ABSTRACT
The ground for considering these three countries within a single comparative structure are considerable. All three were marginal international powers; Italy trembling upon the brink of great power status, her lavish naval programmes already imitating the expenditure patterns of the élite; the Habsburg Empire, territorially the second largest state in Europe but slowly crumbling towards disintegration; and Spain, divested of her overseas possessions in the Spanish-American War of 1898, her international role terminated in all but rhetoric by collision with the surfacing bulk of the transatlantic democracy. Economically, too, there were strong similiarities: all three were late and slow developers; all three retained massive estate agricultures and somehow missed the chance of land reform; all three experienced severe problems of regional underdevelopment; all three attracted the attentions of ‘penetrative’ foreign capital; all three harboured military ambitions which outran their budgetary resources. Yet the similarities were not all oppressive ones; by 1914 each nation had constructed a modern sector – the steel, engineering, and automobiles of northern Italy; the heavy manufactures of metropolitan Austria and the armament industries of Steyr and Skoda; the shipbuilding and metals of Bilbao and Viscaya – which clearly lifted it beyond the reach of chronic, and into the realm of moderate, backwardness. Starting around 1800 from a level of peasant primitivism not far removed from the Russian, each economy by 1914 had created notable successes in both manufacture and agriculture, and at least two of them – Italy and metropolitan Austria, 1 through probably not Spain – had outpaced Russia in the quest for ‘modern economic growth’. The similarities are such that inter-country comparisons should yield significant results: recently Nadal has argued that ‘discussion of the Italian example can help to enrich discussion of the Spanish problem’, 2 and it is not unlikely that extra enrichment can be drawn from the plentiful eccentricities of the Habsburg Empire. As a group these countries should provide an additional testing ground for the major Gerschenkronian hypotheses. Theoretically, these are economies in which one would expect to find ‘big spurts’, development biased towards capital goods industries, active direction by the state, and, somewhat later, the rise of growth-promoting investment banks. It remains to be seen whether the unstable, dualistic, ‘colonial’ and belligerent realities of these states could stretch, or be stretched, to include these promising indications.
