Ex-centric Europe: Visions and Practices of Harmonious Modernization in the 19th-Century European Peripheries (Ireland, Norway, Poland and Two Sicilies)

there existed, in 19th-century Europe (from the end of the Napoleonic wars until the seventh decade), a “modernization project” elaborated in vision and in a series of practices. It rose in and for rural areas of Europe, i.e. for the overwhelming majority of the continent. It strove for “progress” and “modernization” but understood them in ways different from the “Manchester” paradigm of modernization. I refer to this alternative vision and set of practices with the term “harmonious modernization,” while the modernizers saw their action as corresponding to the “natural order of things” (in reference to Adam Smith).