‘To the Barricades’ is a collaborative website project that seeks to chart and compare the development of forms of popular contention and protest in Europe in the years 1815-1850 – from the final fall of Napoleon to the collapse of the revolutions of 1848.
The premise of the project is that, in various important ways, protest and contention develop in similar ways across Europe, in part in reaction to common events, in part as a function of new tools of communication and the rise of political émigré populations, and in part because of the rise of industrialization and the development of organized popular movements.
Developments are uneven, path dependent, and often heavily inflected by local issues and contingencies. Nonetheless, this is a period in which political lexicons change and increasingly align across the region – with liberalism, socialism and other terms referring relatively consistently to sets of common ideas and principles. And it is an era in which popular movements look beyond their borders, tasking inspiration for their activities from foreign exemplars, and in which activities in one place seem to trigger events more widely across the region. In this sense, we can begin to think of a changing European political culture.
The project is a collaborative project, drawing on the expertise of a range of scholars throughout Europe and North America, and on a series of research projects undertaken by a team of students at the University of Warwick, who are also responsible for designing, assembling and curating the website. The website is an on-going project and welcomes new contributions from those working on the period. Potential contributors are encouraged to contact us.The Project leaders are Professors Mark Philp and Kate Astbury from History and Modern Languages, supported by Steve Ranford and Ben Blackham in Warwick’s Digital Humanities team. Design and artwork by Design Penguin Creative and design implementation by Matthew Wendzina. The core student team in 2018-19 has been Charles Edwards, Amal Malik, Celine Romano, Isabelle Riepe, and Dave Steele.
The project is grateful to Warwick’s European History Research Centre for funding the website and related events and activities.
for more details of which see: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ehrc/events/barricades
