This edited volume challenges the historiographical narrative of the Mediterranean as a backward periphery where the nation-state arrived belatedly or imperfectly. Instead, it reframes the long nineteenth-century Mediterranean as a generative laboratory where the era’s most sophisticated critiques of, and alternatives to, the nation-state were elaborated. From federalist projects and imperial decentralization schemes to non-territorial autonomies, constitutional experiments, and exile internationalisms, Mediterranean actors developed a shared idiom of post-imperial and trans-confessional political thought that national historiographies have systematically marginalized and purged.
Building on recent scholarship that has rehabilitated empire as a durable political form, recovered internationalism as a constitutive nineteenth-century project, and reexamined late-Ottoman, late-Habsburg, and post-imperial governance, this volume maps the Mediterranean as a connected space of political imagination. It moves beyond confines of national, institutional, or strictly Western European frameworks to recover the federations debated, autonomies negotiated, constitutions drafted, and political programs circulated across imperial and confessional boundaries.
Topics of Interest
Contributions are welcomed, but not limited, on themes including:
-Federalist political thought across Mediterranean languages and traditions (Cattaneo, Ferrari, Pi y Margall, Rigas Feraios, Sabahaddin, Balkan and Iberist federalisms)
-Imperial decentralization designs (Tanzimat, Habsburg Ausgleich and trialist projects, Mount Lebanon mutasarrifiyya)
Constitutional moments and Mediterranean circulation (Cádiz 1812, Greek revolutionary constitutionalism, Ottoman 1876/1908)
-Non-territorial sovereignty and personal-law regimes (millet, capitulations, Mixed Courts, national-cultural autonomy)
-Diasporic and exilic political imagination in Paris, London, and Geneva
-Religious internationalisms as political alternatives
-Failed and short-lived federations (Septinsular Republic, Eastern Rumelia, Cretan State, Albanian autonomy proposals)
-Mediterranean anarchism and federalist labor traditions
-The “Eastern Question” as a sustained European debate about post-imperial form
-Mountain and local autonomies (Mani, Druze, Maronite, Mirdita, Kabyle) as working models
-Early-twentieth-century afterlives of these alternatives
Submission Guidelines
Abstract: 300–500 words, accompanied by a brief academic biography (max. 150 words)
Full Chapter length: 7,000–10,000 words (including notes)
Submit to: erkjad.kajo@univ-amu.fr