ABSTRACT
The chapter describes the evolution of government institutions in each individual state, the creation of, and major changes to, the civil, criminal and commercial codes and the health, prison and scholastic systems. In the first thirty-five years of the age of restoration, the Italian states initiated government and administration reform processes. The tradition of government of late eighteenth-century absolutism, as well as that of Napoleonic rule, were both retrieved and reconsidered, moving towards a form of power management that, to varying degrees, harked back to administrative monarchy. The states sought to create a more efficient administration, centralizing government decision-making, unifying and streamlining civil, criminal, commercial and health legislation, and reorganizing administration in the hinterlands. It was a system that also sometimes included the modest involvement of the state’s subjects in central administration, and the creation of a vast bureaucracy, increasingly composed of elements selected for their skills and competence.
