Ideas beyond Borders: Studies in Transnational Intellectual History
About the Book Series
In 1944, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce called his fellow scholars to de-nationalise the study of the past, overcoming the cast in which history had been shaped from the nineteenth century onwards and that had contributed to make the nation a seemingly natural and everlasting phenomenon. Indeed, the scholarly community has had to wait more than half a century for the so-called transnational turn, which has led to many new insights but focused primarily on political and social developments. Considering the renewed interest in intellectual and conceptual history, the aim of ‘Ideas beyond Borders’ is to contribute to a new understanding of the ways in which ideas, discourses, images, and representations have been shaped transnationally, going beyond national, regional, or civilisational borders. The series focuses on transnational concepts and notions, such as Europe, civilisation, pan-region, etc. The timespan ranges, roughly, from the sixteenth century to the present day.
A Cultural History of Tolerance: Ideas, Conflicts, and Protagonists
1st Edition
By Lucia Felici, Girolamo Imbruglia
December 15, 2025
Covering the entire European system and its relations with the East and America, this first global history of tolerance in early modern Europe describes how the ideal of tolerance and its realisation transformed both the religious and political life of the modern world. In the sixteenth century, ...
Geo - Political Spaces: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Carl Schmitt
1st Edition
Edited
By Patricia Chiantera-Stutte, Ulrike Jureit
November 27, 2025
This book focuses on the geographical and geopolitical sources for Carl Schmitt’s multilayered political thinking in order to uncover the relation between the political and the geographical aspects of his concept of space from 1939 to 1950. The aim is therefore to open up a field of enquiry, ...
Ethnic Expositions in Italy, 1880 to 1940: Humans on Exhibition
1st Edition
By Guido Abbattista
July 30, 2025
Comprehensively analyzing for the first time the phenomenon of ethnic living expositions in Italy between the 19th and 20th centuries, this book deals with the subject from a comparative European perspective and over the long term, studying analogies and differences in precedents as far back as the...
Europe and the East: Historical Ideas of Eastern and Southeast Europe, 1789-1989
1st Edition
Edited
By Mark Hewitson, Jan Vermeiren
November 28, 2024
This volume investigates competing ideas, images, and stereotypes of a European ‘East’, exploring its role in defining European and national conceptions of self and other since the eighteenth century. Through a set of original case studies, this collection explores the intersection between ...
East Central European Crisis Discourses in the Twentieth Century: A Never-Ending Story?
1st Edition
Edited
By Balázs Trencsényi, Lucija Balikić, Una Blagojević, Isidora Grubački
August 20, 2024
The term “crisis,” with its complex history, has emerged as one of the pivotal notions of political modernity. As such, reconstructing the ways the discourse of crisis functioned in various contexts and historical moments gives us a unique insight not only into a series of conceptual ...
Mediterranean Europe(s): Rethinking Europe from its Southern Shores
1st Edition
Edited
By Matthew D’Auria, Fernanda Gallo
May 27, 2024
This book investigates how ideas of and discourses about Europe have been affected by images of the Mediterranean Sea and its many worlds from the nineteenth century onwards. Surprisingly, modern scholars have often neglected such an influence and, in fact, in most histories of the idea of Europe ...
Global Perspectives in Modern Italian Culture: Knowledge and Representation of the World in Italy from the Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century
1st Edition
Edited
By Guido Abbattista
May 31, 2023
Global Perspectives in Modern Italian Culture presents a series of unexplored case studies from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, each demonstrating how travellers, scientists, Catholic missionaries, scholars and diplomats coming from the Italian peninsula contributed to understandings ...
The Political Thought of Thomas Spence: Beyond Poverty and Empire
1st Edition
By Matilde Cazzola
May 31, 2023
The book is an intellectual analysis of the political ideas of English radical thinker Thomas Spence (1750–1814), who was renowned for his "Plan", a proposal for the abolition of private landownership and the replacement of state institutions with a decentralized parochial organization. This system...
Cosmopolitan Italy in the Age of Nations: Transnational Visions from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century
1st Edition
Edited
By Edoardo Tortarolo
December 30, 2022
Modern Italian historiography has undergone a substantial revision in the last quarter of a century. From an almost exclusive focus on the process of nation-building, the attention of historians has shifted. The most innovative research is now devoted to assessing to what extent the cosmopolitan ...
The Comintern and the Global South: Global Designs/Local Encounters
1st Edition
Edited
By Anne Garland Mahler, Paolo Capuzzo
December 30, 2022
The Comintern and the Global South: Global Designs/Local Encounters studies the relations and productive tensions between the Third International, intellectual histories of racial justice and anti-imperialism, as well as other forms of internationalism. Building on extant institutional histories of...
Italian Elitism and the Reshaping of Democracy in the United States
1st Edition
By Giorgio Volpe
September 26, 2022
This book deals with the reception of Italian elitism in the United States, identifying its key protagonists, phases, and themes. It starts from the reconstruction of the scientific and political debates aroused in the United States by the works of Mosca, Pareto, and Michels, and moves on to define...