Dr Owain Wright

Locating Italy: East and West in British-Italian Transactions is part of a series of books that examines cross-cultural processes between Great Britain and Italy. The volume explores for the first time British-Italian cultural exchanges in terms of East-West, rather than North-South. In so doing, it reveals that Italy has long been a meeting point of East and West as much as one of North and South. Comprising essays from the fields of history, political science, the philosophy of language, linguistics, literature, and the arts, the collection illustrates that the dynamics of British-Italian transactions have long been shaped by a fascinating process of location and relocation. Locating Italy is pathbreaking in that it questions the traditional categories of North, South, East and West in interactions between these two countries and their respective cultures.

In his famous portrayal of the eminent Victorian Henry Manning, Lytton Strachey commented thus: ‘It was as if the Fates had laid a wager that they would daunt him; and in the end they lost their bet.’ As one of the high-profile British converts to Roman Catholicism (1851), archbishop of Westminster (1865), cardinal (1875) and candidate for the papacy (1878), Manning was one of the most formidable and influential churchmen of his day. Throughout his adult life, he shared an intellectual, respectful and fractious friendship with William Gladstone who, as Liberal party leader and four-time British prime minister (1868–74, 1880–5, 1886, 1892–4), was the most successful and prolific politician of his generation. The relationship between Manning and Gladstone is significant because in his political career the latter paid great attention to the former. Throughout, Gladstone was fascinated by religious polemics, while his views on constitutional government were shaped very much by his own religious convictions.

Massimo D’Azeglio’s famous declaration, ‘We have made Italy: now we must make Italians’, might perhaps have been apocryphal, but its significance was not lost on his British contemporaries. The efforts of Italian leaders to bridge the chasm that existed between the Cavourian state and the populations of the various territories which constituted the Kingdom of Italy might well have been ‘wholly inadequate’,2 but they attracted considerable interest among the leaders and representatives of the country which was the first officially to recognise the new entity in 1861. Historians have written at length on British views and attitudes regarding Italy, Italians, and Italian nationalism prior to unification, but they have devoted surprisingly little attention to the critical period which followed the unified kingdom’s creation. Making use of the official and private correspondence of British political leaders, diplomats and consuls, as well as newspaper articles and the accounts of Britons resident or travelling in the new kingdom, this chapter addresses the neglected subject of ‘official’ British perceptions of Italy during its first decade and a half of unity. As such, it covers a period in which Italian leaders struggled with the formidable challenges of asserting the authority of the new state and forging a sense of national identity in an extremely fragmented country.

© 2017 The Author. History © 2017 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd The history of British relations with the states of pre-unification Italy is a neglected field of enquiry. The research that has been undertaken has tended to focus on the generally good relationship Britain shared with the Kingdom of Sardinia, the state which presided over Italy's national unification between 1859 and 1861. By contrast, the extent to which Britain's poor relations with the Papal States, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and the impact that negative perceptions of those countries had upon the development of British sympathy for Italian nationalism, are little understood. This article on British reactions to what the Victorians perceived as religious ‘persecutions’ in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany begins to redress this imbalance. Tuscany was in many respects one of the more progressive states in the Italian peninsula. Its government was moderate compared with those at Naples and Rome, it was affluent and it invested in a modern communications infrastructure. However, during the years following the revolutionary upheaval of 1848–9, the Tuscan state's policy of religious retrenchment led to a sequence of events – some of which involved British subjects – which were perceived as examples of religious ‘persecution’ in Victorian Britain. British reactions to these events illustrate the extent to which religion could affect British foreign policy during the mid-nineteenth century, and they help to explain the emergence of British sympathy for the Italian nationalist cause during the 1850s.

In 1875 Sir Edward Malet spent just a few months of his diplomatic career as a young attaché at the British Legation in Rome, yet when he came to write his memoirs a quarter of a century later he described it as ‘the pleasantest post in the service’. Malet’s words could easily have been those of a number of other British diplomats who showed a remarkable affection for Italy and the cities which served successively as its capital during the years following Italian unification: Turin (1861-5), Florence (1865-71), and Rome (from 1871). For certain other British representatives, however, life in Italy could be a much less pleasant experience. Many members of the consular service found that their careers brought them experiences to be endured rather than enjoyed, leading them to form very different views on their country of residence. During the mid-nineteenth century, the value of both diplomats and consuls to their home government often rested rather more in their ability to describe and explain foreign affairs than in their function as implementers of foreign policy or representatives of British interests overseas. Such observations and opinions could prove influential, and by comparing and contrasting the personal experiences of such individuals in Italy during the 1860s and ’70s, this paper enhances our understanding of British perceptions of the country at the same time as seeking to account for the strange combination of adoration and contempt they felt towards it during this critical phase of Italian history.

This paper examines the surge in British interest in the island of Sardinia which occurred during the nineteenth century. By exploiting a variety of sources – such as the content of rare publications written by British travellers, the Baedeker and John Murray travel guides, The Times newspaper, and official documents produced by the British Consulate at Cagliari – it aims to construct a picture of the overall impression that the island made upon its British visitors throughout this period. This research attempts to fill something of the void left between past studies which have focused on the British political interest in Italian unification, or on the British cultural fascination with mainland Italy and Sicily. It builds upon the considerable work that Miryam Cabiddu has undertaken in this area. It also supports Maura O’Connor’s suggestion that British enthusiasm for the Risorgimento reflected a desire to see the country remade in a British image, by revealing how British visitors often understood Sardinia’s poor state to be primarily the result of its misgovernment. At the same time, it helps to set into context John Pemble’s observation that the Victorians were only prepared to acknowledge any sense of their own inferiority amid the classical sites of the Mediterranean, by helping to show how narrowly this preparedness applied.

Much has been written about British political and cultural relations with Italy before the country’s unification, while little attention has been paid to Liberal Italy, the unified kingdom which emerged from the Risorgimento in 1861. This article examines a number of incidents which involved innocent and not-so-innocent British residents and travellers in the country between 1867 and 1877. In most of these cases British nationals were detained by the Carabinieri, Italy’s militarised police force, for being unable or for refusing to provide evidence of their identity. Although British subjects were not required to carry passports in Italy, all persons – including Italians – were expected to be in possession of some form of identity document. The Britons concerned were in almost every case ignorant of this regulation, and many of them exacerbated their predicament through obstructive or provocative behaviour. These episodes caused considerable aggravation between the governments of the two countries concerned, creating some friction in an otherwise amicable relationship. This study reveals that British nationals could not claim compensation from the Italian government even if they were deemed to have been mistreated by its agents. Its findings are also consistent with the theory that Victorian notions of supremacy were based very much upon ‘values’; in this case, a fervent belief in the right of private individuals to go about their legitimate business free from encumbrance or intrusive surveillance by the authorities. Finally, besides confirming the suggestion that the Victorians were unaccustomed to carrying identity documents about their person, this examination shows that they felt considerable resentment at having to do so

ABSTRACT

During the nineteenth century the British consular service was often dismissed as an organization with purely commercial responsibilities. A succession of governments and diplomats insisted upon this notion, despite the fact that at certain times both relied very much on consular officials for information on foreign affairs. This dependence was especially evident in Italy during the decade after 1860, when British leaders had lent their moral and diplomatic support to the creation of the modern Italian state against considerable international opposition. During this period their desire not to see the achievement undone led them to maintain a close watch on Italian affairs. The contribution made in this area by the consular service, and the manner in which it was reorganized in response to Italian unification, show how such a role could take priority over its other functions. Although this state of affairs was no doubt exceptional on account of the remarkable level of British interest in the Unification of Italy, it nonetheless provides a clear demonstration of how the organization could be used under certain circumstances. The extent to which British consuls were used to monitor affairs in post-unification Italy also encourages reflection upon the widespread view that British foreign policy rejected interventionism in favour of isolation from European affairs during the 1860s.

When the Risorgimento culminated in the Unification of Italy (1859–61), many British spectators anticipated that it would lead to the rebirth of the part of the world which had produced the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. But a sequence of events soon conspired to undermine this optimism. One of these incidents was the Zamponi affair, which drew British attention to Sardinia in 1870. When a local feud between rival Sardinian families in Terranova (Olbia) resulted in a vendetta against a British vice-consul, and when the Italian authorities failed to intervene, a Royal Navy gunboat was sent to the island, causing a brief upset in the normally amicable relations between Britain and Italy. Examination of the British reaction to the vendetta reveals how the island and its people were perceived by contemporary observers as barbarous and unruly, and provides evidence of how their high expectations of the new Italian state had already been disappointed within a decade of Unification. It also enhances our understanding of the role of British consular officials in Italy, and of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. In particular it exposes a tendency towards gunboat diplomacy during a period in which Britain is generally supposed to have avoided entanglements in European affairs. Above all, in the twenty-first century when the British government has sought through aggression to spread its values and institutional models to parts of the world for which they are not necessarily suited and where they are not necessarily desired, it is worthwhile looking at how Italy once succeeded in disappointing the exponents of this perennial British policy.

The history of British relations with the states of pre-unification Italy is a neglected field of enquiry. The research that has been undertaken has tended to focus on the generally good relationship Britain shared with the Kingdom of Sardinia, the state which presided over Italy’s national unification between 1859 and 1861. By contrast, the extent to which Britain’s poor relations with the Papal States, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and the impact that negative perceptions of those countries had upon the development of British sympathy for Italian nationalism, are little understood. This article on British reactions to what the Victorians perceived as religious ‘persecutions’ in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany begins to redress this imbalance. Tuscany was in many respects one of the more progressive states in the Italian peninsula. Its government was moderate compared with those at Naples and Rome, it was affluent and it invested in a modern communications infrastructure. However, during the years following the revolutionary upheaval of 1848–9, the Tuscan state’s policy of religious retrenchment led to a sequence of events – some of which involved British subjects – which were perceived as examples of religious ‘persecution’ in Victorian Britain. British reactions to these events illustrate the extent to which religion could affect British foreign policy during the mid nineteenth century, and they help to explain the emergence of British sympathy for the Italian nationalist cause during the 1850s.

This article explores the action taken by the British government when the Italian Army occupied Rome in 1870, bringing the Risorgimento and the unification of Italy to a conclusion. It enhances understanding of British policy towards the newlyunified Italy by examining the Gladstone government's decision to maintain a British warship at the port of Civitavecchia throughout the Roman crisis. Previously, this action has been explained as resulting from the British government's need to strike a balance between the pro-Italian sentiments of the United Kingdom's Protestant population on the one hand, and the concerns of its Roman Catholic minority for the safety and dignity of the Pope on the other. While acknowledging the full significance of these concerns, this investigation calls attention to additional factors which help further to explain British policy. First, it contends that the reality of a united Italy had become a source of potential embarrassment to the British Prime Minister, William Gladstone. Secondly, it places the British preparedness to intervene in Italian affairs within the wider context of Great Britain's foreign relations and strategic concerns. In particular, it argues that successive British governments were concerned that the newly-unified Italian state might disintegrate or be dismantled by foreign powers, while concurring with the theory that the British aspired towards an 'anglicised globalisation' of Southern Europe. © 2012 Taylor & Francis.

Diplomacy and Intelligence in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World examines the activities of diplomats in the expansion of their home country's informal imperial ambitions. Taking a comparative approach, the book combines a focus on the extension of the informal British Empire with an exploration of the imperial ambitions of other states, such as France, Austro-Hungary and Japan. The authors combine approaches from diplomatic history, intelligence history and microhistory in order to give new insights into the Mediterranean as a 'contested space' between competing informal empires. This study will be of great interest to anyone interested in the history of the Mediterranean region during the 19th century.

This paper exposes a longstanding British tendency to orientalise Italy on account of its political culture, and explains it as being rooted in an inclination to regard the British system as a superior model. It reveals how quickly British leaders who had supported Italy’s national unification were disappointed by the political and legal practices of Italy during the nineteenth century, how the Italian experience of Fascism led many British observers to conclude that Italy was perhaps not suited to democracy during the twentieth, and how recent media treatment of Silvio Berlusconi’s government remains dominated by the same old stereotypes of corruptness and an alleged inability to establish and operate a ‘normal’ democratic system during the twenty–first.

This book explores the interests of British leaders, diplomats and consuls in the unifying of Italy.