English liberal culture and the Italian question, c. 1850-1918

Abstract

The years between 1850 and 1918 in Britain saw the ascendancy of political Liberalism. The same period in Italy included the central years of the Risorgimento, a process of economic, social and cultural revival during which foreign rulers were expelled from the Italian peninsula, and the various Italian states unified. The aim of the thesis is to trace the Victorian debate on the Italian Question – the question of whether, if and how Italy might be united as a single nation – in order to shed new light on English Liberal culture, understood both as a system of governing values and as the common languages and media through which these were communicated.