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Mike Rapport is Reader in Modern European History at the University of Glasgow. He specialises in the French Revolution, particularly its international impact, ideas and practices of citizenship and the spatial dimension of revolutionary politics. He teaches modern European history, with a particular focus on France, as well as transnational and global approaches. He is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh (MA, 1991) and the University of Bristol (PhD, 1997). His publications include Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of Foreigners, 1789-1799 (2000), Nineteenth Century Europe, 1789-1914 (2005), 1848: Year of Revolution (2008), The Napoleonic Wars: A Very Short Introduction (2013), The Unruly City: Paris, London and New York in the Age of Revolution (2017) and edited (with Ben Marsh), Teaching and Understanding the Age of Revolution (2017). He has a book forthcoming on Paris in the Belle Époque. His media appearances include radio (contributing three times to BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time) and television (consultant on the French Revolution for Lucy Worsley’s ‘Royal History’s Biggest Fibs’, 2020). He has served as Secretary to the Society for the Study of French History and is an alumnus (2012) of the Highlands Forum, an informal, inter-disciplinary network aimed at encouraging international co-operation and peace. He is an Affiliated Researcher with the ongoing project led by Professor Peter Jackson on ‘The Weight of the Past in Franco-British Relations since 1815’.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field? 

There is a lot going on because my fields include the French Revolution, the 1848 Revolutions, and Nineteenth-Century Europe. I’d say that regarding the French Revolution, one of the most exciting research directions is how people from all backgrounds experienced the revolution on a day-to-day basis. This is rather more ‘personal’ than older sociological approaches in that it takes historians into the history of emotions, highlighting the revolutionary careers of less well-known participants. To this end, my work on revolutionary Paris explores the spatial dimension, especially how, where, and why the revolutionaries took over older buildings and converted them for their purposes. 

About the 1848 Revolutions, the main developments are twofold. First, there is a lot of new research into their transnational dimension–how networks of radicals operated across borders or seas and how such networks often transcended national differences. Second, historians are looking increasingly into the global dimension of 1848, particularly its impact on colonial slavery and its other resonances within the European overseas empires, but also in the independent republics of Latin America and the United States.

More generally, historians are also ‘de-centering’ Europe or the study of particular European countries by looking at their histories from the point of view of the colonized peoples of Europe’s overseas empires, or peoples on their so-called ‘peripheries’. For example, my colleagues who work on the history of Russia and the Soviet Union have been debating how to approach this history from a less ‘Russocentric’ perspective and focus more on the points of view of those peoples who were conquered or otherwise brought into the Empire. Almost needless to say, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has provided a real spur to this thinking.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

Probably my biggest change has been seeing the world and how it changes increasingly through a transnational lens: how societies develop not only from their internal dynamics but also from external influences. In my research period, this has a strong imperial, global, and European dimension. The transnational level works not only on the movement of people, ideas, and technology but also in a more day-to-day way with the foods we consume or the clothes we wear. Many other historians have taken this path before, but for me, the shift in thinking began in the early 1990s as the European Union was being forged, when it felt apt that my thesis (and first book) should have been on foreigners in revolutionary France and the question of the limits of citizenship. 

I remember that this was just a few years after the 1989 Revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, which happened when I was an undergraduate at Edinburgh University: in my own, perhaps naïve way, it felt like Europe was somehow ‘coming back together.’ I’ve since tried to make my writing about European history as being about Europe as a whole, not just the sum of national experiences but also understanding national and regional differences. This continues to be the case as the longer-term effects of 1989 and EU enlargement are still being played........

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