4. War, Empire, and Republic in Revolutionary Europe. A Review-Interview with R. Whatmore

Abstract

Richard Whatmore’s last book provides an interdisciplinary approach in intellectual history that centers around some political and economical issues debated in the last decades of the eighteenth-century. The story of how the Genevan représentants tried to preserve the independence of their city in the face of the power of France and Britain is investigated as a case study to set out the dialectic between small and large states in the last years of the Old regime and during the revolutionary period, as well as the role of free trade in indicating the path to reorganise international relationships. Some of the main arguments and conclusions of the book are discussed here with the author: a modern republicanism and its economic foundations, tension between democracy and republicanism, a new stress on the political implications of Physiocracy, an innovative idea of empire investigated from the perspective of continental Europe. The author, Director of the Sussex Centre for Intellectual History, also discusses with us the interdisciplinary characteristics of the current main trends of intellectual history in Britain.