Abstract:

Unintended Nations: French Liberals’ Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe, and the Post-Napoleonic World (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025) is about a specific moment in the development of the concept of civilization and the cluster of discourses, institutions, and technologies connected to it — or what we might collectively call civilization-speak — as well as the cross-continental networks that employed these ideas as an organizing principle. The monograph focuses on historical figures in France and the lands that make up significant parts of present-day Greece and Romania from the early Napoleonic era through the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848. It demonstrates how civilization-speak provided a discursive matrix that allowed French liberals to impose their model of modernity on Balkan actors and create informal colonies in the region through the exercise of soft power. Unintended Nations reveals how international partnerships and domestic politics were interwoven in both France and Southeast Europe, notably presenting how these relationships and ideas helped to shape novel national identities and ideologies in the early Greek state as well as Wallachia and Moldavia (lands that would later form the core of modern Romania). This talk discusses the books’ central themes, its historiographical ambitions, and presents key examples from the underlying primary research.

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