| Summary: | Mediterranean states are often thought to have ‘democratized’ only in the post-war era, as authoritarian regimes were successively overthrown. On its eastern and southern shores, the process is still contested. This book looks back to an earlier era, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when talk about establishing some modern version of ‘democracy’ in the region first began. By the 1860s, representative regimes had been established throughout southern Europe, and representation was also the subject of experiment and debate in Ottoman territories. Talk about democracy, its merits and limitations, accompanied much of this experimentation—though there was no agreement as to whether or how it could be given stable political form. This book assembles experts in the history of the region, who have been exploring these themes collaboratively, to compare and contrast Mediterranean experiences, so that they can be set alongside better-known debates and experiments in North Atlantic states. States in the region all experienced subordination to northern ‘great powers’. In this context, their inhabitants had to grapple with broader changes in ideas about state and society while struggling to maintain meaningful self-rule at the level of the polity, and self-respect at the level of culture. The book aims to bring to an English-reading public fresh information and ideas about a region whose experiences during the ‘age of revolutions’ are at best patchily known and understood, as well as to expand understanding of the complex and variegated history of democracy as idea and practice.
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