Product details
- ISBN 9780228024583
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 12 Aug 2025
- Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
- Publication City/Country: CA
- Product Form: Hardback
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In the wake of Napoleon's defeat in 1815, French liberals set out to create an informal empire. Their efforts to cultivate unequal partnerships with Christian, Greek-speaking elites in southeast Europe shaped national identities and structured global civilizational hierarchies over the decades that followed.
Unintended Nations tracks a notion of civilization that developed in early nineteenth-century France. Alex Tipei explores the constellation of ideas, beliefs, and practices this concept invoked – what she calls civilization-speak – and charts the cross-continental networks that employed it as an organizing principle. Drawing on archival and printed primary sources in six languages, Tipei maps out the uses of this civilization-speak on both sides of the continent, focusing on France and the lands that make up significant parts of present-day Greece and Romania. She shows how and why French liberals mobilized civilization-speak to, offering an innovative analysis of liberalism and capitalism's relationship to informal empire.
Calling into question long-standing assumptions about the rise of nationalism in southeast Europe, Unintended Nations explores how Franco-Balkan exchanges helped define political, civilizational, and biopolitical boundaries in the post-Napoleonic era.
Alex R. Tipei is assistant professor of history at the Université de Montréal.
