Cliometrics and the Unification of Italy: A Bulletin from the Front
The present is a brief report on the authors’ ongoing quantitative research
on the sub-national aspects of the Italian economy over the decades from Unification to the Great War. The initial regional estimates for the census years
1871,1881,1901 and 1911 suggested that the north-western «industrial triangle
» emerged over those decades, as factories attracted by the subalpine waterfalls
that replaced artisans attracted by their customers in the capitals of the
pre-Unification states. The new, finer-grained provincial estimates enrich even
more that story. The concentration of factory industry in the subalpine provinces
of the northwest is already evident in 1871; industry was subsequently
intensified in those self-same provinces, with no significant diffusion to the
right bank of the Po river. Over the pre-war upswing, the subalpine provinces
languished and Milan boomed, as progress in the transmission of electric power
effectively moved the waterfalls from the mountain valleys to the plain; but the
fastest industrial growth was registered in Emilia, where land-reclamation led
to the cultivation of sugar beet and the construction of refineries. The most
novel results concern the earliest decades: the fastest-growing provinces were
then almost uniformly southern, apparently because Unification released the
local economy from the shackles imposed by the Bourbons’ high tariffs.