{"id":1575,"date":"2026-01-28T17:58:58","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T16:58:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.uned.es\/gidemig\/?p=1575"},"modified":"2026-03-01T23:38:30","modified_gmt":"2026-03-01T22:38:30","slug":"seminario-cambios-iii-monarchies-and-monarchisms-in-the-atlantic-world-1770-to-the-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uned.es\/gidemig\/2026\/01\/28\/seminario-cambios-iii-monarchies-and-monarchisms-in-the-atlantic-world-1770-to-the-present\/","title":{"rendered":"Seminario Cambios III: Monarchies and Monarchisms in the Atlantic World, 1770 to the Present"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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The seminar Monarchies and Monarchisms in the Atlantic World, 1770 to the Present<\/em><\/strong> offered a forum for debate on the historical evolution of monarchies and, centrally, on monarchism as a transnational political ideology<\/strong> in the Atlantic world from the age of revolutions to the present. Through the presentation and discussion of two recently published volumes<\/strong>\u2014Making of Modern Atlantic Monarchies<\/em> (Bloomsbury) and Transatlantic Monarchisms in the Americas and Europe (1812-1868)<\/i> (Springer)\u2014the seminar analysed the capacity of monarchies to adapt in contexts of imperial collapse, constitutional experimentation, and the formation of new political orders.<\/p>

The seminar brought together <\/span>Professor Natalia Sobrevilla<\/strong> (Instituto Riva-Ag\u00fcero), <\/span>Professor Wim Klooster<\/strong> (Clarke University), <\/span>Professor Adam Smith<\/strong> (Rothermere Institute, University of Oxford), and <\/span>Professor Andr\u00e9s Vicent<\/strong> (Universit\u00e9 de Gen\u00e8ve), whose contributions will offer comparative and long-term perspectives. The event aims to foster transnational and interdisciplinary dialogue on one of the most persistent and repeatedly reconfigured political traditions of Atlantic modernity.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Seminar Cambios<\/em> (Session 3) \u2014 Web Minutes (Essayistic Summary)<\/h3>

The third session of the Cambios<\/em> Seminar unfolded as a deliberately hybrid encounter\u2014anchored in Madrid but spanning multiple time zones\u2014devoted to the simultaneous launch of two major book projects on monarchy and monarchism in the modern Atlantic world. Edward Jones Corredera<\/strong>\u00a0acted as moderator of the session, overseeing the flow of interventions and discussion, while Eduardo oversaw the practical running order of the ceremony and seminar. The convenors emphasised from the outset the need to keep the discussion focused, given the unusually large number of speakers. The audience was also invited to follow the next session of the series, devoted to colonial pasts, justice, and reparations.<\/p>

Institutional welcome and framing<\/h4>

\u00c1ngeles Lario, Vice-Dean for Quality and Innovation, opened with an institutional and intellectual welcome. Speaking both as a faculty authority and as a scholar long engaged with the topic, she underscored the renewed scholarly vitality of monarchy studies\u2014now enriched by approaches ranging from court studies and symbolic representation to political and institutional history. She welcomed the gathering as an opportunity to advance a field whose relevance, in her view, remains central to understanding the design of contemporary state models in Europe and their historical resonance in the Americas. Her remarks also located the session within a broader academic ecology: publishing networks, ongoing research agendas, and the conviction that monarchy continues to matter as an analytical problem rather than as an antiquarian survival.<\/p>

Opening the transatlantic conversation<\/h4>

Matthijs Lok<\/strong> then took the floor as chair, greeting participants across Europe, the Americas, and beyond, and highlighting the rare circumstance that two substantial works on closely related problems had appeared at the same historical moment. He suggested that this convergence was more than accidental: contemporary politics has revived public disputes about monarchy\u2014both in conventional settings and in unexpected \u201cneo-monarchical\u201d idioms circulating in technological and reactionary imaginaries\u2014making it all the more urgent for historians to provide critical illumination. He introduced the structure of the session: first, a presentation of the Palgrave volume by Rodrigo Escribano Roca<\/strong> and Rebeca Vi\u00f1uela P\u00e9rez<\/strong>; second, a presentation of the Bloomsbury volumes by Carolina Renata Armenteros Mu\u00f1oz<\/strong> and Iason Zarikos (\u0399\u03ac\u03c3\u03c9\u03bd\u03b1\u03c2 \u0396\u03b1\u03c1\u03af\u03ba\u03bf\u03c2)<\/strong>; and finally, four commentaries, designed to place the books in dialogue rather than in parallel monologue.<\/p>

I. Transatlantic Monarchisms<\/em> (Palgrave): monarchy as a geopolitical imaginary in a post-imperial Atlantic<\/h2>

Speaking on behalf of both editors, Rodrigo Escribano Roca<\/strong> framed Transatlantic Monarchisms<\/em> around a productive contradiction: the nineteenth century\u2019s widespread expectation that monarchy was doomed, and the stubborn persistence\u2014indeed, the continuing political meaningfulness\u2014of monarchism across Euro-American interactions.<\/p>

He opened with an emblematic anecdote drawn from an 1833 travelogue (America and the Americans<\/em>) by James Boardman<\/strong>, a radical English reformer who travelled to the United States expecting to witness the \u201cmiracle\u201d of republican modernity. Boardman\u2019s encounter with Joseph Bonaparte\u2014living quietly as a farmer\u2014appeared to him as an almost providential sign that monarchy would soon perish everywhere. Rodrigo treated this confidence not as na\u00efvet\u00e9 but as a serious historical expectation shared by a broad constellation of nineteenth-century thinkers.<\/p>

Against that teleology, the volume asks what those republicans would make of a twenty-first-century world in which monarchical symbols continue to mobilise affect and legitimacy\u2014even within republican societies. Rodrigo illustrated this with a contemporary scene: Chilean students, citizens of a republic, watching the death of Elizabeth II and responding with visible fascination and emotion\u2014an episode that dramatized the persistence of monarchical imaginaries far from their institutional \u201chome.\u201d<\/p>

From this tension, the book develops its core concept: transatlantic monarchism<\/strong> not as a single ideology, nor merely nostalgia for absolutism, but as a geopolitical imaginary<\/strong>\u2014a flexible discursive matrix, circulating across the Atlantic, that diagnosed republican internationalism as a source of instability and proposed monarchical solutions (in diverse forms) as instruments of order, legitimacy, and endurance. The volume insists on heterogeneity: counter-revolutionary currents, doctrinal liberalism, democratic parliamentarism, traditionalism, Bonapartism, and other strands are treated as part of the same broader field, united less by doctrine than by a shared diagnosis.<\/p>

The chapters, Rodrigo explained, show monarchism operating transnationally through diplomacy, dynastic negotiation, political theory, military projects, and the press\u2014linking European ambitions with American elite anxieties in a world of fractured sovereignties. Rather than a linear march from throne to republic, the nineteenth-century Atlantic emerges as an \u201cocean of thrones,\u201d a contested and adaptive landscape of political experimentation.<\/p>

II. Making of Modern Atlantic Monarchies<\/em> (Bloomsbury): conservative monarchism, modernity, and reinvention<\/h2>

Carolina Renata Armenteros Mu\u00f1oz<\/strong> then traced the long gestation of the Bloomsbury project, originating in early conversations about the under-theorised place of monarchy in modern intellectual history. She described monarchy as an \u201celephant in the room\u201d of political thought: a form of rule historically dominant across most societies, yet too often occluded by narratives centred on republicanism and democracy.<\/p>

The project\u2019s scale was anchored in a major Cambridge conference whose extraordinary response revealed the depth of scholarly demand for a modern history of monarchy and monarchism. Out of a broader editorial architecture (fifteen volumes of proceedings), the Atlantic-focused collection was shaped around conservative monarchism<\/strong> as an organising theme. Carolina emphasised a central theoretical intervention: conservatism is not an inert, unreflective, merely reactive ideology<\/strong>, but a modern and self-conscious system of ideas capable of innovation and initiative. In this framing, monarchy is not simply a residue; it becomes a key site where conservatism\u2019s modernity can be observed historically.<\/p>

Iason Zarikos (\u0399\u03ac\u03c3\u03c9\u03bd\u03b1\u03c2 \u0396\u03b1\u03c1\u03af\u03ba\u03bf\u03c2)<\/strong> reinforced this point by targeting a persistent historiographical habit: treating monarchists as \u201crelics\u201d displaced by mass politics and the presumed laws of social development. Against deterministic theories of inevitable monarchical decline, he stressed the empirical fact of persistence and reinvention across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The second volume, he explained, follows monarchism\u2019s capacity to form resilient \u201cclusters of ideas,\u201d combining defence of the throne with shifting political agendas\u2014producing monarchists who could function as modernisers, media strategists, cold warriors, or secular and religious leaders. The broader epistemological claim was explicit: history is not governed by laws of social evolution; political forms endure because human creativity continually remakes them.<\/p>

III. Commentaries: rethinking Atlantic political modernity<\/h2>

Four commentators then deepened the dialogue.<\/p>