Search results

"Whether lauded and encouraged or criticized and maligned, action in solidarity with culturally and geographically distant strangers has been an integral part of European modernity. Traversing the complex political landscape of early modern European empires, this book locates the historical origins of modern global humanitarianism in the recurrent conflict over the ethical treatment of non-Europeans that pitted religious reformers against secular imperial networks. Since the sixteenth-century beginnings of European expansion overseas and in marked opposition to the exploitative logic of predatory imperialism, these reformers - members of Catholic orders and, later, Quakers and other reformist Protestants - developed an ideology and a political practice in defense of the rights and interests of distant "others." They also increasingly made the question of imperial injustice relevant to growing "domestic" publics in Europe. A distinctive institutional model of long-distance advocacy crystallized out of these persistent struggles, becoming the standard weapon of transnational activists"--

The analysis performed shows that there was far more than just one type of socio-political reaction to Verdi's operas in the 1840s (the decade before series of revolutions in Europe, including Italy), and that these operas could be used to construct different collective ideological narratives that could have brought people together for different purposes. Moreover, though the close connection between nineteenth-century Italian opera and Risorgimento nationalism has been taken for granted by many generations of scholars, a careful study of historical evidence of political manifestations during operatic performances clearly demonstrates the limitations of this "natural" view. Instead, I advance a new interactionist hypothesis of interpretive activism and interpretive activists. These activists were the minority in opera's audience that, nevertheless, utilised different resources and techniques to rally the whole audience of a theatrical operatic performance (or at least the large part of it) around a political ideology that was profitable for these activists. It could be Risorgimento republican nationalism in favour of a future Italian unified nation. But it also could be support of pope Pius IX as a possible future leader of the country or even sympathy for the Austrians. Documentary evidence shows that a number of times Verdi's operas were replaced with patriotic popular songs and hymns that were obviously considered "more patriotic" and "more popular" than Verdi's art. The best way to explain the various ways in which Verdi's operas were used as an ideological tool in the Risorgimento era, is to consider opera as an audio-visual "space" that serves as a background for activities that are usually perceived as distracting or disturbing (political demonstrations, public speeches, revolutionary gatherings etc.). That interpretive activists could use the structural (modular structure) and acoustic (enormous orchestral sound range) possibilities and resources of opera to construct an ideological "story", largely ...

This article examines the formative influence of the organizational field of religion on emerging modern forms of popular political mobilization in Britain and the United States in the early nineteenth century when a transition towards enduring campaigns of extended geographical scale occurred. The temporal ordering of mobilization activities reveals the strong presence of religious constituencies and religious organizational models in the mobilizatory sequences that first instituted a mass-produced popular politics. Two related yet analytically distinct generative effects of the religious field can be discerned. First, in both cases the transition toward modern forms of popular mobilization was driven by the religious institutionalization of organizational forms of centralized voluntarism that facilitated extensive collective action. Second, the adoption of different varieties of the same organizational forms led to important divergences. The spread in the United States of societies for moral reformation—in contrast to their non-survival in Britain—steered popular politics there towards a more moralistic framing of public issues. These findings indicate the importance of the organizational field of religion for the configuration of modern forms of popular collective action and confirm the analytical importance of religion's organizational aspects for the study of collective action.

Considering long-distance advocacy as a distinctive institution of European modernity, the article examines the genesis and history of networks engaged in political action on behalf of distant others. Ever since the beginnings of European expansion overseas in the sixteenth century, such networks have originated from a persistent pattern of radicalization of religious actors against rival networks within the context of empire. In the late eighteenth century, the very same processes led to the establishment of modern forms of long-distance advocacy, with the international movement against colonial slavery and the slave trade. Throughout, long-distance advocacy was initiated and carried out by distinctively reformist and activist religious organizations within Catholicism and Protestantism. These findings highlight the importance of religious organizations in the imperial context for the configuration of modern forms of political activism.