CfP: Environmental Concepts in the Global Age of Revolutions (c. 1789–1914)

London, 27 May 2022

In recent years, the proliferation of global approaches to the so-called ‘Age of Revolutions’ of the long nineteenth century (c. 1789–1914) has reshaped understanding of this period, upending longstanding Eurocentric perspectives with a more pluralistic outlook emphasising a broader range of contexts, ideas and events. Among historians, specific revolutionary experiences have increasingly been considered in the light of global processes of integration, thereby helping uncover previously neglected linkages among geographically dispersed manifestations of the revolutionary age. While much of this historiography revolves around arguments for seeing global revolutionary conjunctures as a response to an experience of ‘world crisis’, a further and overlapping conceptual challenge comes from alternative perspectives on temporality and catastrophe which have developed around the notion of ‘the Anthropocene’. A key task for contemporary scholarship, therefore, is the confrontation and potential integration of new approaches focused on the impact of humans on nature, and on environmental history, with the ongoing re-evaluations posited by global history approaches to the Age of Revolutions, and encompassing the political, intellectual, ideological, social and economic foundations of the ‘modern’ world.

This one-day conference seeks to explore these themes by encouraging a cross-disciplinary and transregional discussion on the links between environmental and ecological concepts and the global revolutionary process. It aims at bringing together experts from various areas of social sciences and humanities, and at drawing from the resources of neighbouring disciplines (including, but not limited to: history, philosophy, geography, politics, literature, sociology, and economics) to reflect on interrelated questions such as: how was the global wave of Revolutions of this period influenced by environmental imaginations? To what extent did these Revolutions engender new perspectives on the relationship between humans and the natural environment? How did the experiences of crisis in different settings of global revolution signify a growing awareness of ecological change? And how did shifting notions of land, territory and space, broadly conceived, relate to visions of state- and polity-building?

We invite proposals from a diversity of fields working at the intersection of environmental thinking and the global history of revolutions. Please email your CV and an abstract of max. 500 words for papers of 30 minutes to: uclcth@gmail.com. For more information, do not hesitate to contact Dr Alessandro De Arcangelis or Dr Simon Macdonald.

Keynote: Prof. Pierre Charbonnier (CNRS / Sciences Po, Paris)