Italian Perspectives on Global History

During the 1850s, the Kingdom of Sardinia—while presenting itself as a champion of liberal
ism and constitutionalism on the Italian Peninsula—carried out the forced removal of politi
cal exiles: individuals arrested for participating in uprisings or deemed threats to public order. 
Between April 1853 and March 1855, three ships transported refugees from across the penin
sula to the United States. These deportations aimed to reinforce internal security, silence dis
sent, and signal to Austria the regime’s determination to suppress revolutionary movements. 
Yet the arrival in New York of these refugees—none of whom had been formally charged or 
convicted—provoked diplomatic controversy. The episode raised pressing questions about in
ternational law, the legal status of the deportees, and US immigration policy. Critics accused 
Piedmont of attempting to turn the United States into a penal colony.

In the framework of global history, the nineteenth-century political Mediterranean has been 
the focus of a recently renewed historiography. The essay aims to contribute to this new re
search thread from a peculiar perspective, that of the articulation of the state in a Mediter
ranean dimension, investigated though a specific case study: the intelligence activity for the 
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies carried out by the diplomatic mission in Constantinople. The latter 
turned out to be a crucial node of the Bourbon network of the state abroad as well as of an 
inter-state conservative network with the common aim of political surveillance. Moreover, the 
analysis sheds light on the intersection of state apparatuses with the network of exiles moving 
across the Mediterranean. Shifting the point of view from the national Italian movement to 
the modernization of one of the conservative states in the peninsula, framed in a transnational 
context, the article shows a more politically complex and plural nineteenth-century Mediter
ranean than usually outlined.

This article addresses the problem of the ambivalent relationship that Global History has en
tertained with the Issue of the state. On the one hand, Global History is critical towards the 
“methodological Nationalism”, and therefore tends to devalue also the role of the state, as most 
global historians share a certain mistrust for conceptual abstractions and prefer making use of 
terms such as politics and government rather than that of state. On the other hand, however, 
even for Global History the use of a category like that of Empire is indispensable, and the latter 
requires a strong attention to the role played by state institutions in the construction of vast 
power systems on a global scale.

This essay explores the peculiar meanings conferred on the idea of nation in the context of 
various attempts to redefine in statal-national terms Britain’s imperial identity which character
ized the tradition of liberal imperialism. The analysis focuses on the evolution of a specific form 
of pan-Britannism that emerged from the 1880s onwards and sought both to emphasize the 
political potentialities of a presumed ethnolinguistic and cultural homogeneity between the 
“white colonies” and the motherland, and to credit the British global state with a providential 
vocation for the unification of mankind. India’s later inclusion in pan-Britannist rhetoric, which 
went so far as to invest the “Raj” with the mission of encouraging the birth of a pan-Indian na
tion state based on the cross-fertilization of European and Asian civilizations within the British 
Commonwealth of Nations, not only demonstrated the colonial authorities’ final adoption of a 
variant of Orientalism aiming to distinguishing itself from the most blatant kinds of cultural dif
ferentialism, but was also premised on a profound revision in a pluralist sense of the categories 
according to which late Victorian imperialists had interpreted nationality in reference to the 
British Empire’s composite metropolitan core and its neo-European overseas peripheries.

The article reconstructs the late emergence and politicization of colonialism as a term, dis
tinguishing it from older notions such as colonization and imperialism and tracing its shift, 
especially after Bandung, into a condemnatory, activist category appropriated by both anti
colonial actors and historians. It shows how colonialism became central in historiography only 
after decolonization, first in militant, Marxist-inflected narratives and then in more complex 
frameworks that provincialize Europe, recover subaltern agency, and embed colonial history 
within broader national and transnational histories. It reviews key trajectories in colonial stud
ies—from Enlightenment reflections to twentieth-century typologies of colonial situations and 
states—highlighting their methodological sophistication and continuing relevance in the age 
of globalization. 
A substantial section analyzes how postcolonial theory, Atlantic and transnational approaches, 
and concepts such as “entangled empires” and “connected histories” have redefined colonial
ism as a plural, relational, and non-teleological field of inquiry. Through case studies of Bayly, 
Osterhammel, Subrahmanyam, Gruzinski, and Cooper, the article argues that some of the most 
innovative strands of global history in fact grow out of colonial and imperial historiography. 
It insists that global history is best understood as a perspective rather than a separate object, 
and that there can be no serious global history without a rigorous, historically differentiated 
account of colonialism and its legacies. In conclusion, the article stresses the analytical utility 
of colonialism for understanding contemporary phenomena—neocolonialism, environmental 
exploitation, global inequalities, racialization—and contends that far from being superseded 
by global history, the category remains indispensable for grasping both the historical formation 
and the present contradictions of a globalized world. 

Between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a number of adventurers from 
the Italian Peninsula left the Old World and joined the struggle for the emancipation of New 
Granada. Motivated by a range of factors, they became involved in the pre-independence up
risings, enlisted in the ranks of the Ejército Libertador (Liberation Army), and participated in the 
consolidation of the new republics. Taking place within a broader transatlantic and revolution
ary movement, their biographic trajectories influenced the course of independence in the ter
ritories of New Granada and the eventual birth of Gran Colombia. 

This article advocates for an entangled practice history of interwar anti-colonialism and youth 
by exploring the political and cultural significance of the Indian News Service and Information 
Bureau in interwar Berlin. It was a place where young socialists from the left wing of the Ger
man-Jewish youth movement mingled with Indian anti-colonial activists, as well as a space for 
international encounters more widely. But how exactly did this fusion between these different 
groups occur, in what practices did it materialize, and how did it impact on the activists‘ lives 
in the 1920s, but also beyond? One of the connecting lines that stretched from the left wing of 
the youth movement to the anti-colonial activists was a progressive, experimental approach to 
sexuality that aimed at the overcoming of class, racial, and religious boundaries. Mixed relation
ships between cosmopolitan men from Asia and independent young women from German
Jewish homes, who had grown up with and in the youth movement of the early twentieth 
century, had more than an erotic appeal, however. They were also a political statement, a lived 
rejection of the middle-class conventions of the prewar period and, from the perspective of the 
Indian activists, also a critique of colonial emotional regimes and the regulation of intimacy that 
often accompanied them.