Giuseppe Grieco is Lecturer in Modern History at City, University of London, where he teaches history of political thought and comparative history of modern empires.
His research focusses on international law, empires, and intellectual connections spanning Southern Europe and the Mediterranean in the 19th century.
In 2022, he earned a PhD in History at Queen Mary University of London (The British Empire and the Two Sicilies: Constitutions and International Law in a Revolutionary Mediterranean, c. 1800-1860, supervisor: Prof. Maurizio Isabella). His dissertation was awarded the 26th Premio Spadolini for the best PhD thesis in the history of modern and contemporary Italy. His current book project – based on his PhD dissertation – offers a global history of the interaction between empires, the Two Sicilies, and the central Mediterranean in the age of revolutions (1800-1860). By taking as its starting point the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, his research brings to light types of imperial rule beyond colonialism at the margins of Europe, and until now neglected Southern cosmopolitan visions of world order and theories of international law as an emancipatory project.
In Turin, Giuseppe collaborates with Fondazione 1563 as Research Associate to the Turin Humanities Program. Previously, in 2021-2022, he was a fellow at the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi.
He was educated at the Scuola Normale Superiore and University of Pisa.
RESEARCH PROJECT
My book project offers an intellectual history of the interaction between the Two Sicilies and empires in the central Mediterranean, a region until now neglected by historians of political thought and empire. It shows that this space represented a semi-colonial and inter-imperial site at the periphery of Europe, during the age of revolutions. The book explores transnational intellectual exchanges on empire, constitution-making, and international law between Southern policy-makers in Naples and Sicily, their networks in Malta, the Ionian Islands, Greece, and the Barbary coast, and British, French, Austrian, Russian and Ottoman imperial agents. In the central Mediterranean, encounters between imperial and Southern actors brought about the fashioning of conceptions of empire and the ‘international’ at variance with colonial categories of exclusion and hierarchy. Focus on this space in between the European state-system and the colonial world demonstrates the existence of types of imperial rule beyond colonialism at the margins of Europe, and helps unveiling hitherto unknown efforts to recast international law upon principles of justice and inclusivity toward lesser polities.
