CHAPTER SEVEN Away or Homeward Bound? The Slippery Case of Mediterranean Place in the Era Before Nation-states Dominique Kirchner Reill With the new transnational turn, scholars of nationalism have looked to the experience of the physical displacement of activists and intellectuals as a prime means to reassemble the international circulation of ideas: For, after all, Gottfried Herder wrote some of his most stimulating work while sailing across the north seas, 1 Mazzini debated in England longer than he ever resided in Italy, 2 Kossuth spent over half of his life everywhere but Hungary, 3 Mickiewicz attracted world attention not from the medieval burgs of Lithuania, but from Parisian university podiums, 4 and, fnally, Garibaldi regularly fell off the peninsular grid, explaining the global commemorations of his stays in New York City, Taganrog (Russia) and Garibaldi (Brazil). 5 Scholars of exile and diaspora have given us the necessary reminder of how transnational nationalism was (and is). However, much remains unclear in trying to ascertain the contours of displacement. Though there can be no doubt that travel and living ‘abroad’ informed the shape and texture of nineteenth-century activists’ ideas and the strategies they chose to make their ideas real, what remains unclear is how far ‘home’ and ‘away’ really extended in a world of mini-city-states, broad continental (and transoceanic) empires, tariff unions, and the introduction of railways and steamships. Were you always ‘displaced’ when you moved? Can we discuss a Mediterranean ‘diaspora’ if the movement of peoples along and across the Mediterranean 30012.indb 135 07/05/2015 14:23