ABSTRACT
The role of private bankers in the process of Italian industrial development has never been studied in depth and detail. On the other hand, studies on the relations between banks and industry have, in general, focused on the changes wrought in the Italian financial system by the process of reorganisation of the entire Italian banking system that began in the mid-1990s. The emergence of the Banca d’Italia generated the initial reorganisation of the issuing banks, and the consolidation of the mixed bank brought the Italian banking world significantly closer to the European standards. Effectively, since according to many economic historians this process was functional to if not actually decisive for Italian industrialisation, over the last thirty years studies on banking in Italy have concentrated specifically on the development of the relations between the mixed banks and the sphere of industrial enterprise, through an attentive examination of Gerschenkron’s model for Italy. An initial phase, marked by a substantial confirmation of the validity of this explicative model, was followed by a partial decline (and the consequent strengthening of revisionist positions), which nevertheless opened the path to a clearer understanding of the role played by the Bank d’Italia and the State, not only in the modernisation of the financial system, but above all in the definition of a stable framework within which mechanisms of accumulation were guaranteed in a country on the road to industrialisation.1 This evolution of the debate paved
the way for the application to the Italian case also of Goldsmith’s conceptual instruments of a statistical-accounting nature.2 This made it possible, in the first place, to show how in Italy, in the period following the emergence of the mixed banks, the financiatial intermediation ratio indicator (FIN) was higher than that of other industrialised countries and that there was an elevated and precocious institutionalisation of the credit system, and that consequently the Italian case came within the financing schema. In the second place, it showed that the increase in the financial inter-relation ratio (FIR) was very high in the interwar period (1914-1938), but very low in the period of industrialisation (1881-1914). Thus, at a merely quantitative level, exploding ‘the theory that in the initial launch of Italian industry, given the “forced” nature of the process, the overall role of finance […] was more important than in other periods’. Such considerations, nevertheless, ended up by strengthening rather than undermining Gerschenkron’s theory, confirming that the credits of the financial intermediaries, and in particular those of the mixed banks ‘replaced others rather than augmenting them’ and that, in view of the considerable contribution made by such credit institutes to the increase of the FIN they must have had ‘a specific ‘qualitative’ tendency […] to foster the industrial and economic development of the country’ between 1895 and 1913.3
Nonetheless, all these studies very carefully avoided considering the role played by private bankers both before the reorganisation of the credit system and after the birth and consolidation of the mixed bank. References to the importance of these economic entities had not been lacking in the past. As observed by Franco Bonelli,4 in the 1920s Luigi Einaudi had already drawn attention to the role played by the minor banks and by private bankers in enabling the major credit institutions that emerged at the end of the last century (Banca Commerciale Italiana, Credito Italiano) to expand their sphere of action to a clientele traditionally bound to the private banks by relations of trust, and at times even family connections.5 About thirty years ago, the same concept was confirmed by the then governor of the Banca d’Italia, Guido Carli.6 The difficulty – up until very recently – of accessing direct archive sources was for a long time a serious impediment to the progress of such studies. Recently, however, several important steps forward have been made, primarily thanks to a younger generation of scholars who have adopted an
original approach to the study of private bankers. The two most significant cases are those of the Milanese and the Florentine bankers in the pre-unitary period. In the first case, the activity of the private bankers is considered as functional not only to the provision of resources for productive investments, but also to fostering dynamic processes for the creation and management of means of payment, fruitfully exploiting the vast body of theoretical literature on the subject.7 In the second case, they swiftly rule out the idea that there was no financial market in Tuscany in the first half of the nineteenth century.8 This idea was derived from the general conviction that, for the entire nineteenth century and a good part of the twentieth, any real financial market in Italy was insubstantial or even nonexistent. This concept was in its turn linked to the view – for long prevalent in Italian historiography – that the financial system of the new unified State, and even more so in the pre-unitary States was underdeveloped, governed within the territory by regional traditions that exacerbated its backwardness and was in a subordinate relation to the international finance of England and France.9 This vision began to be partially called into question by global studies of the national banking system, which among other things also began to focus the research on the private bankers.10
