Through the Atlantic: the Corsican Crisis and British America (1768-1769)

• Grant number: 24/16715-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: January 01, 2025
• End date: December 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - Modern and Contemporary History
• Principal Investigator: Daniel Gomes de Carvalho
• Grantee: Guilherme Farias Ghefter
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The following work, as a project of intellectual history, aims to comprehend how the Corsican Crisis was made part of the the north-american intellectual discourse. The years of 1768 and 1769 were a tumultuous moment in which Corsica was invaded by the french, while the parliamentarians across the Channel debated what to do about it. Studies about the Corsican Republic, especially those concerned with the broader age of revolutions are few. However, some recent academic works, such as those by Bell (2020), Colley (2021) and Carvalho (2022), have tried to explain possibble interactions between the Paolist experiment and other revoutionary processes of the late 1700s. Through the means of the linguistic contextualist method of the Cambridge School, we aim to comprehend how the political debates of the european world were interpreted and assimilated by north-american settlers. For the purposes of this work, the primary sources are two of the works of the scottish polemist James Boswell, as well as excerpts of north american newspapers published througout 1768 and 1769.