On 16 May, the Security History Network organises their final lecture of the year. Professor of Modern History Maurizio Isabella (Queen Mary University of London) will give the lecture, titled ‘The Age of Revolutions in the South’.

Utrecht University, Drift 21, Room 1.05, Utrecht

More information and registration.

A wave of uprisings
Isabella aims to answer the question of what revolutions were by looking at the way in which they were conceived, understood and performed by historical actors in the early 19th century. He does so by discussing a wave of uprisings that broke out in Portugal, Spain, Piedmont, Naples, and the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s to introduce constitutions.

Isabella looks at the military origins of these events, all organised by army officers, and the ideals and practices related to them. By so doing, he points to a chronology and geography of the age of revolutions in Europe alternative to existing historical narratives, based on 1789, 1830, and 1848, and centred around France.

He shows instead that the events of 1820s inaugurated a wave of revolutions in Southern Europe independent from French event that lasted up to 1870, and points to their importance in the history of representative government and popular politics in Europe.

Maurizio Isabella
Maurizio Isabella is Professor of Modern History at the Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era (2009). More recently he published his book Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions (2023), which was longlisted for the Runciman Award.