Abstract
Historians often assume a one-directional transmission of knowledge and ideas, leading to the establishment of spatial hierarchies defined as centres and peripheries. In recent decades, transnational and global history have contributed to a more inclusive understanding of intellectual and cultural exchanges that profoundly challenged the ways in which we draw our mental maps. Covering the early modern and modern periods, Re-Mapping Centre and Periphery investigates the asymmetrical and multi-directional structure of such encounters within Europe as well as in a global context. Exploring subjects from the shores of the Russian Empire to nation-making in Latin America, the international team of contributors demonstrates how, as products of human agency, centre and periphery are conditioned by mutual dependencies; rather than representing absolute categories of analysis, they are subjective constructions determined by a constantly changing discursive context. Through its analysis, the volume develops and implements a conceptual framework for remapping centres and peripheries, based on conceptual history and discourse history. As such, it will appeal to a wide variety of historians, including transnational, cultural and intellectual, and historians of early modern and modern periods.
Highlights
How well did the English, the Italians or the Spanish play football? Were their talents – solid English stamina, defensive Italian catenaccio or even the Spanish penchant for making sneaky fouls – appreciated as something the Dutch should follow? As I have argued, whether or not the presence of such ‘Others’ led to the construction of a ‘Dutch identity’ is not the interesting point. Such contentions tend to lead to never-ending and meaningless discussions about ‘whose identity?’ and ‘which identity?’ The more significant question is whether the mutual bonding of European nations through competitive activities led to a sense of Europeanness in the Dutch collective mentality
I have claimed that a Self, such as a national Self, can be examined as a structured entity, a cultural matrix or collective mentality that endures over a longer period of time
From the point of view of the European theme ‘united in diversity’, the most significant thing to become part of the twentieth-century Dutch collective mentality was a spatial frame of reference that excluded substantial parts of the European Union as it would become with expansion in 2004
Summary
In 1851 the Italian philosopher and statesman Vincenzo Gioberti, arguably Italy’s most influential political thinker at the time and a former Prime Minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, self-confidently described England as ‘the Sicily of Europe’: an oceanic island in the continent’s northern periphery, whose connection to Europe was allegedly on a par with Sicily’s relationship to the Italian peninsula.[1]. As Christopher Bayly has argued, it was between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth century that uniformities in state administration, trade and political ideologies placed the European imperial system at the centre of new transnational connections, in particular with the Islamic world and South Asia.[22] These new hierarchies were reflected in concepts of race, in the economic and ecological degradation of entire world regions, and in the use of violence as a basis of defining global power. Evoking a situation that shows clear similarities to the views on agricultural reform discussed in Marta Petrusewicz’s chapter, Miller starts with an anecdote about the celebrated Argentine poet José Hernández refusing to accept the decision of his government to place his home country on the margins of the developed world, pointing instead at the excellent conditions of future progress if existing knowledge, on a meta-regional level, was pooled together Once again this example shows that the relationship between core and periphery cannot be defined in absolute terms. With its wide thematic scope, this book will hopefully be relevant to researchers from across the globe, which is why we publish it in Open Access
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