A Global History in the Political Mediterranean in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Neapolitan Legation in Constantinople

In the framework of global history, the nineteenth-century political Mediterranean has been the focus of a recently renewed historiography. The essay aims to contribute to this new research thread from a peculiar perspective, that of the articulation of the state in a Mediterranean dimension, investigated though a specific case study: the intelligence activity for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies carried out by the diplomatic mission in Constantinople. The latter turned out to be a crucial node of the Bourbon network of the state abroad as well as of an inter-state conservative network with the common aim of political surveillance. Moreover, the analysis sheds light on the intersection of state apparatuses with the network of exiles moving across the Mediterranean. Shifting the point of view from the national Italian movement to the modernization of one of the conservative states in the peninsula, framed in a transnational context, the article shows a more politically complex and plural nineteenth-century Mediterranean than usually outlined.