Imperialism within Europe
I was first introduced to the concepts of colonial imperialism directed towards the peoples of Europe itself when talking a course on the Irish Famine in my freshman year. The exposure did not really legitimate the hardline separatist account of the Quebecois experience in Canada as a case of “imperialism” which should be likened to such cases as India, South Africa or Sri Lanka (this is a genre thing in literature more than anything else). I have been reading Broer’s The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796-1814 and it is changing how i am conceiving of imperialism. In a nutshell, Broer appears to be arguing that French institutions were fundamentally incapable of coping with transhumance as a main social pattern and that this, among other factors, caused Italian elites, usually complicit in processes of integration and amalgame to turn away and provide the French with only assimilation, ever unsuccessful, as a model.
There was only one thing worse than the propensity of the peripheral elites to turn against — or simply away — from the French, that was their seemingly bottomless hatred of each other. The elites were not drawn in volatile, lascivious popular culture, there were its “trend setters”. In the Ligurian mountain communes of Vezzano and Arcola, the local notables appointed as tax collectors by the French proved not only corrupt - some people were made to pay their taxes several times in 1809 - but were driven by lust and sexual jealousy to the public violence that first brought them to the notice of the police. Gian-Battista Bertaldi, the chief tax collector, attacked his brother-in-law’s dometic servant with a sword in the main square and threatened to kill her because he had had an affair with her, and believed she was now having one with his brother-in-law (229-330).
