New Book
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Alex Tipei
Sep 15, 2025, 5:20:50 PM (11 days ago) Sep 15
to mgs...@uci.edu
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
I'd like to share the publication of my book, Unintended Nations: France's Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe, and the Post-Napoleonic World,
with all of you. Below is the editor's description and a link to their website. I'd also like to thank the MGSA for furnishing me with a convivial forum to workshop many of the ideas in the book over the years.
Best wishes,
Alex R. Tipei
Assistant Professor of History and International Studies
Université de Montréal
Unintended Nations : France’s Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe, and the Post-Napoleonic World
How France’s informal empire shaped Balkan nationalism and global civilizational hierarchies.
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In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, French liberals set out to create an informal empire. Their efforts to cultivate unequal partnerships with Christian, Greek-speaking elites in southeast Europe shaped national identities and structured global civilizational
hierarchies over the decades that followed.
Unintended Nations tracks a notion of civilization that developed in early nineteenth-century France. Alex Tipei explores the constellation of ideas, beliefs, and practices this concept invoked – what she calls civilization-speak – and charts the cross-continental networks that employed it as an organizing principle. Drawing on archival and printed primary sources in six languages, Tipei maps out the uses of this civilization-speak on both sides of the continent, focusing on France and the lands that make up significant parts of present-day Greece and Romania. She shows how and why French liberals mobilized civilization-speak to, offering an innovative analysis of liberalism and capitalism’s relationship to informal empire.
Calling into question long-standing assumptions about the rise of nationalism in southeast Europe, Unintended Nations explores how Franco-Balkan exchanges helped define political, civilizational, and biopolitical boundaries in the post-Napoleonic era.
Unintended Nations tracks a notion of civilization that developed in early nineteenth-century France. Alex Tipei explores the constellation of ideas, beliefs, and practices this concept invoked – what she calls civilization-speak – and charts the cross-continental networks that employed it as an organizing principle. Drawing on archival and printed primary sources in six languages, Tipei maps out the uses of this civilization-speak on both sides of the continent, focusing on France and the lands that make up significant parts of present-day Greece and Romania. She shows how and why French liberals mobilized civilization-speak to, offering an innovative analysis of liberalism and capitalism’s relationship to informal empire.
Calling into question long-standing assumptions about the rise of nationalism in southeast Europe, Unintended Nations explores how Franco-Balkan exchanges helped define political, civilizational, and biopolitical boundaries in the post-Napoleonic era.
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