The British Empire and the Two Sicilies: Constitutions and International Law in a Revolutionary Mediterranean, c. 1800-1860

This dissertation focuses on the British imperial presence in the central Mediterranean in the age of revolutions (1800-1860). It investigates the debates on international order, empire and constitution-making, between British imperial agents and élites, Neapolitan and Sicilian intellectuals, liberals, and policy-makers. By analysing the circulation of people, ideas and institutional practices in the central Mediterranean region (Naples, Sicily, Malta, Ionian Islands), this research shows how imperial and Southern actors interacted in a space in between the European state-system and the colonial world to shape imperial rule beyond colonialism and recast international law upon principles of justice and inclusivity toward lesser polities. This study explores the Mediterranean as a site of ‘transnational’ and ‘global intellectual history’ and speaks to historians of empires, political thought, and international law. The dissertation shows that the British empire developed in the central Mediterranean an inter-polity region of colonies, protectorates and quasi-sovereign states, and supported those projects by Southern policy-makers that were compatible with imperial rule. In this region, encounters between British and Southern actors brought about the fashioning of conceptions of empire and the international at variance with colonial categories of exclusion and hierarchy at a time in which the geopolitical recasting of world order opened new possibilities for the political imagination. In particular, the dissertation unveils a peculiar brand of ‘imperial liberalism’ that combined British rule with constitutions and national freedom. Moreover, it demonstrates that imperial interventions encouraged Southern intellectuals to develop original theories of international law that denounced colonialism and inequalities and advocated national self-determination. Finally, it shows that the imperial practices of legal ordering and intervention in this region were the outcome of mutual interactions with Southern liberalism and that the political projects formulated by Southern thinkers influenced British ideas of empire and liberty in the imperial centre