L'industria e l'economia nelle province dell'Italia liberale: tra storia e geografia

The authors’ work on the industrial growth of Italy’s regions between Unification and World War I has recently been extended to their component provinces. These new estimates for the census years 1871, 1881, 1901 and 1911 confirm that initially manufacturing industry was largely artisanal, and located in the political capitals; but they also document the early presence of factory production next to the waterfalls of the subalpine Northwest. Over the late nineteenth century, as factories displaced artisans, industry increasingly concentrated there. The early twentieth century was marked by the diffusion of industry to Emilia, with the cultivation of the sugar beet on newly reclaimed lands, and by the concentration of industry within the Northwest, into the major capitals, as the novel transmission of electric energy effectively moved the waterfalls themselves into the plains. The most novel result, however, is that over the 1870s industrial and overall economic growth appears to have been most vigorous in selected provinces of the South: the high tariffs of the Bourbon kingdom prior to Unification appear to have constrained the economy of the South much as Italy’s own later constrained the entire national economy.