(Re-)Making the ‘Stateless Capital’: Edinburgh and Dublin in European Context, <i>c</i> .1820–1850*

Abstract This article revisits and complicates the idea of the ‘stateless capital’, a city that (through absorption into a larger political entity) was no longer the capital of a state, kingdom or empire, but which still claimed to be the capital of a nation, principality or province within that larger polity. It does so through an analysis of philanthropy in Dublin and Edinburgh. It compares local detail in each city while also considering them in a wider European context. It indicates that Graeme Morton was correct to emphasise that relationships between central state, local government and voluntary activity shaped the nature of these stateless capitals in the mid-nineteenth century. In fact, it demonstrates that contrasts in these relationships helped to make Dublin a different kind of stateless capital than Edinburgh. It also indicates that the factors that shaped stateless-capital status were not fixed but changed in response to other trends in urban governance. The combination of in-depth comparison and wider European perspective adopted here encourages us to think more about the stateless capital as a type of city worthy of detailed analyses that may further our understanding of modern European urban history.