The present dissertation explores the contexts in which political agency was negotiated in nineteenth-century Romania (1830-1907), the concepts through which it was articulated, and the ways in which it was perceived as being distributed across time, class and state borders. Whatever may be understood by ‘agency’ is necessarily projected onto others as a way of making sense of their actions and justifying our power relationships with them, and situated in time, insofar as we tend to assume that projects in the present and the future are informed by past intentions and conditions. Guided by these assumptions, our research focuses on two key questions: how did historical actors ascribe agency to other actors and to themselves, and per which criteria? And, secondly, how did specific ways of thinking about agency in turn influence historical actors’ own perceptions of history and temporality? In order to make sense of this, we use “agency” – a socio-culturally mediated capacity to act,1 inherently temporally-situated – in order to historicise perspectives on human action, taking Romania as a case-study, covering a period from the preliminaries of establishing a nation-state and the abolition of serfdom, to the last great European peasant uprising. The project exhaustively examines more than a half-century of parliamentary debates, periodicals, literary texts and pamphlets in Romania and beyond. Surveying socio-political discourse in an age of rapid modernization, it highlights how often-surprising concepts articulated preconditions for – or loci of – agency, recovering the historically-situated meanings of terms as diverse as “feudalism”, “colonisation” and “proletariat”, how their supposed (in)applicability to Romania as a European periphery was negotiated, and how they became key concepts for thinking about both individual and collective action, its preconditions, and its limitations.

Visions of Agency: Imagining Individual and Collective Action in Nineteenth-Century Romania

Introduction 1. The origins of anarchist terrorism 2. Conspiracies, panics, agent provocateurs, mass journalism, and globalization 3. International action against subversives: 1815-89 4. The terrorist '90s and increasing police cooperation: 1890-8 5. The first International Conference on Terrorism: Rome 1898 6. 1900: three assassination attempts and the Russo-German Anti-Anarchist Initiative 7. The murder of President McKinley, 1901 8. The St Petersburg Protocol, 1901-4 9. Multilateral anti-anarchist efforts after 1904 10. The decline of anarchist terrorism, 1900-30s Appendix Bibliography.

The Battle against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878–1934

Background/Context Throughout history, a country's economic and military strength has influenced its times of cultural splendor and the rise of famous intellectuals and artists. Spain has been an exception to this. At the turn of the 20th century, a surprising series of events that no one could have predicted occurred. At the time, Spain had recently lost the last of its overseas colonies. A few years later, the Moroccan War was also a failure. All these events sent Spain into a state of confusion and provoked strong political tensions within the country: popular uprisings, street fights, and a general state of economic, political, and military weakness. Simultaneously, the cultural and intellectual scene developed a fascinating degree of momentum. Spain became the cradle of some of the world's foremost painters, poets, writers, and intellectuals, such as Picasso, Machado, Lorca, and Buñuel. Among them, the Catalan pedagogue Ferrer i Guàrdia (1859–1909), who was important in the libertarian tradition of popular culture, became a world figure with his educational project, the Modern School. This project was specifically aimed at the lowest social classes so that they would have access to a scientific, democratic, quality education, thereby developing their skills in a society where education was limited to the upper classes and contributing educational development to improve social conditions. Both his project and Ferrer i Guàrdia himself were persecuted and attacked until he was finally sentenced to death in October 1909. Purpose This goal of this study was to analyze Ferrer i Guàrdia's indefatigable fight for an egalitarian, high-quality pedagogical project. Specifically, the figure of Ferrer i Guàrdia was analyzed in the context of a socially and militarily decadent country, which led to his defamation, persecution, and death—in contrast with the international impact and prestige he achieved. Research Design This research was based on historical methods, specifically drawing on analyses of literature review, historical documents, books, and articles (both scientific articles and newspaper articles from the time) regarding the life and work of Ferrer i Guàrdia and the historical context in which he lived. Findings/Conclusions The article concludes with a summary of the great current value of Ferrer i Guàrdia's libertarian approach to education, which consisted of transforming education to provide high-quality learning for all regardless of socioeconomic class.

The Modern School of Francisco Ferrer i Guàrdia (1859-1909), an International and Current Figure.

In October 1898, the Italian vice-consul in Alexandria charged a group of Italians with participating in an anarchist plot to attack German Emperor Wilhelm II during his planned tour through Egypt and Palestine. This collective arrest produced unexpected outcomes, left a trail of multi-lingual documents, and illuminated specific forms of late nineteenth-century Mediterranean migration. Anarchists were among those who frequently crossed borders and they were well aware of and connected to what was happening elsewhere: they sent letters, circulated manifestos, raised and transported money, and helped fugitive comrades. They maintained nodes of subversion and moved along circuits of solidarity. Similarly, diplomats of Europe, Cairo, Istanbul, and local consular officials operated across borders and cooperated to hunt anarchists down. By following people who were on the move on boats, in post offices, and in taverns, I make a methodological and historiographical argument. First, I examine the Mediterranean as a space of flows and show how the Maghreb/Mashreq divide in Middle Eastern history has concealed webs and connections. Because anarchists and authorities acted on multiple fronts simultaneously, so must scholarship of this part of the world take account of several histories at once. Second, I look beyond the micro-macro binary to emphasize the interconnections and mutual implications of the micro, the macro, and everything in between. I highlight competing, intersecting, and even contradictory trajectories of some of these anarchist migrants’ belonging. As the affair of the bombs unfolded, all of these contradictions and scales of analysis became visible at once.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/7C82668D81BE6FDE48714AC13E262B2E/S0010417516000554a.pdf/div-class-title-alexandria-1898-nodes-networks-and-scales-in-nineteenth-century-egypt-and-the-mediterranean-div.pdf

Alexandria, 1898: Nodes, Networks, and Scales in Nineteenth-Century Egypt and the Mediterranean

This article is a synoptic overview of a larger project on the social histories of anarchism from the eighteenth century to the present. The specific themes of this article are a discussion of the periodization of anarchism as an ism, an ideology originating in nineteenth-century Europe, and its relationship to and differences with more general libertarian or noncoercive modes of behavior and organization found in all human societies. Secondly, the dissemination of anarchism (and syndicalism) throughout the globe and thus the role of the Global South in the history of anarchism will be surveyed. This article focuses on the period of classical anarchism (1860s to 1940s) and therefore discusses the differences between preanarchism and classical anarchism on the one hand, and classical anarchism and postanarchism on the other. Once that is established, which in turn sets the context for the ideology of classical anarchism, the article proceeds to examine the dissemination and reception of anarchism from the 1880s to 1914 in many ways the heyday of anarchism as a global movement, in which it competed with, and at times challenged, the hegemony of social democracy. This challenge was most successfully mounted where anarchism merged with or lived under the protective cover of the syndicalist movement. Thus, a discussion of the relationships among anarchism, syndicalism, and the globalization of the

Social Histories of Anarchism

Anarchist terrorism became a problem in both Spain and Italy during the 1890s but lost its virulence in the latter after 1900. One of the reasons for the difference in outcomes between the two nations may have been that the ideas of criminal anthropology had permeated Italian society and institutions and this allowed the government and other authorities to reframe (and play down) the whole question of anarchist terrorism. Given the surprising extent of positive criminology's influence in Spain, a similar tactic there might have been possible but was not adopted. The results were disastrous.

Richard Bach Jensen

Papers

Criminal Anthropology and Anarchist Terrorism in Spain and Italy