Exile represented a fundamental experience in shaping Italian national identity. This book investigates the contribution of the Italian exile community in Europe and Latin America in the post Napoleonic era to imagining a new Italian political and economic community. By looking at the writings of such exiles, the book challenges recent historiography regarding the lack of genuine liberal culture in the Risorgimento. The book argues that these émigrés' involvement in debates with British, continental, and American intellectuals, hitherto ignored in the historiography, points to the emergence of ... More

Exile represented a fundamental experience in shaping Italian national identity. This book investigates the contribution of the Italian exile community in Europe and Latin America in the post Napoleonic era to imagining a new Italian political and economic community. By looking at the writings of such exiles, the book challenges recent historiography regarding the lack of genuine liberal culture in the Risorgimento. The book argues that these émigrés' involvement in debates with British, continental, and American intellectuals, hitherto ignored in the historiography, points to the emergence of liberalism and Romanticism as international ideologies shared by a community of patriots from Southern Europe as well as Latin America, and demonstrates that the Risorgimento first developed as a variation upon such global trends.