Portugal to the eastern Mediterranean is that of a set of overlapping concentric circles. In some areas there was a higher number of circles, which overlapped with some but not all of those existing across southern Europe. So, for instance, direct relations between the eastern Mediterranean and Portugal were scant. The geographical spaces where such concentric circles overlapped more tightly were the Iberian peninsula (the multiple interactions between Spain and Portugal via their territorial border and maritime exchanges), the space between the Italian peninsula and Spain, and that between the Italian peninsula and the eastern Mediterranean. In my book I chose Sicily and Palermo as a point of departure to reconstruct mobilities across the sea precisely because the island connected revolutions in both the eastern and the western Mediterranean. In so doing, as Riall has noted, I have not always adopted a micro-global approach, with its emphasis on small spaces interlinked over long distances. I have found this approach useful only in a few instances, when discussing the way in which music and public manifestos traveled to be consumed by different audiences in different contexts and places, from churches to theaters.

In fact, most of the small spaces I discuss were not connected with one another at all. What the small scale I use throughout my book makes possible is primarily an analysis of local responses to shared practices (elections, petitions, demonstrations, etc.) and shared experiences (war, violence, civil war, foreign invasion, etc.). It is this level of analysis that, as Judson has observed, enabled me to look at state-building as a process happening at the grassroots level. My close focus on participation and politicization also offered a way to bring together, and compare, the Greek revolution with other movements taking place at the same moment. Gekas has focused on my interpretation of the way in which Greek patterns diverged from or converged with those of the other revolutions. While I do not deny that the particular context of the Greek case (imperial, diasporic, multi-faith, multilingual) distinguished it from the others, I have sought to look at it in a different light from conventional narratives, which tend to assume its uniqueness. In general, historiography (and especially the Greek tradition) still makes a sharp distinction between this revolution, described as a national movement that achieved independence, and the others, which were constitutional and monarchical. The Greek revolution therefore tends to be considered in terms of its final end point, emancipation, either celebrated as an achievement or discussed as a process of failed or partial modernization. This latter interpretation points to the alleged weaknesses and illiberal nature of the new Greek state—a betrayal of Enlightenment values—but does so by adopting ahistorical standards.Footnote ¹⁰ In abandoning this approach, I was able to look at the Greek case from a different perspective, centered on popular participation. What stands out is not Greek exceptionalism but the peculiar intensity that different types of political apprenticeship and their related practices assumed in comparison to the other southern revolutions. War and civil strife were more intensely experienced in Greece than in Naples (though not in Portugal), but petitioning and elections (themes seldom integrated into conventional, national narratives of the Greek revolution), mattered almost as much as they did elsewhere. As in other contexts, different social actors had different understandings of the Greek state and constitution, but comparable interpretations emerged simultaneously in different locations, amalgamating the defense of corporate privileges with the advocacy of individual rights.Footnote ¹¹ Of course, I could have done more to explore this process of politicization in Greece and elsewhere.

If I could rewrite my book now, I would also more explicitly compare and comment on the gender dimension of the different conflicts and their violence, a theme still inadequately treated in global and transnational histories, and highlight the extent to which women made up the majority of refugees displaced.Footnote ¹² I would also write much more extensively and comparatively on oath taking, a pervasive practice which deserves more attention than I gave to it in my research.

In the final part of my response, I want to return to the question of how the 1820s can help us rethink existing chronologies of the age of revolutions. While my work moves away from the North Atlantic revolutionary space, I did not mean to ignore or dismiss the legacies of the American and French revolutions in the European south. In fact, I see the expansion of Napoleonic armies toward the Iberian peninsula and the Mediterranean, and the related wars in the Balkans, as a moment that unleashed the conflicts leading to the 1820s revolutions. The revolutionary culture of the 1820s owed much to the French and American revolutions, even if this influence was often subterranean. The revolutionaries of the 1820s predicated the legitimacy of their actions on popular resistance against the Napoleonic armies and the defense of monarchical authority, thereby defining their own insurrections as antithetical to the French revolution. They could not have done otherwise: to celebrate the French revolution would have alienated their own monarchs, the popular audiences whose support they were seeking, and the foreign powers whose endorsement they were hoping to obtain. Nonetheless, the Greeks looked to France and America as sources of inspiration for their own constitution. In southern Italy, those who had supported the rule of Joachim Murat as King of Naples continued to stress the legacy of Napoleonic reforms during the events of 1820–1821, defending French administrative centralization against calls for the devolution of powers to the local level. The Spanish exaltados advocated land reform and land redistribution, likewise mobilizing the memory of the French revolution. Its influence was felt, too, in popular culture. In Piedmont and Genoa, villagers celebrated the new constitution by performing the farandole, a dance also practiced in the South of France three decades earlier. Members of the Carboneria in the Neapolitan provinces adopted the practice of planting the tree of liberty, a revolutionary custom imported from France. The United States was important for Greek revolutionaries, who were inspired by American constitutional culture and who looked to Washington as a model of military leadership respectful of the constitutional order and an alternative to Napoleon. The American constitution was also discussed in Naples.Footnote ¹³

However, as Riall observes, my choice to study these southern revolutions as taking place in a shared geographical space complicates and challenges the existing chronology of the age of revolutions, forcing us to look beyond 1776 and 1789. Other cultural references and experiences also mattered, and often mattered much more. The legacies of cultures of protest and revolutionary events before the French revolution were crucial to the actors of the 1820s, and once again oblige us to turn away from France toward other geographies. Indeed, the events of the 1820s revolutions cannot be understood in isolation from what Franco Venturi described as the “first crisis” of the ancien régime, which unfolded between the late 1760s and the mid-1770s. As Venturi noted, the origins of this crisis were not “to be sought in the great capitals of the West … but on the margins of the continent, in unexpected and peripheral places.”Footnote ¹⁴

The upheavals of these years notably included the revolts in the eastern Mediterranean that coincided with Admiral Orlov’s expedition against the Ottomans in 1770, the so-called Orlofika. This insurrection was not simply instigated by the Russians in the context of their conflict with the Ottomans. Like the Greek revolution of 1821, the Orlofika had profound roots in the Peloponnese but also had ramifications in the islands of the Aegean, in the heartlands of Rumelia, and across the Mediterranean. It mobilized army agents, tradespeople, members of the Orthodox clergy, and groups of klephts and mercenaries, and led to the creation of new institutions inspired by the Russians and temporary forms of autonomous governance. From the moment these events began to unfold, as Venturi has shown, they had an important impact on European public opinion.

As Mark Mazower, Vasilis Molos, and Ada Dialla have recently remarked, the memory of these events continued to shape expectations in Greece fifty years later. Members of the Filiki Eteria, the secret society that planned the insurrection of 1821, wrote extensively about the two uprisings together at the end of the Greek revolution. Some protagonists of the insurrection of 1770 were still active in 1821, while other revolutionaries were the children of those who had risen against the Ottomans with Russian support. Recollections of Russian involvement in 1770 made the rumors spread by the Filiki Eteria about an imminent Russian expedition credible to the insurgent populations, and offered hope that this time victory might be at hand. They also reinvigorated the existing bond forged by Orthodoxy between the Russian Empire and the Greeks.Footnote ¹⁵

This first crisis of the ancien régime coincided with the great famines of the late 1760s and 1770s, which led to violent urban revolts in Madrid in 1766 (the Esquilache riots) and in Palermo in 1773.Footnote ¹⁶ As I have highlighted, the pattern of popular mobilization seen in these cities at that time would reemerge along similar lines in the 1820s. During the Spanish Trienio Liberal of 1820–1823, the crowds of Madrid considered the physical presence of the monarch in the capital essential to protect the constitutional regime from its enemies and guarantee their demands to the government—just as in 1766, when they demanded that Charles IV return from the suburban Palace of Aranjuez, and submitted to him a specific list of requests. In Palermo, the revolution of 1820 followed the same script as the events of 1773: both revolts started out during the religious processions organized for the annual celebration of the city’s patron saint. The key protagonists of the revolts in Madrid and in Palermo, both in the eighteenth century and in the 1820s, were the artisans’ corporations.Footnote ¹⁷

A revision of chronology is needed if we are to understand not only the eighteenth-century roots of these events but also the decades that followed. As Judson points out, the 1820s invite us to look at the wave of revolutions that took place in 1848 in a different light. I would add that a study of the 1820s reminds us of the existence and impact of a rich revolutionary culture before 1848. It also draws attention to another set of revolutionary moments after the 1820s that were just as important as 1848, if not more so, in the countries of southern Europe. The revolutions that broke out in 1836–1837 in Portugal, Spain, and Sicily, in Spain in 1840, in Greece in 1843, and again in Portugal in 1846–1847 all responded to local dynamics and built on earlier revolutionary cultures, but also interacted with Europe-wide political movements and global conjunctures. A thorough study of these events, exploring their diverse set of “nested” revolutionary cultures—liberal, democratic, and federal—and relating them to earlier and later revolutions, still remains to be carried out. It is, however, a necessary task if we want to continue, to use Judson’s word once more, to “de-peripheralize” events in decades and countries too often left at the margins of the current narrative of the age of revolutions.Footnote ¹⁸