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This chapter looks at the challenging subject of Scottish and Irish reservations about the nature of empire even while participating in it. It identifies the presence of Scottish and Irish societies abroad in the British Empire as means of exporting nationalities, which had by 1801 officially disappeared into the United Kingdom. It suggests that notwithstanding enthusiastic participation in colonialism by many Scottish and Irish figures, where certain intellectual or political structures or networks were in place, a different attitude, ‘Fratriotism’ — the espousal of the rights of other countries as displaced versions of one's own — was an important component in the Scottish and Irish experience of empire. Extended consideration is given to the cases of Boswell, Byron, and Cochrane.

The year 1796 was marked by Napoleon Bonaparte's brilliant victories in North Italy. The French victories in Italy made possible the creation of the Cisalpine Republic in the Po valley. Milan immediately became, in 1796, a center to which patriots and revolutionaries congregated from all parts of Italy. Other Italian republics were soon set up on the model of the Cisalpine, and in fact, by the turn of 1797–1798, there was a general alarm at the prospect of a “Cisalpinization” of Europe. The Cisalpine Republic is best understood in a broad perspective. This chapter begins with a view of “world revolution” as seen in 1796 from Paris. It then turns to the French attitude to revolution in Italy, then shifts the point of observation to Italy itself, in an attempt to describe the sources of revolutionary agitation in that country from an Italian standpoint. The closing section presents an account of the Kingdom of Corsica.

This chapter explores the sociolinguistic significance of teachers' stancetaking in a Corsican bilingual school, with a specific focus on how teachers take up stances toward the two languages of the classroom (Corsican and French) and simultaneously project stances and identities onto their students. The chapter analyzes stance in the details of individual instances of classroom interaction as well as in the trajectories of participant roles taken up by social actors over time. It demonstrates the salience of the language ideological and institutional contexts for the structuring of paired interactional stances and indexical relations between language use and social meanings, and argues that stancetaking both reflects and constitutes the sociolinguistic order.

This book is about the prehistoric archaeology of Europe—the lives and deaths of peoples and cultures—about how we became human; the rise of hunters; the birth and growth of society; the emergence of art; the beginnings of agriculture, villages, towns and cities, wars and conquest, peace and trade—the plans and ideas, achievements and failures, of our ancestors across hundreds of thousands of years. It is a story of humanity on planet Earth. It’s also about the study of the past—how archaeologists have dug into the ground, uncovered the remaining traces of these ancient peoples, and begun to make sense of that past through painstaking detective work. This book is about prehistoric societies from the Stone Age into the Iron Age. The story of European prehistory is one of spectacular growth and change. It begins more than a million years ago with the first inhabitants. The endpoint of this journey through the continent’s past is marked by the emergence of the literate societies of classical Greece and Rome. Because of a long history of archaeological research and the richness of the prehistoric remains, we know more about the past of Europe than almost anywhere else. The prehistory of Europe is, in fact, one model of the evolution of society, from small groups of early human ancestors to bands of huntergatherers, through the arrival of the first farmers to the emergence of hierarchical societies and powerful states in the Bronze and Iron Ages. The chapters of our story are the major ages of prehistoric time (Stone, Bronze, and Iron). The content involves the places, events, and changes of those ages from ancient to more recent times. The focus of the chapters is on exceptional archaeological sites that provide the background for much of this story. Before we can begin, however, it is essential to review the larger context in which these developments took place. This chapter is concerned with the time and space setting of the archaeology of Europe.

The introduction of iron after 1000 BC brought new tools and weapons to Europe. Smelting technology and higher furnace temperatures were likely the key to iron production, which is generally thought to have originated in Anatolia around 1400 BC among the Hittites, but there are a few earlier examples of iron artifacts as old as 2300 BC in Turkey. Iron produced sharper, more readily available implements and was in great demand. In contrast to copper and tin, whose sources were limited, iron was found in a variety of forms in many places across the continent. Veins of iron ore were exploited in Iberia, Britain, the Alps, the Carpathian Mountains, and elsewhere. Bog iron was exploited in northern Europe. Carbonate sources of iron in other areas enabled local groups to obtain the raw materials necessary for producing this important material. At the same time, the collapse of the dominant Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean changed the flow of raw materials and finished products across Europe. Greece fell into a Dark Age following the demise of the Mycenaean city-states. The Etruscans were on the rise in Italy. Rome was a small town at the border of the Etruscan region. Soon, however, new centers of power in classic Greece and Rome emerged, bringing writing and, with it, history to Europe. Again, we can observe important and dramatic differences between the “classic” areas of the Mediterranean and the northern parts of “barbarian” Europe. The chronology for the Iron Age in much of Europe is portrayed in Figure 6.2. The Iron Age begins earlier in the Mediterranean area, ca. 900 BC, where the Classical civilizations of Greece, the Etruscans, and eventually Rome emerge in the first millennium BC. Rome and its empire expanded rapidly, conquering much of western Europe in a few decades before the beginning of the Common Era and Britain around ad 43, effectively ending the prehistoric Iron Age in these parts of the continent. The Iron Age begins somewhat later in Scandinavia, around 500 BC.

This chapter focuses on the official appointment of the Duke of Grafton as British prime minister in October 1768. Grafton was given full power and responsibility, and he enjoyed the King's wholehearted support throughout his brief ministry. Though he had more ability and character than tradition has accorded him, he was distracted by his private life, women and horse racing. The chapter also discusses the problems of his administration concerning the fiasco over Corsica, confrontation with John Wilkes over the Middlesex election and the ongoing American crisis.

The increasing debility of the Ottoman Empire brought the Mediterranean to the attention of the Russian tsars. From the end of the seventeenth century Russian power spread southwards towards the Sea of Azov and the Caucasus. Peter the Great sliced away at the Persian empire, and the Ottomans, who ruled the Crimea, felt threatened. For the moment, the Russians were distracted by conflict with the Swedes for dominion over the Baltic, but Peter sought free access to the Black Sea as well. These schemes had the flavour of the old Russia Peter had sought to reform, just as much as they had the flavour of the new technocratic Russia he had sought to create. The idea that the tsar was the religious and even political heir to the Byzantine emperor – that Muscovy was the ‘Third Rome’ – had not been swept aside when Peter established his new capital on the Baltic, at St Petersburg. Equally, the Russians could now boast hundreds of vessels capable of challenging Turkish pretensions in the Black Sea, even if they were far from capable of mounting a full naval war, and the ships themselves were badly constructed, notwithstanding Peter the Great’s famous journey to inspect the shipyards of western Europe, under the alias Pyotr Mikhailovich. In sum, this was a fleet that was ‘poor in discipline, training, and morale, unskilful in manoeuvre, and badly administered and equipped’; a contemporary remarked that ‘nothing has been under worse management than the Russian navy’, for the imperial naval stores had run out of hemp, tar and nails. The Russians began to hire Scottish admirals in an attempt to create a modern command structure, and they turned to Britain for naval stores; this relationship was further bolstered by the intense trading relationship between Britain and Russia, which had continued to flourish throughout the eighteenth century while England’s Levant trade withered: in the last third of the eighteenth century a maximum of twenty-seven British ships sailed to the Levant in any one year, while as many as 700 headed for Russia.

This chapter discusses the Curacaoan composer Jules Blasini (1847-1887) a child prodigy who had gone to Paris to study at the conservatory and was probably the first to bring back sheet music of Chopin to Curacao tracing his European origins while discussing the socio-cultural and political situation after the abolition of slavery on the island in 1863. It deals with the Sephardic Jewish community too.

Virginia Woolf moves toward her distinctive voice and finds her rhythmic movement in her 1922 and 1923 diary books. Her 1922 diary stands out as one of her most resilient diaries. Across the year, she turns from male voices repeatedly—and with assurance. In fact, she replaces “unsympathetic” male voices, male sites, and male works with female. She feels she is striking now closer to her own voice. She also activates the “quick change” movement envisioned in her 1921 diary. In her 1923 diary she moves on many levels. She writes six (surface) play scenes in her diary while also pursuing her soul and the rush of “extraordinary emotions” she begins to feel. She seeks greater freedom and movement and sets her eyes on London once more. In 1922, Woolf reads Alie Badenhorst’s Boer War Diary, a powerful anti-war document and important addition to her understanding of women and war. In July 1923, she receives James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to Corsica. She finds there a journal bold in experiment; rich in portraits, voice, and movement; and baring of the soul.

This chapter reveals the continuity of colonial thinking about geopolitics after the end of the Seven Years War. It shows how the unsettled state of Europe continued to trouble colonists after 1763. From its earliest days, the patriot movement warned about the renewal of international tensions, criticizing British colonial policy alongside the isolationist turn of British foreign policy as sources of weaknesses. Despite the conquest of Canada, the prospect of a French war of revenge and the spectre of French infiltration continued to dominate colonial discourse, maintaining its hold over conspiratorial thinking. These fears reached a height in the late 1760s and early 1770s, when a string of international crises in Poland, Corsica, the Falkland Islands, and Sweden unleashed a series of major war scares that shaped and tempered patriot manoeuvrings during the imperial crisis.

This chapter explores Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous and infamous distinction between the general will and the will in general. As the basis for an account of how legitimacy emerges within political life, the general will is evident when the whole community considers questions that pertain to the whole community, involving everyone actively in legislating that which must combine what is chosen with what is right. The fragile work of creating a distinctive political domain is for Rousseau all that can interrupt various versions of the “right” of the strongest. If eroded or muted in most instances, there were general wills that were still in the making. Rousseau considered this to be the case with the island of Corsica for which he was asked to play the role of legislator. Formerly colonized by the Moors and the Genoans, Rousseau aimed to figure out how the island could become postcolonial by moving beyond conditions of economic dependence and poverty. Although outlining some influential criticisms of Rousseau’s general will, it is defended as indispensable to projects of forming collectivities that do more than aggregate individual, private interests. Fanon advances this discussion by exploring how legitimate alternatives can be forged out of colonial circumstances.

Starting from a her own relationship to Corsica, a place where she was not born and yet considers like home, Barbara Cassin seeks to circumscribe the experience of nostalgia, from the Greek nostos, meaning return, and algia, meaning suffering or pain, and so the pain or suffering of return, the desire for return once one has left and is far away from one’s home. Cassin sets the stage for her analysis: Through the exploration of the founding myths of exile and impossible return exemplified by the Odyssey and the Aeneid, and through an examination of German philosopher Hannah Arendt’s own relationship to her mother tongue while in exile, she will try to rethink what it means to be at home, to be away from home, and what it might mean for us today to rethink the home not in terms of rootedness, place, and self-identity, but exile, language, and alterity.

This chapter takes up the complex interrelationship between minority language practices, the construction of place/space and processes of minority language identification. The specific focus is on how linguistic boundaries and statuses are negotiated through Corsican along with other languages in the commercial and tourist spheres in the context of changing economic practices and circulating discourses about plurilingual, European and global markets and forms of citizenship. Using examples of commercial and public texts and images from the linguistic landscape viewed by tourists, as well as some brief examples of tourist interaction, the chapter identifies both continuity and change in language ideological positionings. It further introduces the notion of ‘imagined interaction’ to describe the discursive worlds proposed by tourist texts and image.