David Bailie Warden: transnational man of mystery

Talk description (200 words maximum): As a prize-winning graduate of Glasgow University, David Bailie Warden was destined for a respectable career in the Presbyterian Church, ministering to Ireland’s dissenting minority. But his University education, steeped in the Scottish Enlightenment principles of republicanism, popular soverignty, and cosmopolitan universalism, heightened his sense of his own people’s subjugation at the hands of the Protestant Ascendancy class in Ireland. His decision to join the United Irishmen in 1797, an Irish republican brotherhood committed to separatism from Britain, changed the course of his life; he took a leading role in the disastrous Rising of 1798, narrowly escaping into exile in America. Here he quickly rose to the attention of leading Democratic-Republican politicians in Thomas Jefferson’s circle, and was sent to France as a member of the American Legation, rising to a diplomatic position in Paris in 1808. During these years he established a reputation as a respected polymath and by 1830, he was one of the most well-connected individuals and scholars in the transatlantic world, connecting thousands of correspondents from prolific names such as Alexander Humboldt, Henri Gregoire, Thomas Jefferson, Humphry Davy, Sydney Owenson and Helen Maria Williams to a catalogue of lesser known, precarious cultural figures. Unlike many of his Irish-American contemporaries who formed a powerful political bloc on the U.S. Eastern seaboard, Warden chose a more unconventional expatriate life in Paris where he was claimed by many as America’s unofficial cultural ambassador. Focusing on his remarkable transnational maneuvering, Warden’s life offers insights into the characteristics and conditions that made Romantic networking possible in an age of seismic political, cultural, and geographical shift.

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