ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Italian industrialization process in the social and political context of Liberal Italy between the Peace of Villafranca and the Treaty of Versailles. This process has been taken to be synonymous with Kuznets' modern economic growth. The central issue is that of the peculiarity of Italy's development. Italy is an important case study used by Gerschenkron to illustrate his well-known general proposition that in a number of important historical instances the industrialization process, when launched at length in a backward country. Fenoaltea's contribution to the debate on the process of Italian industrialization between 1861 and 1913 is one of the most fruitful. This way of interpreting the unsatisfactory behaviour of the Italian economy after the Unification more intuited than quantified since neither Gramsci nor Sereni had national accounting statistics at their disposal has been widely criticized.
