Skip to main content

Urban government, the police and citizen participation in eighteenth-century Naples: a comparative perspective

When: —
Venue: Birkbeck Clore Management Centre

No booking required

Speaker: Professor Brigitte Marin
Chair: Professor Vanessa Harding

Registration is free, but booking is required - book your seat here

In what ways were ordinary people in eighteenth-century Naples integrated into management of their urban environment and its policing institutions, in this large southern European capital city? How did citizen participation in the exercise of urban government manifest itself at the neighbourhood or district level? And by what means did the Neapolitan population manage to influence public policy and spatial planning? Through comparisons with other eighteenth-century urban contexts in Italy, France and the Spanish territories, my lecture turns a spotlight onto the social being of Neapolitan police auxiliaries recruited from ordinary backgrounds. My lecture examines the police auxiliaries’ expression of their sense of social and political legitimacy, through authority constructed in the locale, through their daily contact and interaction with other inhabitants, and in the varieties and differing levels of integration into the central organs of urban government concerned with the maintenance of order in the city.

 
Brigitte Marin is a Professor of Early Modern History at Aix-Marseille Université and a Visiting Fellow at the Birkbeck Insititute for the Humanities

 

Contact name: