Europe from Its Margins: Georgia and the Making of Modern Europe

Europe is commonly narrated from its historical centers. Political ideas, cultural innovation, and modernity itself are assumed to originate in places such as Paris, London, or Berlin before spreading to the continent's margins. Georgia usually appears in this narrative, if at all, as a distant periphery whose history merely reflects developments elsewhere. This lecture argues that such a view is historically misleading. Rather than treating Georgia as Europe's edge, it proposes to read it as one of the places from which Europe's history becomes newly intelligible. Revisiting the invention of