ABSTRACT
The poor, part of the overall surplus population, pressed upon the industrial reserve army, just as the latter constrained the active vanguard of workers. The overwhelming majority of the labouring poor remained apparently untouched by ‘modern’ working-class consciousness, responding to the changed conditions imposed by mechanization and industrialization through traditional or adapted strategies of subsistence. The problem of the origins of a ‘modern’ working class in Italy has tended to be subsumed into a debate about the spontaneity or otherwise of the formation of its class-consciousness and organizations, in which judgements about the positive or negative role of the trade unions play a predominant part. The decline of Italy from the sixteenth century is well known. Politically, the Italian states were conquered by, or gravitated around, the Spanish Habsburgs; economically, the peninsula lost its central location as the axis of European trade shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.
