Journal of the History of Ideas

This paper focuses on the shift that occurred in the spatial representation of states in the eighteenth century. This shift will be considered as a combination of institutional reforms and of a new social awareness of space. A consideration of the case of the Italian Piedmont will demonstrate how “national” space was created through antiquarian research and how a larger political confrontation took place in the guise of a learned debate. The diverse accounts of Piedmontese history under examination all employed methods derived from previous ages, relying upon a concept of space as historically continuous, embedded in time immemorial.