ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses Count Camillo Cavour’s 1844 essay Thoughts on Ireland: Its Present and Its Future in transnational perspective as a means to shed light both on the image of Ireland in nineteenth-century Italy and on a particular case study in the circulation of ideas about agricultural progress in nineteenth-century Europe. Both Italian and Irish historians have noticed the importance and insightfulness of Cavour’s publication, 1 either in the context of Cavour’s life or in the context of nineteenth-century Irish history. I intend to take a close look at Cavour’s essay by analysing it in light of the sources that inspired its creation. In the first instance, Cavour’s trips to Britain, particularly to London in 1835—during which he saw Daniel O’Connell—and again in 1843, exercised a great influence on his thinking. However, a second, and perhaps more important influence—and yet one often overlooked by historians—was represented by Cavour’s activities as a promoter of agrarian reform in his native Piedmont, the heart of the Kingdom of Sardinia, in Italy, specifically through his participation in the Associazione agraria subalpina (Subalpine Agrarian Association), founded in 1842.
