Risorgimento Research Articles

Why East Germany did not become a new Mezzogiorno

Economic integration is generally thought to favour convergence in the economic performance of previously separated regions; but this is far from universally true, as the experience of the members of the Eurozone testifies. The paper considers the two sharply contrasting cases of East and West German convergence following reunification and the enduring poverty of the Italian Mezzogiorno since Italian unification a century and a half ago. In both countries, political integration delivers much higher consumption in the lagging relative to the leading region than of per capita GDP. Consumption convergence can be supported by transfers but ‘production’ convergence ultimately requires catch-up in the production of tradeables. The paper demonstrates the radically different performance of the tradeable sector in the two cases, and suggests that this may be the result of differences in labour market flexibility, in investment performance and in the social norms required for the production of complex manufacturing.

ІСТОРІЯ СТВОРЕННЯ ТУРИСТИЧНИХ ПІДПРИЄМСТВ ТА ЇХ СУЧАСНЕ БІЗНЕС-ПЛАНУВАННЯ

The article analyzes history of creation and considers current problems of business planning of new tourist enterprises. The author came to conclusion that historically first tourist enterprises appeared in second half of nineteenth century. A tourist enterprise is a self-governing entity that owns rights of a legal entity, which, on basis of use of a labor collective of property, produces and sells products, performs work, renders services in field of tourism. Іn 1872, Т. Cook formed a partnership with his son, John Mason Cook, and renamed travel agency as Thomas Cook & Son. They acquired business premises on Fleet Street, London. The office also contained a shop which sold essential travel accessories, including guide books, luggage, telescopes and footwear. Thomas saw his venture as both religious and social service; his son provided commercial expertise that allowed company to expand. In accordance with his beliefs, he and his wife also ran a small temperance hotel above office. Their business model was refined by introduction of 'hotel coupon' in 1868. Detachable coupons in a counterfoil book were issued to traveller. These were valid for either a restaurant meal or an overnight hotel stay provided they were on Cook's list. Conflicts of interest between father and son were resolved when son persuaded his father, Thomas Cook, to retire at end of 1878. He moved back to Leicester and lived quietly until his death. The firm's growth was consolidated by John Mason Cook and his three sons, especially by its involvement with military transport and postal services for Britain and Egypt during 1880s, when Cook began organising tours to Middle East. In 1880, Italian government joined Cook's tour company. The Italian economy benefited from additional tourism profits in which Cook programmed and executed as a system. Cook certainly played a key role in not only boosting Italian economy but also bringing atmosphere and morale of Italian unification. Italians physically felt their country from place to place by traveling. By 1888, company had established offices around world, including three in Australia and one in Auckland, New Zealand and in 1890, company sold over 3¼ million tickets. John Mason Cook promoted, and even led, excursions to, for example, Middle East where he was described as the second-greatest man in Egypt. However, while arranging for German Emperor Wilhelm II to visit Palestine in 1898, he contracted dysentery and died following year. Disclosure of theme became possible through use of general scientific methods of cognition: analysis, synthesis, system, generalization, concreteness, historicism and dialectical method. The scientific research also uses special scientific methods of research: historical-comparative, historical-synthetic, historical-diachronic, empirical analysis, etc.

Evolution of accounting education in Italy, 1890–1935

This article focuses on the development of the study of accounting in the Italian education system between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also focuses on the subsequent formation of a scientific and experimental forma mentis that would prepare students for administrative and managerial activities in industry, commerce and public administration. Starting from the second half of the nineteenth century – when the presence of accounting in education was limited to secondary school and implemented with sporadic educational initiatives by private bodies – and covering approximately the 50 years after the unification of Italy, this study analyses, through the lens of Foucault’s power–knowledge relationship, the institutional and structural measures adopted by the State to develop the study of accounting in Italy, in the period 1890–1935.

Southern rebels against Italian unification: the Great Brigandage in the province of Capitanata

This article explores counter-revolutionary brigandage in Southern Italy after 1860 (also known as Great Brigandage). Working from archival sources, the article offers a new interpretation of the interactions between the political, social and criminal aspects of the guerrilla war against the Risorgimento. Notwithstanding the plurality of the individual motives leading single actors to fight, it is argued that brigandage was an essentially political phenomenon and that the alliances between common bandits and loyalist forces were made possible only in the macro-political setting of the collapse of the Neapolitan monarchy, the difficulties facing Italian state-building, and the emergence of popular legitimist sympathies after 1860.

Seasonality of livebirths and climatic factors in Italian regions (1863-1933)

Birth seasonality is a phenomenon that characterizes almost all the populations of the world. In spite of this, the causes underlying these seasonal fluctuations represent an as yet unsolved puzzle. Two main theoretical approaches have been proposed to explain birth seasonality. The first encompasses a social explanation and emphasizes the role of social, economic and cultural factors in determining the optimal moment (from a social perspective) for conception (e.g., according to the cycle of agricultural workload, religious festivity, marriage seasonality, etc.). The second theoretical approach encompasses an environmental explanation and focuses on the role that climatic factors (e.g., temperature, rainfall, light intensity, etc.) play in determining the optimal moment of conception from a biological perspective. Our paper may be collocated in the latter strand of the literature. The aim is to investigate the effects of temperature on conceptions, and subsequently on the seasonality of livebirths, while controlling for a possible social confounding effect, i.e. the seasonal pattern of marriage. To achieve this end, we empirically investigate the role of temperature as well as that of marriage seasonality in Italian regions for the period stretching from the Italian unification to the eve of World War II. We find that extreme temperatures (both cold and hot) negatively affect the number of births. At the same time, marriage seasonality also seems to be an important explicative factor of the seasonal fluctuation of live births.

La ginnastica come disciplina della scuola elementare negli anni dell’unificazione italiana. Una proposta di «ri-contestualizzazione» storiografica

The contribution aims to suggest some research paths to begin a study on Gymnastics in the primary school during the years of Italian unification, starting from the analysis of the well-known literature which have dealt with physical activities in that period. Many of these publications – often arising from a non-academic intention and, in any case, characterized by a thematic and methodological eclecticism – are influenced by a historiographical tradition that has studied physical education without a specific attention on the elementary school. Therefore, the essay proposes a «re-contextualization» of the research that focuses on school Gymnastics and examines this topic according to a consistent heuristic view. Even on the basis of studies that have already taken a similar approach, it points out the new sources to be used and outlines new interpretative perspectives that, complying with the most recent instances of educational historiography, can reconstruct the first steps of Gymnastics as a discipline in the curriculum of Italian primary school.

The «Roman question» in N.V. Charykov’s assessment

N.V. Charykov paid much attention to the Roman question. His interest to this issue was likely to have been formed when he was a Russian diplomatic representative at the Vatican. After his diplomatic service in the Vatican N.V. Charykov published its greatest scientific work that was dedicated mainly to the relations of Russia and the Vatican in the seventeenth century. The problem discussed in this paper is connected with Charykovs views on the Roman question rather than his diplomatic service. The Roman question was covered in two articles The Pope and Caliph and The Roman question, Leo XIII, and signor Mussolini. In these papers N.V. Charykov revealed the origins of the problem, its development and a solution of the Roman question, as well as potential problems. In his opinion, the problem arose during the unification of Italy and a solution was found under the Government of Mussolini who was interested in the support of the Pope. The author pays attention to the relations between Russia and the Vatican after their recovery, referring to his own diplomatic practice.

Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento ed. by Nick Carter (review)

Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento ed. by Nick Carter (review)

La fabbrica del criminale. Alexandre Dumas e le rappresentazioni del brigantaggio meridionale tra letteratura e politica

The essay aims at analyzing the discursive identity of brigandage in Southern Italy during the XIX century. The author establishes a constant dialogue between Alexandre Dumas’ masterpieces and many cultural representations which have deeply inspired his stylistic and interpretive perspectives, or, on the contrary, that the writer has helped to change. The essay begins with the analysis of the stereotyped representation of the brigand with the pointed hat, which derives from the overlap of literature and politics. The author also studies the identification of robbers as a criminal class. Therefore, the folkloristic dimension of the brigand, as well as its idealization as a romantic hero, are both connected to the imagery of metropolitan crime in the first half of the XIX century. Lastly, the author demonstrates how brigand’s representations are reshaped by political conflict during the Italian Risorgimento, leading to a process of idealisation in the pre-Unitarian era and of criminalization in post-Unitarian years.

D'Annunzio’s Il piacere: A Generational Gaze on New Values

This paper centers on the nature of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s first, and very influential novel, Il piacere, and its influence on Italian thought at the time. I argue that Il piacere is truly a breviary, to borrow Cevasco’s term, a bible—or in socio-economic terms, a manifesto—for its time. I draw from Charles Altieri’s Radical Poetics and from Martin Puchner’s Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos and the Avant-Gardes to prove that Il piacere is indeed a social critique of its time, an attempt by D’Annunzio to bridge the gap that Italian Unification produced by projecting a mostly agricultural country—which had long lost its epic stature, dating back to the Renaissance years—into modern thought and society.

From Hindustan to Brabant: Meyerbeer’s L’africana and Municipal Cosmopolitanism in Post-Unification Italy

AbstractThis article examines the political and cultural circumstances leading to the Italian premiere of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s posthumous opera L’Africaine at Bologna’s Teatro Comunale in November 1865. Meyerbeer’s death in May 1864 and the French premiere of his last opera the following year combined to produce a striking moment of transnational cosmopolitan sentiment that built on the composer’s reputation for writing music that had the capacity to communicate across national and political boundaries. Shortly after the Unification of Italy, Bologna was keen to capitalise on these emotions and used the Italian premiere strategically in order to position itself as one of the cultural capitals of the new Italian nation state.

Alessandro Pavia’s Album dei Mille: Collection, Archive, and National Identity during the Risorgimento

Histories of the carte de visite and the photographic album rarely consider adequately the intersections between modes of viewership associated with collecting and archiving, and assertions of national identity in the nineteenth century. Alessandro Pavia’s Album dei Mille, completed in 1867 to commemorate the Expedition of the Thousand, a defining episode in the Italian Risorgimento, presents the portrait card of 824 of the 1,092 men known to have participated. The photographs are ordered alphabetically and erratically sourced – although Pavia took many in his own studio – and bound into a massive album. The Album mobilises practices of viewing and organisation that come from both the archive and the collection, constituting a case in which contradictory modes of constructing narrative, engaging historical time, and understanding the materiality of photography produce a complex mode of viewership significant to the histories of photography and identity construction in the newly formed Italian nation. Seen from the purviews of the collection and the archive, this episode in the history of photography has implications for understanding how the album and the portrait card shaped the way photographs were viewed and used in the second half of the nineteenth century, and more specifically in nation-building movements such as the Italian Risorgimento.

Strutture architettoniche e restauri in Santa Giulia di Brescia: la cripta di San Salvatore

The monastery of San Salvatore of Brescia, after the suppression of the late eighteenth century, was the scene of numerous interventions of functional adaptation that have profoundly changed the appearance and the destination of use. These works, which ended with the recent organization in the city’s Museum, allow you to not only understand the architectural evolution of the ancient monastic foundation but also the complex role that it has had in representing the construction of the city’s identity with the Unity of Italy. The contribution, which is part of a scientific research project directed by Gabriele Archetti, presents the first significant results on the nineteenth-century reconstruction of the crypt and on the structural work carried out in the basilica of San Salvatore. The parametric modeling of Santa Giulia complex is being built.

Culture visuali e forme di politicizzazione nel lungo '800 europeo

The long 19th century was marked by a shift from an «old regime» of the media to a new system of public communication. New techniques of (re)production of images played a key role in this process. Did such circulation of mass-produced images change political practices and popular attitudes toward the public sphere? How can historians investigate the 19th-century relationships between visual, material, and political culture? Three major scholars present different case studies from across the continent. Rolf Reichardt investigates the international spread of the powerful new iconic vocabulary created by the French Revolution throughout the 19th century. Enrico Francia presents the most significant results of a research project on the production and uses of patriotic objects during the Italian Risorgimento. Eva Giloi discusses how mass-produced portraits changed the parameters within which people experienced authority in the German Empire.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Hazel Sheeky Bird (bio) It is, perhaps, a given that the Lion and the Unicorn (L&U) would mark the centenary of the First World War with a special edition because it has been in the consciousness of many children's literature scholars for a number of years, including co-editor Jacquilyn Weeks and myself. Indeed, Stacy Gillis and Esther MacCallum-Stewart opened their introduction to the 2007 L&U special edition on Children's Culture and the First World War by noting the centenary's approach. Likewise, major international projects such as the Leverhulme International Research Network, which hosted conferences in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia between 2011and 2013, drew together a significant body of work, demonstrating the variety and complexity of current scholarship on children's literature and culture of the First World War.1 Writing about Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, Dan Todman observes that the First World War was "a cornerstone of British culture" (17). The articles in this special edition remind us that it was, and perhaps continues to be, a cornerstone of not just British culture, but also the cultures of many nations, and for many different reasons. This is often because writing for children about the First World War was, and frequently still is, embedded in discourses of national identity, either alone or in contradistinction to that of other nations and, as Peter Hunt observes of Western children's literature about the war, "local historical differences make generalizations difficult to sustain" (319). Consequently, it behooves us to try, as far as our linguistic skills will allow, to situate our knowledge of any particular nation's writing on and of the First World War within and against that of other nations. Many of the essays in this special edition are concerned with the ways in which national politics and culture directly shaped the way that the war was presented to young readers. Taking a comparative approach, Laura Leden's contribution examines issues of politics and gender in Nordic translations of L. M. Montgomery's Rilla of Ingleside (1921). Whereas Montgomery's original novel presents women as heroic figures on the home front, and [End Page v] depicts the First World War patriotically, Leden sets out the changes that are evident in Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, and German translations of the source text. By examining censorship and purifaction in the texts, Leden highlights how discourses pertaining to nationality, pacifism, female heroism, and cultural didactic norms resulted in very different adaptions of the novel, differences that reveal each country's experience of the war, as either an ally, an occupier, or an occupied nation. In her piece, Lindsay Myers points to the relationship between Italian national identity myths and the presentation of the war in Lia Levi's historical novel, Cecelia va alla guerra, first published in 2000 and yet to be translated into English. Pointing to the reawakening of a national rhetoric in the late 1990s, Myers argues that Levi's book refigures the conflict as a war between the Austrians and the Italians, with the end of the war being parochially marked by Italian Unification rather than a European armistice. What Myers' contribution reminds us of, then, is that the act of commemoration is far from universal. Moreover, while we might expect young readers today to be presented with novels that encourage them to question the "truths" of the First World War, and to recognize and interrogate its continued cultural legacies, this, unfortunately, is not always the case. Rather than highlighting a unified national voice, Anthony Pavlik's contribution points to a multiplicity of voices in American boys' series fiction of the war. Looking closely at two series in the years leading up to America's entry into the war in 1917, Pavlik argues that some American children's literature spoke back to British propaganda that aimed to draw America into the war and resisted crude depictions of German combatants. In doing so, the books reveal the conflicting and shifting ideologies that characterized diverse American attitudes in the years leading up to 1917. While Pavlik notes the presence of resistance to British propaganda in American series fiction for boys...

Divided Nation: The North-South Cleavage in Italian Tax Compliance

It is well known that tax compliance is low in Italy, and lower in the South than in the North. Many scholars have examined Italian taxpayer behavior, mainly using experiments and surveys. However, little attention has been given to the historical circumstances that have shaped divergent taxpayer behavior by Northern and Southern Italians. This article uses historical data from Italian unification through the Second Republic to assess the effects of Italy’s major formal institutions (the church, state, and political parties) and informal institutions (clientelism) on Italian tax behavior. It argues that nineteenth-century unification had significant repercussions on the two most important institutions in Italy—the Catholic Church and the state—and hence led to two different kinds of clientelism. Since Southern clientelism favored private interests and Northern clientelism led to the construction of public institutions, this created two different tax compliance environments.

The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger by Rocco Rubini

Reviewed by: The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger by Rocco Rubini Beatrice Variolo Rocco Rubini. The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014. 386 pages. The Other Renaissance explores in detail the role of Renaissance Humanism in shaping the intellectual tradition of modern Italian philosophy. Rocco Rubini’s research arises from his interest in unpacking two coeval and parallel debates that occurred in the aftermath of World War II. The first one sees Sartre’s existential humanism pitted against Heidegger’s anti-humanism whose resolute rejection of Cartesian subjectivism had far-reaching consequences, leading to “the anti-humanist sentiment that shaped our post-modern consciousness” (3). Conspicuously absent from the existentialist discussion is Renaissance Humanism, to which it is reserved a baffling indifference. This omission, Rubini remarks, is not just lamentable, but it is also quite paradoxical. Despite clear parallels between existentialism and humanism, existentialists removed Renaissance Humanism from the discussion, thus failing to recognize “their anti-Cartesianism as, in fact, a ‘humanism’” (5). The second disputation, connected to the existentialist debate, revolves around the question if Renaissance Humanism can be considered a philosophy, and has as main protagonists Eugenio Garin and Paul Oskar Kristeller. To reconcile the interpretations of these two scholars, Rubini looks back at the origins of modern Renaissance studies. He identifies a tradition in Italian interpretation—parallel, but distinct from the German line stemming from Jakob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance Italy—which attempts “another” account of the Renaissance, in philosophical thought. In a telling coincidence, this Italian lineage originated, with Bertrando Spaventa, in 1860, the same year in which Burckhardt’s work was published. Even more significant is the fact that it starts in the wake of the Italian unification. In the period leading to the creation of the Italian kingdom, intellectuals attempted to retroactively construct a national, Italian philosophy. It is in these circumstances that the interpretation of the Renaissance became a crucial and enduring problem of Italian philosophy from the Risorgimento to the Fascist period and well into the postwar era. To forge their intellectual tradition, Italians were forced to face the Renaissance, and what they discovered made them “recoil in horror” (47). What was considered the moment of most intense cultural and artistic flourishing coincides with the political decline of the country, culminating in Italy’s three-century-long occupation by [End Page 246] foreign powers, against which Italians were fighting. This realization resulted into a deep-rooted sentiment of “Renaissance shame” (7). Rubini embarks in a thorough genealogical reconstruction of “the self-contained trajectory of Italian philosophy” (37) from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the postwar period. His aim is to demonstrate how Italian philosophers attempted to integrate and, finally, restored the Renaissance to its rightful position, as the backbone of an Italian philosophical approach. The subtitle given to the book, “Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger,” finds its explanation in the fact that the Italian intellectual tradition, while struggling to find its place in the European scenario, could not eschew the influence of Hegel’s idealism and Heidegger’s existentialism. It was Bertrando Spaventa who, striving to free Italian philosophy from its isolation, turned to Hegel, whose idealism could not only support the Italian unification but also settle that which Renaissance philosophy could not. More specifically, Spaventa sees German thought as the natural continuation of Renaissance’s philosophy. Thus the “Renaissance shame” could be overcome by demonstrating that its intellectual tradition had matured and thrived elsewhere. However, the irreparable ‘fault’ of the Renaissance lay within the individualism of its letterati that manifested itself in their utter carelessness toward the political and military situation of their country. This conviction persisted well into the twentieth century in scholars such as Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. Although belonging to this tradition, Gentile represents a fundamental turning point. In shifting his attention from the vernacular to the Latin writers, Gentile rescued the Latin Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, Lorenzo Valla and many more from oblivion. In these humanist figures’ fierce opposition to scholasticism and their celebration of the centrality and dignity of man, Gentile sees the precursors of “the freedom of spirit of...

Rome / Kabul / Rome: Elective Affinities and an Embassy ProjectThe First Italian Embassy in Kabul

As both symbols of the State and places devoted to the representation of sovereignty, embassies represent an aspect of the “conspicuous visibility” of Italians abroad that still deserves some critical attention. Although the Italian unification marked a new departure in the way the national government shaped foreign policy in part by means of architectural projects outside Italy, it was especially during the Fascist regime that national propaganda was spatially materialized through the promotion of new embassy buildings, one prominent example being the one in Ankara. This paper proposes to explore the overlooked case of the Italian embassy in Kabul. The project’s inception and subsequent history are necessarily intertwined with the historic phases of Italian politics, from the end of the Great War, through the rise of Fascism until the post-World War II years, marked by a new aspiration towards a moral and physical reconstruction of the country. The embassy’s origins can be traced back to 1919, when Carlo Sforza, the Italian plenipotentiary minister in Istanbul, signed an agreement with the Afghan king Amanullah Khan pledging Italian financial support for the Third Afghan War. Architect Andrea Bruno was commissioned to design the present embassy building, which opened in 1974. Since the early 1960s, Bruno had been involved in the restoration works on the Buddhas of Bamiyan, later inscribed on the unesco List of World Heritage in Danger.

Extractive States: The Case of the Italian Unification

Despite the huge evidence documenting the adverse impact of extractive policies, we still lack a framework that identifies their determinants. Here, we lay out a two-region, two-social class model for thinking about this issue, and we exploit its implications to propose a novel account of the present-day economic divide between North and South of Italy. In contrast with the extant literature, we document that its opening is the result of the region-specific policies selected between 1861 and 1911 by the elite of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which annexed the rest of Italy in 1861. To elaborate, pre-unitary regional revenues from land property taxes per capita and railway diffusion are only driven by the contemporary region's farming productivity but not by the region's political relevance for the Kingdom of Sardinia's elite, whereas the opposite is true for the post-unitary ones. Moreover, tax-collection costs, the regional political relevance, and tax distortions shaped the growing North-South gap in post-unitary development, culture, and literacy. Crucially, our framework clarifies the incentives of dominating groups in other political and economic unions, e.g., post-Civil War USA and EU.

The History of Liberal Violence in The Woman in White

The History of Liberal Violence in The Woman in White Sophia Hsu (bio) In the first pages of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–60), the novel’s hero, Walter Hartright, introduces Professor Pesca, a political exile who initially provides comic relief to a tale of sensational violence. By “doing his utmost to turn himself into an Englishman” (7), Pesca shows deference to his host country and thereby neutralizes the danger that he might otherwise pose as a foreigner. While Pesca disappears from the narrative after this encounter, he returns later in his true garb as a radical nationalist, who inspires “mortal dread” (585) in even the most indomitable character, the villain (and the novel’s other Italian character) Count Fosco. The shocking change in Pesca’s representation helps situate the novel’s critique of English liberalism in the context of the Risorgimento, the mid-century movement for Italian unification contemporaneous with the novel’s serialization.1 In evoking the Risorgimento, The Woman in White offers a vantage point from which to re-evaluate England’s perception of itself as a liberal sanctuary. In the words of Edward Smith Stanley, Earl of Derby, “to the distressed and persecuted of all the world, England was the land of protection” (Hansard 5 June 1822). But even as Victorian society was “self-consciously liberal,” as Lauren M.E. Goodlad indicates, English liberalism was full of tensions as a moral and political philosophy (Victorian Literature x). Though nineteenth-century liberalism most often corresponded with anti-statism and volunteerism, it also referred to the state’s responsibility to individual and social welfare, as well as an ethical responsibility to build civic character in its citizens (Goodlad, Victorian Literature vii–x). “Since the nineteenth century,” Goodlad writes, “[liberalism] has been variously employed to denote diverse political agendas, a set of capitalist economic ideologies, and a broad cultural investment in promoting freedom” (Victorian Literature viii). The numerous and often incompatible goals of liberalism have led critics to view it as a “notoriously elusive notion” (Bellamy 1). This elusiveness continues today; thus, Duncan Bell offers a fluid definition of the concept: what counts as liberalism is what has been “classified as liberal, and recognized as such by other self-proclaimed liberals” (690). To Bell, this elastic understanding of the term “forces us to examine [liberal] traditions as evolving and contested historical phenomena” (690). The call to historicize liberalism and to see it as “evolving,” however, runs counter to the Victorian belief in the myth of stable, eternal English freedom. Many Victorians assumed that [End Page 111] ancient constitutional liberties were the source for the contractual nature of their parliamentary government, tradition of self-governance, and rule of law (Goodlad, Victorian Literature 3). But, as Collins illustrates, such self-congratulation and ahistorical thinking were unfounded given the contradictions he exposes via Pesca and Fosco. These contradictions pertain to the English people’s claim to a liberal cosmopolitanism that allegedly distinguishes them as sympathetic and tolerant, open to foreign groups and cultures in an ethical, intellectual, and aesthetic manner. As Amanda Anderson writes, nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism is a “broad concept” (30) that encourages “the need to enact or embody universalism” (31). Similarly, Goodlad and Julia M. Wright define cosmopolitanism as both “an ethics of cross-border relations” and “an ethos borne by specific individuals and groups wherever they go, within or across national borders” (par. 5). The Woman in White demonstrates how the Victorians’ enactment of cosmopolitanism, exemplified by their welcoming of political exiles such as Pesca, hides their actual intolerance and inhumanity. My argument thus resembles Uday Singh Mehta’s discussion of “the inclusionary pretensions of liberal theory and the exclusionary effects of liberal practices” (46). Mehta contends that empire operates as a limit point for liberalism’s supposed universality, which should extend freedom, equality, and national self-determination to all people. Because liberalism was fashioned in a European context and, hence, according to Mehta, can only manage difference by recasting it through that lens, liberal justifications for empire rely on a narrative of historical progress that denies non-Europeans the capacity for self-rule (28–36). For Mehta, empire reveals liberalism’s exclusions. I add...