L'invenzione della frontiera. Isole, Stato e colonizzazione nel Mediterraneo del Settecento

The islands of Tabarka, Minorca, Corse and Sardinia have formed a social landscape for a long time, becoming increasingly crucial in allowing exchanges between different cultures, religions and markets within the western Mediterranean. As this paper will attempt to show, in the Eighteenth Century, such a rich and multicultural environment – marked by the presence of Christians, Jews, Muslims and renegades – was one of the first places to feel social and economical consequences and effects of the jurisdictional rise of the European states. Such a growth of the statal presence triggered new diasporas, through which thousands of islanders fled and spread all over the Mediterranean in search of new lands to settle. Many of them exploited the King of Sardinia's proposal, aimed at populating Sardinia with foreign colonists, reinventing the relationship between Sardinian State and its own territorial body. Starting from the case study of the town of Carloforte, this paper will endeavour to verify whether and to what extent refugees/colonists were able to introduce such values as individual and collective need of social and institutional autonomy in the island of Sardinia, values which were typical of islanders and diasporas' people.