ABSTRACT
Economic crises in nineteenth century Italy A preliminary survey of Italian literature of the nineteenth century discloses only a vague perception of the momentous change from a traditional society largely based on agriculture to a society centered in cities and divided in new classes. How much the latter depended on the economic cycle was a question posed and answered only in economic journals and academic writings at the end of the century, not in literature at large. The awareness of modernity was confined to a general reappraisal of agricultural life, in positive or negative; to the perception of a growing bureaucratization of life, particularly in relation to the setting up of the national state; and to condemning the changes of the few urban spaces influenced by a slow process of industrialization. Crises found their definition abroad. Gerolamo Boccardo (1857, pp. 731-738) derived the general structure of the voice on crises in his Dictionary of political economy from French antecedents (Besomi, 2012). He defined them: “more or less deep perturbations of the social interests” (Boccardo 1857, p. 731) that, however severe, were brief by definition. Crisis maintained its original medical significance: a seizure always followed by healing that would never be fatal. It is worthwhile to cite the subdivision of crises that Boccardo proposed to his readers, because this taxonomy would recur in many subsequent authors until the last decades of the nineteenth century. Boccardo classified crises in three main categories: crises that afflicted agriculture, disturbing the production of necessity goods; industrial crises, arising in manufactories, causing disorders in their production and in the related interests; commercial crises, perturbing the trading market through turmoil in the currency, in credit or in the means and ways of communications. In 1864, almost a decade after the first edition of Boccardo’s Dictionary, Francesco Ferrara edited the fourth volume of the second series of the Biblioteca dell’Economista (Gilbart, Scherer, Stirling, 1864). The volume dealt with the history of trade and included works by Gilbart (1847), Scherer (1853) and Stirling (1846). Ferrara introduced it with a lengthy essay on economic crises. Definition and taxonomy were similar as in Boccardo. Ferrara, through his pictorial and metaphoric language, vividly described economic crises as distresses of
nations’ economic life, quite similar to a physiologic disease: an epidemic menacing the orderly functioning of the economic body (Ferrara, 1864, p. v). The crisis had three main forms of appearance: insufficient production, excessive production and scarcity of money (Ferrara, 1864, pp. vi-xi). As Boccardo, Ferrara too stressed how the subdivision followed from the sectors involved: agriculture, manufacture and trade. Only in 1878, Salvatore Cognetti de Martiis proposed a change in terminology and taxonomy. In his essay on “Shapes and Laws of Economic Perturbations,” published on the Giornale degli Economisti, Cognetti ignored the term crisis and wrote instead of perturbations (Cognetti de Martiis, 1878a). He also introduced the concept of cycles as defined by Clément Juglar (1856). Even in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, crises were not popular among Italian economists, with few exceptions. In the “Essay on Italian Economic Bibliography” for the years 1870-1890, compiled by Angelo Bertolini (1892), crises were included in the general section on trade. Bertolini listed 110 titles of which only nine actually referred to economic crises. Two of them tried to explain the trading problems of Italian wine and spirits (Cantalamessa, 1888; Snider, 1889) others referred to the crisis of Italy’s economy in the late 1980s (Dalla Volta, 1888; de Johannis, 1885; Montaldo, 1885; Tanlongo Berna, 1889; Usigli, 1890), one particularly in relation with the institutional framework of the stock exchange (Bonis, 1889). Only Max Wirth (1886) addressed the problem of crises from a more theoretical point of view. Shunned by literature, barely tolerated by intellectuals and economists, crises were much more researched in countries like England and France, where their repetitive and destructive recurrence sparked the most remarkable theoretical advancements and many literary recollections and representations. The most frequent form of crisis Italian people would experience for the whole century was famine. In 1885 the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Trade dedicated an entire booklet to the analysis of wheat prices from Unification to the 1880s (Ministero di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, 1886). Only in the last few years had the improvement of internal and international trade allowed a general fall in prices of grains, corn and other needed primary agricultural produces. Fluctuations in the preceding decades (Figure 13.1) all corresponded to severe shortage crises. Famines plagued Italy at the very beginning of the century, at the end of Napoleonic wars and then regularly every decade. A scrutiny of periodicals,1 novels and tales, so results in few narratives on the crises caused by the spreading of manufactures or financial institutions, but many analyses of food shortages, their causes and prospective solutions. For economists and intellectuals, modernization was more a question of eliminating famine than industrializing Italy.
