Erik de Lange wins the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era Charlie Crouch Graduate Student Paper Prize​

Erik de Lange MA won the 2019 Consortium on the Revolutionary Era Charlie Crouch Graduate Student Paper Prize​ for his paper No Security, Except in Destruction: Transnational Threats, International Anxieties and the French Invasion of Algiers. The prize was awarded by the Revolutionary Era Consortium.

The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe was established by five universities–Florida State University, the University of Florida, the University of Georgia, the University of South Carolina, and Louisiana State University–in 1972 to foster the study of Europe during the Revolutionary Period (1750-1850). The primary goal was to organize an annual conference for those interested in this field and to publish the results of their contributions. The Consortium has expanded in the past twenty-five years and now includes seventeen universities and colleges.

No Security, Except in Destruction

The French invasion of Ottoman Algiers in the summer of 1830, which started over a century of colonial rule in Algeria, ought to be understood within the frameworks of the nineteenth-century international system of peace and security. Though the historiography generally stresses the domestic concerns and electoral calculations behind the French monarchy’s decision to attack Algiers, De Lange took a different approach.

Congress System

Rather than focusing on internal political factors, he highlighted how the invasion was, in fact, deeply embedded in the multilateral structures of the post-Napoleonic ‘Congress System’. The paper showed that the invasion of 1830 was not only inspired by geostrategic concerns over the territorial order as created at the Congress of Vienna, but also corresponded to the more abstract aspects of that international order, i.e. its ‘security culture’.