Diplomacy and Intelligence in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World - by Mika Suonpää & Owain Wright (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Diplomacy and Intelligence in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World examines the activities of diplomats in the expansion of their home country's informal imperial ambitions. Taking a comparative approach, the book combines a focus on the extension of the informal British Empire with an exploration of the imperial ambitions of other states, such as France, Austro-Hungary and Japan.

The authors combine approaches from diplomatic history, intelligence history and microhistory in order to give new insights into the Mediterranean as a 'contested space' between competing informal empires. This study will be of great interest to anyone interested in the history of the Mediterranean region during the 19th century.

Review Quotes

Consular relations provide a remarkable window into the Ottoman and North African Mediterranean in the 19th century, and its interaction with European states. Drawing on unpublished archives from across Europe, this book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the region.
Erik Goldstein, Professor of International Relations and History, Boston University, USA

In this remarkable sequence of essays, the nineteenth-century Mediterranean emerges as a space of infiltration and competition. By reading the different microhistories of diplomats, consuls, and their local agents, and by glancing at their dispatches, reports, and correspondence, we come to realize just how these people shaped not only the institutions of the states they worked for, but also the very area they were inspecting, the Mediterranean Sea. The volume brightly illuminates the impact of knowledge-accumulation and dissemination in perceiving, organizing and controlling a space which would be ever since marked by colonial claims and imperial competition.
Konstantina Zanou, Assistant Professor of Italian, Columbia University, USA

About the Author

Mika Suonpää is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary History at the University of Turku, Finland.

Owain Wright is Senior Lecturer in European History at Leeds Beckett University, UK.