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This book explores imperial entanglements to reassess the
Napoleonic Empire as a missing link-or at least an important
chain-in the global and longue duree history of Empires. In recent
years Napoleonic studies have, belatedly but resolutely, embraced
the transnational historiographical turn, vastly expanding the
field's geographical scope. Its canonical chronological boundaries,
on the other hand, appear increasingly narrow against this wider
backdrop, giving the impression of a parenthetical, almost
anachronistic aside from 1799 to 1815. What connects, and what
doesn't connect, the Napoleonic Empire to the Age of Empire,
remains by and large an open question. Put another way, this book
attempts to locate the Napoleonic empire in World History.
Nostalgia today is seen as essentially benign, a wistful longing
for the past. This wasn't always the case, however: from the late
seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth, nostalgia
denoted a form of homesickness so extreme that it could sometimes
be deadly. What Nostalgia Was unearths that history. Thomas Dodman
begins his story in Basel, where a nineteen-year-old medical
student invented the new diagnosis, modeled on prevailing notions
of melancholy. From there, he traces its spread through the
European republic of letters and into Napoleon's armies, as French
soldiers far from home were diagnosed and treated for the disease.
Nostalgia then gradually transformed from a medical term to a more
expansive cultural concept, one that connected to Romantic notions
of the aesthetic pleasure of suffering. But the decisive shift
towards a benign emotion occurred in the colonies, where Frenchmen
worried about excessive creolization came to view a moderate
homesickness as salutary. An afterword reflects on how the history
of nostalgia can help us understand the transformations of the
modern world, rounding out a surprising, fascinating tour through
the history of a durable idea.
Nostalgia today is seen as essentially benign, a wistful longing
for the past. This wasn't always the case, however: from the late
seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth, nostalgia
denoted a form of homesickness so extreme that it could sometimes
be deadly. What Nostalgia Was unearths that history. Thomas Dodman
begins his story in Basel, where a nineteen-year-old medical
student invented the new diagnosis, modeled on prevailing notions
of melancholy. From there, he traces its spread through the
European republic of letters and into Napoleon's armies, as French
soldiers far from home were diagnosed and treated for the disease.
Nostalgia then gradually transformed from a medical term to a more
expansive cultural concept, one that connected to Romantic notions
of the aesthetic pleasure of suffering. But the decisive shift
towards a benign emotion occurred in the colonies, where Frenchmen
worried about excessive creolization came to view a moderate
homesickness as salutary. An afterword reflects on how the history
of nostalgia can help us understand the transformations of the
modern world, rounding out a surprising, fascinating tour through
the history of a durable idea.
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