Making War, Mapping Europe: Militarized Cultural Encounters, 1792-1920

'To the Dardanelles', Illustrite Zeitung, 2 September 1915

Before the age of mass tourism began, warfare was one of the most significant engines of cultural encounter in European history. Across Europe and on its frontiers, the era of mass armies inaugurated by the French Revolution involved millions of soldiers and civilians in cultural encounters to which they would not otherwise have been exposed. Funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) Joint Research Programme, 'Making War, Mapping Europe: Militarized Cultural Encounters, 1792-1920' brings together scholars from Trinity College Dublin, the Freie Universität Berlin and the Universities of York and Swansea to examine these encounters between soldiers and civilians across Europe and on its borders over the course of the long nineteenth century. By focusing on the experiences of British, French and German armies in Eastern Europe, Italy, the Balkans and the Middle East from the Revolutionary wars to the First World War it asks what impact these militarized encounters had upon these ordinary Europeans' sense of themselves and of the world beyond Europe's frontiers.

Charles Balzac, 'Pyramides de Memphis. Vue générale des pyramides et du Sphinx, prise au soleil couchant', [detail] Description de l'Égypte: ou, Recueil des observations et des recherches qui ont été faites en Égypte pendant l'expédition de l'armée française (Paris, 1822).

In Trinity College, this research team consists of Professor John Horne and Dr Joseph Clarke in the Department of History and two postdoctoral research fellows. The Trinity College strand of this project focuses on the experience of French and British soldiers in Italy, the Balkans, Egypt and Palestine during the French Revolutionary wars and the First World War. In comparing the French and British expeditions of the 1790s and the Great War as cultural encounters, this research charts how Europeans confronted one another culturally in times of conflict and asks how this encounter changed when Europeans came face to face with non-European populations.