Books by Gavin Murray-Miller
Mediterranean Europe(s): Rethinking Europe from its Southern Shores, 2023
This chapter examines the role that the Mediterranean played in constructions of imperial soverei... more This chapter examines the role that the Mediterranean played in constructions of imperial sovereignty and European national identity. In particular, it treats the ways in which Europe’s encounter with the Muslim Mediterranean engendered multiple forms of identity that often cut across imperial formations. France at once promoted ideas of itself as a “Latin” race and a “Muslim power.” Spanish colonialists and Africanistas agonized over their country’s European credentials and yet promoted a vision of a shared Iberian-Arab racial identity as Spain expanded into Morocco. Italian publicists and nationalists looked back to the glories of Rome and turned their eyes to Libya and the dreams of a colonial African empire. These and other examples reveal that the Mediterranean was an imperial space, but a space in which concepts of European sovereignty and identity were reformulated to fit the contours of imperial nationhood. Framed otherwise, the Mediterranean became a laboratory in which ideas of Europeanness were subject to refashioning and re-invention. ,
Oxford University Press, 2022
Bloomsbury , 2020
From book jacket:
Revolutionary Europe is an original examination of radical political movements... more From book jacket:
Revolutionary Europe is an original examination of radical political movements during Europe's long 19th century. It employs both national and transnational contexts, incorporating new debates in Atlantic history, empire studies and cultural history to give a comprehensive narrative of the period from 1775 to 1922.
Rather than assessing revolution as a purely theoretical, socially-driven force or a structural phenomenon, the book presents revolution as a process of community building and cultural identification born from instances of acute social and political crisis. Taking into account various moments of political upheaval during the 19th century, including the French, Russian and 1848 revolutions, it explores the ways in which political actors attempted to construct new definitions of sovereignty and social unity in a period characterized by vast social, economic and governmental change.
In a wide-ranging text that covers Britain and much of continental Europe in detail, as well as reaching out to the Americas and Atlantic and Mediterranean Worlds, Gavin Murray-Miller provides an authoritative transnational study of revolution in the 19th-century age of high nationalism.
Table of contents
Introduction
1. Patriots and Citizens: America and France (1763 – 1789)
2. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death: Radicalizing the French Revolution
3. Artisans, Citoyennes and Slaves: The Meaning of Equality it a Revolutionary World
4. Taming the Furies of Revolution: Order, Disorder and Empire (1794 – 1815)
5. Transnational Revolutionaries: Post-Napoleonic Europe and the Mediterranean (1815 – 1835)
6. Socialism and Social Protest: From Reform to Radicalism (1815 – 1848)
7. The Indian Summer of Romantic Revolution: 1848 and the Reassessment of European Radicalism
8. The Revolutionary Tradition at a Crossroads: The Anarchists (1865 – 1905)
9. The Revival and Failure of Revolutionary Constitutionalism: The Russian and Ottoman Empires (1905 – 1914)
10. Forging the New Regime: War and Revolution in the Russian Empire (1914 – 1922)
Epilogue: Revolutionary Currents Beyond Europe
Selected Bibliography
Index
University of Nebraska Press, 2017
France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization Series
The Cult of the Modern focuses on n... more France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization Series
The Cult of the Modern focuses on nineteenth-century France and Algeria and examines the role that ideas of modernity and modernization played in both national and colonial programs during the years of the Second Empire and the early Third Republic. Gavin Murray-Miller rethinks the subject by examining the idiomatic use of modernity in French cultural and political discourse. The Cult of the Modern argues that the modern French republic is a product of nineteenth-century colonialism rather than a creation of the Enlightenment or the French Revolution. This analysis contests the predominant Parisian and metropolitan contexts that have traditionally framed French modernity studies, noting the important role that colonial Algeria and the administration of Muslim subjects played in shaping understandings of modern identity and governance among nineteenth-century politicians and intellectuals.
In synthesizing the narratives of continental France and colonial North Africa, Murray-Miller proposes a new framework for nineteenth-century French political and cultural history, bringing into sharp relief the diverse ways in which the French nation was imagined and represented throughout the country’s turbulent postrevolutionary history, as well as the implications for prevailing understandings of France today.
Gavin Murray-Miller is a lecturer of modern European history at Cardiff University.
“A provocative—and convincing—account of how the conception of modernity became a vital means to political action and legitimacy in nineteenth-century France.”—Benjamin Franklin Martin, Katheryn J., Lewis C., and Benjamin Price Professor of History at Louisiana State University and author of France in 1938
“A serious and ambitious work that will inspire a great deal of debate, which I imagine will last some time. The author is a talented thinker.”—William Gallois, associate professor of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history at the University of Exeter and author of A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony
Chapter in the Book: Mediterranean Modernism: Intercultural Exchange and Aesthetic Development, e... more Chapter in the Book: Mediterranean Modernism: Intercultural Exchange and Aesthetic Development, eds., Adam Goldwyn and Renée Silverman (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016), pp. 317-342. ISBN: 978-1-137-58927-9
Articles by Gavin Murray-Miller
Europe and The East: Historical Ideas of Eastern and Southeast Europe, 1789-1989, 2023
Assessments of Europe’s engagement with the Orient have customarily drawn upon Edward
Said’s theo... more Assessments of Europe’s engagement with the Orient have customarily drawn upon Edward
Said’s theory of Orientalism, an approach that has critically examined the discursive
relationship between East and West. While Said’s theoretical framework has been innovative
in understanding concepts of identity and the language of cultural difference that
underwrote global power relationships, it too often fails to recognise the multiple discourses
and traditions that shaped European perspectives on the ‘East’. This chapter proposes a more nuanced understanding of the ‘East’ in modern European cultural and intellectual history. It assesses the various grammars of European Orientalism in the long nineteenth century, covering French and British colonial ideologies, Austro-Hungarian perceptions of the Balkans, and the ambiguities that characterised the Russian and Ottoman empires. By highlighting the multiple registers of European Orientalism, it argues for a reassessment of the Saidian framework that persists to see Orientalism as a static, trans-historical epistemology. It examines various Orientalist typologies and situates them within their specific historical contexts to re-conceptualise the ‘East’ as a fluid and pluralist category within nineteenth-century European culture. Ultimately, this chapter investigates the complicated dynamics that characterised Europe’s many Orientalist cultures and urge a greater appreciation for the historical experiences that conditioned them across the continent.
Revue d’Histoire Contemporaine de l’Afrique , 2022
Au début du xx e siècle, les communautés musulmanes d'Afrique du Nord ont réagi à l'expansion imp... more Au début du xx e siècle, les communautés musulmanes d'Afrique du Nord ont réagi à l'expansion impériale européenne de diverses manières. Comme le démontre cet article, la période entre l'invasion du Maroc (1907) et la guerre italo-turque (1911-1912) a vu une montée de nouveaux réseaux politiques et paramilitaires traversant les frontières impériales. Ces réseaux, créés à partir de relations religieuses et intellectuelles préexistantes en Afrique et en Asie, ont créé un espace alternatif pour l'activisme politique et mobilisé les populations à travers le monde musulman. En se penchant sur les histoires interconnectées des empires nord-africains, cet article adopte une approche transrégionale qui montre comment les réflexions nées du « tournant transnational » de la recherche historique peuvent ouvrir de nouvelles perspectives sur les processus d'échanges et d'interaction entre les empires.
The Historical Journal, 2020
During the nineteenth century, the Muslim Mediterranean became a locus of competing imperial proj... more During the nineteenth century, the Muslim Mediterranean became a locus of competing imperial projects led by the Ottomans and European powers. This article examines how the migration of people and ideas across North Africa and Asia complicated processes of imperial consolidation and exposed the ways in which North Africa, Europe, and Asia were connected through trans-imperial influences that often undermined the jurisdictional sovereignty of imperial states. It demonstrates that cross-border migrations and cultural transfers both frustrated and abetted imperial projects while allowing for the imagining of new types of solidarities that transcended national and imperial cate-gorizations. In analysing these factors, this article argues for a rethinking of the metropole-periphery relationship by highlighting the important role print and trans-imperial networks played in shaping the Mediterranean region.
Istoryia, 2020
This article examines the relationship between war, revolution, and citizenship during the Paris ... more This article examines the relationship between war, revolution, and citizenship during the Paris Commune of 1871. The event marked a moment in which French radicals began to rethink the nation's revolutionary heritage as they proposed alternative models for a reconstituted republican government and society. War and military conflict were important factors in these ideological considerations, especially as radical republicans grappled with concepts of offensive and defensive revolutionary strategies. As this article suggests, these arguments came to inform novel ideas regarding republican citizenship and state institutions, demonstrating that the civil war of 1871 was conceptualized as a turning point in France's revolutionary tradition in the 19th century.
Middle East: Topics and Arguments, 2019
Recent histories of the Mediterranean have drawn attention to the region’s internal diversity and... more Recent histories of the Mediterranean have drawn attention to the region’s internal diversity and provided a basis for considering the sea and its surrounding coastal areas as a place of trans-national entanglements. While this space was a contact zone between cultures, the dynamics and practices of Mediterranean imperialism frequently extended beyond a strict colonizer-colonized relationship. By examining networks forged through émigré communities, journalism, religion and finances, we can rethink concepts of the contact zone within a trans-imperial context. Assessing forms of engagement across and between imperial frontiers allows us to question the familiar metropole- periphery relationship and examine the connective webs that linked nodal cities and multiple peripheries spanning Europe, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean.
French History, 2018
Between 1852 and 1870, Napoleon III and his Bonapartist entourage successfully established a Seco... more Between 1852 and 1870, Napoleon III and his Bonapartist entourage successfully established a Second Napoleonic Empire that encouraged a 'cult of the emperor', emphasizing the strong and even mystical bond between the sovereign and the people. While the 'spectacular politics' of the Bonapartist regime have been examined in detail, far less attention has been given to how Bonapartist patriotism was applied within a colonial context and, more specifically, in relation to Algeria. This article examines iterations of Bonapartist dynastic patriotism and nationalist politics in North Africa. It argues that an evaluation of French imperial sovereignty and practices in the years prior to the Third Republic can help to diversify our understanding of the French colonial experience and propose models that diverged from the narrative of republican colonialism in crucial ways during the post-revolutionary period.
ФРАНЦУЗСКИЙ ЕЖЕГОДНИК (Annuaire d’Études Française), Oct 2017
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans spread out across the globe. They colon... more During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans spread out across the globe. They colonized territories in Africa, Asia and the Americas and created homelands thousands of miles away from the European continent. This essay looks at the influence of European settler communities on the currents of nationalism and identity in an age of empire. Moving through Barbados, Algiers, Cairo and Tashkent, it offers a sweeping panorama that explores the meaning of “Europe” for those on the continent as well as those who traveled and lived abroad. Drawing upon recent scholarship in colonial and nationality studies, this essay illuminates the possibilities of a global European history and speculates on the impact that migration and globalization continue to have on Europe to this day.
Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, 40:3 (Winter 2014), 2014
Modernity has typically been considered a process consisting of “modernizing” initiatives concern... more Modernity has typically been considered a process consisting of “modernizing” initiatives concerned with nation-building, industrial economic development and new social and political practices associated with democratization. This article engages ongoing debates regarding the import and meaning of modernity for historians and argues in favor of a historically-situated understanding of the modern based upon an examination of social power and identity in post-revolutionary France. In particular, it assesses the transformation of social and political relationships in the nineteenth century as France embraced mass democracy and overseas imperial expansion in North Africa, arguing that modernity became a convenient means of preserving elite primacy and identity in an age increasingly oriented toward egalitarianism, democratic participation and the acquisition of global empires.
French Historical Studies, vol. 37, no. 2, Apr 2014
The making of the French colonial republic in the nineteenth century has often been examined prim... more The making of the French colonial republic in the nineteenth century has often been examined primarily as a metropolitan-centered enterprise, dictating a history focused on Parisian politicians and French elites that excludes the peripheral influences of the settler community. This article looks at the often marginalized dialogue between metropolitan republicans and Algerian activists that grew up during the Second Empire, revisiting an important moment in the making of France’s “modern” republican democracy. Through an examination of the Algerian newspapers and publications, it assess the role that Algerian public opinion played in the “republican renaissance” of the 1860s, detailing how Algerian polemicists consciously tailored the ideological tenets espoused by moderate republicans on the continent to fit the contours of colonial society to elaborate a brand of republican colonialism that would, in time, provide the ideological basis for the colonial republic. In placing nineteenth-century French political history in a trans-Mediterranean framework, this article challenges the customary history of hexagonal France, indicating how Algerian activists encouraged a re-thinking of the French nation and citizenship that would, in time, encourage the conception of a French imperial nation-state supported under the Third Republic.
French Colonial History, vol. 15 , 2014
The Parenthetical Review, Jun 2014
While modern tourism has, as Ilan Stavans notes, become controlled, determined and even perfuncto... more While modern tourism has, as Ilan Stavans notes, become controlled, determined and even perfunctory in many respects, travel accounts from the nineteenth century continue to demonstrate the continued possibilities endemic to the experience of travel prior to the rise of the tourist industry and the guide book. This essay examines the practice and culture of tourism as it has become known to the West, and questions whether the “foreign” remains a salient concept in a world shaped by processes of colonial modernization and globalization. Through an assessment of tourism and imperialism from the Mediterranean to Japan during the nineteenth century, it seeks to explore how Europeans abroad grappled with incipient trends in globalization, migration and cultural hybridity, noting the implications these phenomena hold for our own forms of recreational travel today.
ARC: The Journal of The Faculty of Religious Studies, vol. 38, 2010
Peer English: The Journal of New Critical Thinking, vol. 3, 2008
While post-colonial theorist have characterized European imperialism as a system of domination an... more While post-colonial theorist have characterized European imperialism as a system of domination and representation in which Europeans defined themselves against a colonial “other,” French encounters with colonial Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century often reflected an ambivalence regarding colonization that undermined attempts to construct a stable French colonial identity. The subjective experiences of French travelers mimicked the political diffidence evident in governmental circles in the years prior to the Third Republic as France attempted to come to terms with its new colonial role in the world. Reflexive themes of modernity espoused by both travelers and imperial ideologues frequently illuminated the internal tensions and antagonisms which shaped modern French colonial discourse in Algeria, revealing the fragility of French colonial identity prior to the “civilizing mission” asseverated under the Third Republic. In examining the tensions which framed the emergence of modern French colonial discourse, claims of metropolitan domination and power came to be simultaneously substantiated and challenged in collective accounts of French colonial travel.
“Beyond Tragedy: NATO’s Intervention in the Former Yugoslavia"
Hindsight, vol. 1, 2007
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Books by Gavin Murray-Miller
Revolutionary Europe is an original examination of radical political movements during Europe's long 19th century. It employs both national and transnational contexts, incorporating new debates in Atlantic history, empire studies and cultural history to give a comprehensive narrative of the period from 1775 to 1922.
Rather than assessing revolution as a purely theoretical, socially-driven force or a structural phenomenon, the book presents revolution as a process of community building and cultural identification born from instances of acute social and political crisis. Taking into account various moments of political upheaval during the 19th century, including the French, Russian and 1848 revolutions, it explores the ways in which political actors attempted to construct new definitions of sovereignty and social unity in a period characterized by vast social, economic and governmental change.
In a wide-ranging text that covers Britain and much of continental Europe in detail, as well as reaching out to the Americas and Atlantic and Mediterranean Worlds, Gavin Murray-Miller provides an authoritative transnational study of revolution in the 19th-century age of high nationalism.
Table of contents
Introduction
1. Patriots and Citizens: America and France (1763 – 1789)
2. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death: Radicalizing the French Revolution
3. Artisans, Citoyennes and Slaves: The Meaning of Equality it a Revolutionary World
4. Taming the Furies of Revolution: Order, Disorder and Empire (1794 – 1815)
5. Transnational Revolutionaries: Post-Napoleonic Europe and the Mediterranean (1815 – 1835)
6. Socialism and Social Protest: From Reform to Radicalism (1815 – 1848)
7. The Indian Summer of Romantic Revolution: 1848 and the Reassessment of European Radicalism
8. The Revolutionary Tradition at a Crossroads: The Anarchists (1865 – 1905)
9. The Revival and Failure of Revolutionary Constitutionalism: The Russian and Ottoman Empires (1905 – 1914)
10. Forging the New Regime: War and Revolution in the Russian Empire (1914 – 1922)
Epilogue: Revolutionary Currents Beyond Europe
Selected Bibliography
Index
The Cult of the Modern focuses on nineteenth-century France and Algeria and examines the role that ideas of modernity and modernization played in both national and colonial programs during the years of the Second Empire and the early Third Republic. Gavin Murray-Miller rethinks the subject by examining the idiomatic use of modernity in French cultural and political discourse. The Cult of the Modern argues that the modern French republic is a product of nineteenth-century colonialism rather than a creation of the Enlightenment or the French Revolution. This analysis contests the predominant Parisian and metropolitan contexts that have traditionally framed French modernity studies, noting the important role that colonial Algeria and the administration of Muslim subjects played in shaping understandings of modern identity and governance among nineteenth-century politicians and intellectuals.
In synthesizing the narratives of continental France and colonial North Africa, Murray-Miller proposes a new framework for nineteenth-century French political and cultural history, bringing into sharp relief the diverse ways in which the French nation was imagined and represented throughout the country’s turbulent postrevolutionary history, as well as the implications for prevailing understandings of France today.
Gavin Murray-Miller is a lecturer of modern European history at Cardiff University.
“A provocative—and convincing—account of how the conception of modernity became a vital means to political action and legitimacy in nineteenth-century France.”—Benjamin Franklin Martin, Katheryn J., Lewis C., and Benjamin Price Professor of History at Louisiana State University and author of France in 1938
“A serious and ambitious work that will inspire a great deal of debate, which I imagine will last some time. The author is a talented thinker.”—William Gallois, associate professor of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history at the University of Exeter and author of A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony
Articles by Gavin Murray-Miller
Said’s theory of Orientalism, an approach that has critically examined the discursive
relationship between East and West. While Said’s theoretical framework has been innovative
in understanding concepts of identity and the language of cultural difference that
underwrote global power relationships, it too often fails to recognise the multiple discourses
and traditions that shaped European perspectives on the ‘East’. This chapter proposes a more nuanced understanding of the ‘East’ in modern European cultural and intellectual history. It assesses the various grammars of European Orientalism in the long nineteenth century, covering French and British colonial ideologies, Austro-Hungarian perceptions of the Balkans, and the ambiguities that characterised the Russian and Ottoman empires. By highlighting the multiple registers of European Orientalism, it argues for a reassessment of the Saidian framework that persists to see Orientalism as a static, trans-historical epistemology. It examines various Orientalist typologies and situates them within their specific historical contexts to re-conceptualise the ‘East’ as a fluid and pluralist category within nineteenth-century European culture. Ultimately, this chapter investigates the complicated dynamics that characterised Europe’s many Orientalist cultures and urge a greater appreciation for the historical experiences that conditioned them across the continent.