This article focuses on the 1863 Anglo-Italian Commercial Treaty as a case study for a wider analysis of the relations between the newly unified Italy and Britain. The importance of this treaty lies chiefly in its peculiarity, mainly due to the fact that the British proposed the inclusion of a religious clause in its text. This clause was meant to protect Protestant missionaries operating in rural parts of Italy, where religious intolerance was still frequent. The resulting confrontation showed the extent to which lack of communication between the Board of Trade and the Foreign Office hampered the pursuit of British policy aims, reflecting the then fashionable combination of free trade and Protestantism to promote a form of 'anglicized globalization' in Southern Europe. This resulted in the frustration of British commercial interests as defined by the Chambers of Commerce. The present article throws new light on the multi-layered nature of the British engagement with Italy, which involved different economic and religious pressure groups, and confirms Peter Marsh's thesis about the inadequacy of the British commercial approach to continental Europe in the age of free trade.
Biographies of national heroes emerged as some of the most important books to grapple with the theme of the Risorgimento and Unification. Of all the heroes, martyrs, and intellectuals of the Risorgimento, Giuseppe Garibaldi is undoubtedly the most celebrated. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that two important biographies have been published about him in one year. These two monographs, however, are so radically different in their conceptual and narrative temperaments that one would be forgiven for assuming that the authors were writing about two different people. Lucy Riall's Garibaldi is perhaps the best-written biography of the Italian general. Unlike others, it does not merely mythologize and lionize Garibaldi; it also proffers powerful insights into why he captured the imagination of Italian society. Riall accounts for Garibaldi's immense fame by linking it with the still largely unexplored, but familiar, theme of masculinity, charm, and sexual appeal. To many, Garibaldi was a semi-God, the secular prophet of the liberation of Italy from foreign oppression. Men admired him for his heroic life, for his status as the 'ideal man', as an epitome of strength, for being seemingly invincible, and for his well-earned honours and awards that extended beyond Italy. Women, on the other hand, loved him for his disarming charm, his romantic and adventurous life, and for Mediterranean looks that evoked ideas of exotic, Oriental, erotic adventures. Protestant men and women saw in him their hope that one day the temporal as well spiritual authority of the pope would end. What is missing in Riall's fascinating accounts, however, is a more complete exploration of the role and centrality of Garibaldi's participation in the events of the Roman Republic, a revolutionary experiment that was followed with great interest by Protestants of both Great Britain and the USA (the only country officially to recognize the Roman Republic). Garibaldi's staunch defence of the Roman Republic against the French troops led by General Oudinot deserves a deeper examination because it had two lasting consequences: it increased British antipathy and adversarial stance towards the French, seen as the reactionary protectors of Roman Catholicism; and it gave Garibaldi enduring fame as a Christian hero who fought for the good of his country against the tyrannical and corrupt power of the papacy. For many Britons and Americans, the Risorgimento was a protracted crusade against the papacy and against what they saw as the superstitious and un-Christian practices of the Roman Catholic Church. The support that countries with Protestant majorities rendered to the Unification of Italy was mainly due to internal pressures arising from the tide of public opinion in their polities which, in the nineteenth century, were shot through with anti-Catholic sentiments. Protestants all over the world hoped that Garibaldi was the man who would, once and for all, destroy the unjust, inefficient, and outdated temporal power of the Roman pontiff. It is therefore fund...
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