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Selling Security: the Market of Security Devices in 20th-Century Europe (c.1900–1939)

Objective

Selling Security: the Market of Security Devices in 20th century Europe (c.1900–1939) (SEC-EUR) will address a striking lacuna in the study of European History. At its heart, the project will collect and analyse evidence on the production, marketing, and use of commercial security technologies – locks, safes, alarms, patrol call boxes – in Italy, France, and the UK between 1900 and 1939, and study them comparatively as a whole. Although such an approach is crucial to understanding how security itself became a consumer good, shaping ideas of property, individual responsibility, and cultural attitudes to threat, no one has ever done it.
The project will therefore transform our understanding of European history by showing how industrial innovation and commercial strategies translated diffuse social fears into concrete products; how advertising embedded them in gendered imaginaries of intimacy, property, and danger; and how their daily use normalised the privatisation of protection. In doing so, it will reframe the history of security as the interplay of market, technology, and socio-cultural change, and reveal the early twentieth century as the foundational moment in which consumer-based security cultures emerged.
While the candidate has been trained in Italy on political violence and policing history, he will carry out the core of the project at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, under the guidance of a leading scholar of legal and material security, and will then complement this with training in business history at Padua and in consumption history at Sciences Po Paris. These environments provide the precise expertise and intellectual networks that the project requires.
More broadly, the project will also offer a historical investigation of markets, (in)security, and faith in technology as a guarantor of safety – an inquiry urgently relevant in today’s world of commodified security.

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HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI PADOVA
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 317 923,08
Address
VIA 8 FEBBRAIO 2
35122 Padova
Italy

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Region
Nord-Est Veneto Padova
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

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No data

Partners (2)