Southern question
The term southern question indicates, in Italian historiography, the perception, which developed in the post-unification context, of the situation of persistent backwardness in the socioeconomic development of the regions of southern Italy compared to the other regions of the country, especially the northern ones. First used in 1873 by Lombard radical MP Antonio Billia, meaning the disastrous economic situation of the south of Italy compared to other regions of united Italy, it is sometimes used in common parlance even today.
The great southern emigration began only a few decades after the unification of Italy, where in the first half of the 19th century it had already affected several areas in the north, particularly Piedmont, Comacchio and Veneto. The historical reasons for the first southern emigration in the second half of the 19th century are to be found in widespread literature both in the crisis of the countryside and grain, and in the situation of economic impoverishment affecting the south in the aftermath of unification, when industrial investments were concentrated in the northwest, as well as in other factors.
Between 1877 and 1887 Italy had passed new protectionist tariff laws to protect its weak industry. These laws penalized agricultural exports from the south, favored industrial production concentrated in the north, and created the conditions for the corrupt mixing of politics and economics. According to Giustino Fortunato, these measures determined the final collapse of southern interests in the face of those of northern Italy. With the First World War, the relative development of the north, based on industry, was favored by the war orders, while in the south, the conscription of young men to arms left the fields neglected, depriving their families of all sustenance, since, in the absence of men at the front, southern women were not accustomed to working the land like peasant women in the north and center; in fact, in the south, the arable land was often far from the homes, which were located in the villages, and even if they had wanted to, southern women would not have been able to do the housework and work the land at the same time, which was possible in northern and central Italy, where the peasants lived in farmhouses just a few meters from the land to be cultivated.
The policies implemented in the Fascist era to increase productivity in the primary sector were also unsuccessful: in particular, the agrarian policy pursued by Mussolini deeply damaged certain areas of the south. In fact, production focused mainly on wheat at the expense of more specialized and profitable crops that were widespread in the more fertile and developed southern areas. As for industry, it experienced during the "black twenty-year period" a long period of stagnation in the south, which is also noticeable in terms of employment. In the late 1930s, Fascism gave a new impetus to its economic efforts in the south and in Sicily, but this was an initiative aimed at increasing the meager consensus the regime enjoyed in the south and at popularizing in the south the world war that would soon engulf Italy.
The southern question remains unresolved to this day for a number of economic reasons. Even after the Second World War, the development gap between the centre and the north could never be closed, because between 1971 and 2017, the Italian state invested, on average per inhabitant, much more in the centre-north than in the south, making the gap not only unbridgeable but, on the contrary, accentuating it. According to the Eurispes: Results of the Italy 2020 report, if one were to consider the share of total public expenditure that the south should have received each year as a percentage of its population, it turns out that, in total, from 2000 to 2017, the corresponding sum deducted from it amounts to more than 840 billion euros net.
The situation before the unification of Italy
Political situation and framing
The origin of economic and social differences between Italian regions has long been controversial, partly because of the related ideological and political implications. The prevailing historiographical current argues that the differences between the different areas of the peninsula were already very pronounced at the time of unification: the intensive agriculture of the Po Valley, the drive to build roads and railways of Piedmont, and the role of trade and finance are contrasted with the approach that characterized the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.According to journalist and essayist Paolo Mieli, based on Vittorio Daniele and Paolo Malanima's work, Il divario Nord-Sud in Italia 1861-2011, the Bourbon territories presented in the years of national unification, economic conditions quite similar to those of the northern areas and that indeed the per capita GDP of the south was higher, albeit slightly, than that of the north.
In contrast, U.S. economist Richard S. Eckaus argued there was an economic depression in the south prior to unification.
According to Francesco Saverio Nitti, between 1810 and 1860, while states such as Britain, the United States, France, Germany, and Belgium experienced progress, pre-unification Italy had great difficulties in growth, largely due to various issues such as internal rebellions and wars of independence. The situation was also exacerbated by malaria, which plagued the south of Italy in particular. Nitti believed that, prior to unification, there were no marked economic differences at the territorial level, and in every area of pre-unification Italy there was a scarcity of large industries:
About the conditions of economic and productive development in pre-unification Italy Antonio Gramsci took a different view than Nitti, and according to the Marxist politician and historian at the date of Italian unification there were instead profound differences in economic organization and infrastructure between the northern and southern parts of the Italian peninsula.
According to Denis Mack Smith's exposition in his work History of Italy from 1861 to 1998, starting in 1850, Cavour's Piedmont was led by a liberal elite that marked a radical acceleration, with the declared aim of confronting the major European powers. The civil code was reformed on the model of the more advanced but decidedly centralist French code. A new bank was founded to provide credit to industrial enterprises and duties were significantly reduced, by an average of 10 percent, in comparison with 100 percent in the south. Technicians were sent to England to study the war industry, and infrastructure was greatly developed: the Cavour canal, begun in 1857, made the Vercelli and Novara region fertile, railways were expanded so that by 1859 Piedmont possessed half the mileage of the entire peninsula, and by 1868, the Moncenisio railway soon made it possible to reach Paris in a single day's journey. Nitti argued that this transformation entailed huge public expenditures that led the Sardinian kingdom into a deep financial depression, as many public works proved unproductive. According to Nitti, without detracting from the great merits of Piedmont in the face of Italian unification, the situation of the Kingdom of Sardinia, in order to avoid bankruptcy, could only be resolved by "mixing Piedmont's finances with those of another, larger state".
In the climate of restoration following the Sicilian uprisings of 1848, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had pursued a conservative policy. The Bourbon government, according to Mack Smith, traced an aristocratic model, based on lower levels of taxes and low spending on infrastructure. Economic policy was paternalistic: domestic production was protected by high duties on the import of goods and food prices were kept low by the prohibition of exporting grain, while land ownership was concentrated among a few landowners who held it as a latifundium, or held in mortmain by the Church, while feudal rights to tithe and public use of communal lands still applied. Nitti assessed that the system adopted by the Bourbons was due to a lack of vision, a refusal to look to the future, a principle he judged to be narrow and almost patriarchal, but which at the same time guaranteed a "rough prosperity that made the life of the people less torturous than it is now".
However, the causes of the southern problem must be sought in the many political and socio-economic events that the south has undergone over the centuries: In the absence of a communal period, which would have stimulated intellectual and productive energies; in the persistence of foreign monarchies, incapable of creating a modern state; in the centuries-long domination of a baronage, holder of all privileges; in the persistence of the latifundium; in the absence of a bourgeois class, creator of wealth and animator of new forms of political life; in the nefarious and corrupting Spanish domination. Of particular importance was the almost systematic alliance between foreign monarchies and the nobility, based on the maintenance of the feudal regime. This alliance prevented the emergence of an active, enterprising bourgeoisie.
The problems of integrating the south into the new unified nation-state were also generated because of the profound socio-cultural differences between the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the other pre-unitary states:
The situation was exacerbated by extensive and widespread administrative corruption. In the years following national unification, the average life expectancy in the south was several years shorter than in the north, and there was a higher incidence of malnutrition and undernourishment.
The socioeconomic situation in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was succinctly described by British historian Denis Mack Smith as follows:
Economic situation
To correctly interpret the economic and social situation, it must be considered that the Kingdom was not a uniform reality within itself, and indeed regional differences were more pronounced than in modern Italy. In general, wealth increased from inland to the coast, and from the countryside to the city. Naples, with as many as 450,000 inhabitants, was by far among the top cities in Europe by population. Its province could compete with the more developed provinces of the northwest while there were extremely poor areas, such as the Calabrian, Sicilian and Lucanian hinterlands. According to Giustino Fortunato such a state of profound difference between the city of Naples and the poor provinces of the kingdom would have influenced the events of the Risorgimento in the south: "If the provinces, and not the capital, preceded the few insurrections that led to Garibaldi's landing in Reggio di Calabria, it was perhaps due in no small part to an ascetic sense of aversion to the excessive, enormous preponderance of the city of Naples, made too great, if not rich, at the cost of a small and too miserable dark kingdom....."Sicily constituted a case apart: the end of the uprisings of '48 had reestablished its reunification with the rest of the peninsula, yet independence continued to be strong and would be instrumental in supporting Garibaldi's landing.
The situation of pre-unification Italy was, in general, disadvantaged compared to that of other Western European states and decidedly poor by today's standards. In a country relatively overpopulated and poor in raw materials, the economy was deeply based on agriculture.
Of the 22 million inhabitants recorded by the 1861 census, 8 million were employed in agriculture, compared with 3 million employed in industry and handicrafts. Moreover, of these about 80 percent were women employed only seasonally. According to the traditional view, however, the level of productivity in the different regions was radically different, whether due to natural causes or the techniques adopted.
The nature of the southern terrain reduced the availability and regularity of water, reducing the possibilities for cultivation. Centuries of deforestation and lack of investment in land care and channelization facilitated erosion and the persistence of extensive swamps, such as those in the Pontine or Fucine regions. In several areas, infectious diseases carried by marsh mosquitoes drove populations to retreat to the hills.
Mack Smith believes that in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies the method of cultivation was based on the feudal system: estates cultivated by laborers produced grain for self-consumption only. The aristocrats who owned them did not live on their estates and found it disreputable to deal with their management. Consequently, they had no interest in investing in improved production techniques or in more profitable crops such as olive trees or orchards, which could be productive after only a decade or so, preferring instead to grow wheat every year, even on unsuitable land: in 1851, Nassau Senior noted that production per hectare in Sicily had not changed since the time of Cicero. The resulting prices were high and, together with tariff barriers, discouraged trade.
The life of the laborers, according to Mack Smith, was quite miserable: malaria, brigands and the lack of water forced the populations to cluster in villages that were as far as twenty kilometers from the areas where they worked. Illiteracy was almost complete, and even in 1861 there were places where rent, tithes to the parish priest, and the "protection" of the field-guards were paid in kind. Unemployment was widespread, so much so that observers of the time reported how a southern peasant earned half as much as his northern equivalent, although wages were comparable. Agriculture was often insufficient; the Bourbon historian Giacinto de' Sivo specifically mentions that, "Due to poor harvests there was a shortage of grain but the government decided to buy grain abroad and sell it at a loss both here and in Sicily."
Inadequate agricultural production was also caused by the customs regime, which prohibited the export of cereals produced in the kingdom, so that production was for internal consumption, and an increase in production of 5 per cent led to a fall in prices, while on the contrary an insufficient production of 10–15 per cent led to a considerable rise in prices, which the ceiling tried in vain to prevent, causing the famine described by De Sivo, in addition to the situation of poor harvests, the mortmain and other restrictions on cultivation.
Moreover, in 1861 with a population of 38 percent of the Kingdom of Italy, the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had an average agricultural income of 30.6 percent. The situation was aggravated by the fact that per capita consumption of cereal products was higher in the south than in the north and centre, indicating the relative depression of the southern regions, a situation that persisted even in 1960. In contrast, the northeastern part of the country would have at least partially incorporated the techniques of the agricultural revolution of northern Europe, introduced during the Napoleonic campaigns. Agriculture was practised by farmers in the north and sharecroppers in Tuscany, and driven by the capitals of the cities, which acted as financial centres. Water legislation was more advanced and intensive canalisation allowed the intensive cultivation of rice, which could be exported.
Silk production was an important source of exports and foreign exchange, and production was heavily concentrated in the northern regions.
As for industry, at the time of unification it consisted mainly of a series of craft activities serving the elite. Italy was a country of second industrialisation because the lack of raw materials slowed down its industrial development until around 1880. At the same time, low labour costs, difficult access to capital and a lack of technical expertise prevented the purchase of machinery from abroad to replace manual labour.
One partial exception was mechanised weaving, which had become widespread since 1816, especially in the north-west, where waterways were abundant, and which, with the advent of the steam loom, would form the basis of widespread industrial capitalism. The main exports were wool and silk from Lombardy and Piedmont, followed by sulphur from Sicily for gunpowder. However, Mack Smith, in his work The Italian Risorgimento, argues that "in many industries in Lombardy, the law of compulsory education was not observed, and two-fifths of the workers in the Lombard cotton industry were children under the age of twelve, mostly girls, who worked twelve and even sixteen hours a day". Child labour was widespread throughout the peninsula and remained so for a long time, as in the case of the carusi, the Sicilian term for children who worked in the sulphur mines.
Significant British capital was involved in sulfur mining, and it would remain relevant to the Sicilian economy until competition from the United States emerged. The south was not devoid of industry: the Officine di Pietrarsa, the Mongiana ironworks and the Castellamare di Stabia shipyards are often cited as examples, which the Crown strongly desired as strategic to reduce dependence on British imports. However, their impact on the Kingdom's economy was limited.
Employment in the large mechanical and metallurgical industries in Italy, taking into account industries of a certain size in 1864, numbered 64 establishments with a total of 11,777 employees, of which in the north 46 establishments with 7,434 employees, in the center 13 establishments with 1,803 employees and in the south 9 establishments with 2,540 employees, of which 7 establishments in Campania with 2,225 employees, 1 establishment in Sicily with 275 employees and 1 establishment in Sardinia with 40 employees. Industries of significant size were present in all regions except Abruzzi, Basilicata, Apulia and Calabria.
The poor development of industry in the pre-unification south is evidenced by the absence of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies at the Great Exhibition of Industry in London in 1851 and the Exhibition of Industry at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1855, at which the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Papal States were present.
Southernist and Lucanian senator Giustino Fortunato expressed the following opinion on the problems related to the economy of the pre-unification south:
Some astonishing firsts were achieved in the field of transport, such as the first steamship in Italy and the first iron bridge. However, investment in roads and railways was hampered by the hilly hinterland and maritime transport was favoured, facilitated by the significant expansion of the coastline, to the extent that the Bourbon merchant fleet became the third largest in Europe in terms of number of ships and total tonnage, despite the fact that the merchant navies of the other pre-unitary states in the north had greater tonnage. The fact remains that maritime transport was limited to the southern coasts and could not bring goods into the interior, where it had to be carried by animal-drawn wagons or pack animals, to the point that Giustino Fortunato stated in his political speeches that "... transport was carried out by pack animals, as in the plains of the East".
The tonnages of the merchant fleets of the peninsula in 1858 were as follows: Kingdom of Sardinia 208,218; Grand Duchy of Tuscany 59,023; Modena 980; Papal State 41,360; Two Sicilies 272,305; Venice and Trieste 350,899. Out of a total of 932,785 tonnes, the Bourbon kingdom thus had less than a quarter.
On the size of the Bourbon merchant fleet, the southern historian Raffaele de Cesare, in his book La fine di un Regno writes:
The opening of the 8 km of the Naples-Portici line in 1839, Italy's first railway, was met with great enthusiasm. However, just 20 years later, the northern railways were 2035 km long, while Naples was only connected to Capua and Salerno, for a total of 98 km of railway. Similarly, according to Nicola Nisco, in 1860, 1621 out of 1848 towns were without roads and therefore virtually inaccessible, being served by sheep and mule tracks; the lack of road infrastructure was particularly acute in the Bourbon South, which had a road network of only 14,000 km out of the more than 90,000 km of the then unified peninsula, while Lombardy alone, four times smaller, had a road network of 28,000 km, with the road network of central Italy at the same level as Lombardy in terms of metres per square kilometre.
The scarcity of capital was felt everywhere, but especially in the south, where savings were immobilised in land or precious coins. In his essay "North and South", Nitti notes that when the coins of the pre-unitary states were unified, 443 million coins of various metals were withdrawn in the south, compared with 226 million in the rest of Italy.
The substitution allowed different types of precious metals to be withdrawn, generating the feeling of a real expropriation, so much so that still in 1973 Antonio Ghirelli erroneously claimed that 443 million gold lire "ended up in the North".
Capital from the new kingdom was used to build a southern railroad network, which in the south in 1859 was limited only to the area of Naples and its environs, and with an unprecedented effort, in July 1863, in the territories of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies the railroads increased from 128 km to 1896 km with an increase of 1768 km in the continental part, while in Sicily, where railways were nonexistent, it increased to 708 km.
Piedmont's development came at a price: public accounts were severely affected both by the effort to modernize the economy and by the wars of unification. With the birth of the Unified Italy, the budgetary debts of the Kingdom of Sardinia were transferred to the coffers of the newly formed Italian State, which in the years following the unification financed the construction of many kilometres of roads and railways throughout the peninsula, particularly in the south, which at the time had few roads and very few railways, but the construction of such infrastructure did not initiate a parallel economic development of the south compared to the rest of the peninsula.
The economic gap was thus already evident by considering the statistical data referring to Italian joint-stock and limited partnerships at the time of unification, based on data on commercial and industrial companies taken from the Italian Statistical Yearbook of 1864. There were 377 anonymous and limited partnerships, 325 of which were in the center-north, excluding from the count those existing in Lazio, Umbria, Marche, Veneto, Trentino, Friuli and Venezia Giulia. However, the share capital of these companies was a total of 1.353 billion, of which 1.127 billion were in companies in the center-north and only 225 million in the south. By way of comparison, the total financial reserve of the Bourbon state was 443.200 million liras; practically one-third of the capital of the anonymous and limited partnerships in the center-north excluding several territories not yet annexed. The anonymous and limited partnerships of the Kingdom of Sardinia alone had a total capital that was almost double that of the Bourbon state: 755.776 million versus 443.200 million in liquid assets. This calculation excludes all stock and limited companies in the northeast, since it was not included in the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.
The annual import-export trade before 1859, including the territories not yet unified and subsequently annexed, reached a national total of 800,251,265 lire for imports and 680,719,892 lire for exports; in relation to these amounts, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies imported goods worth 104,558,573 lire and exported 145,326,929 lire, representing only 13% of the value of imports and 21% of national exports on an annual basis.
At the time of unification, the banking system showed a predominance of the northern centre in terms of the number of branches and offices, the volume of operations and the capital moved, out of a partial national total of 28 institutions and 120,025 discount transactions for a total of 465,469,753 lire and 24,815 advance transactions for a total of 141,944,725 lire, the branches in the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies numbered 5 and carried out 8,428 discount transactions for a total of 33,574,295 lire and 1,348 advance transactions for 9,779,199 lire, noting also the partial figure of Sicily alone, which carried out most of the discount transactions, 4,388 for 17,743,368 lire, compared with the continental part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which carried out only 4,040 for 15,830,927 lire. The Genoa branch alone recorded 19,715 discount transactions for 113,189,568 lire and 1,578 advance transactions for 24,517,419 lire before unification, i.e. a volume almost three times greater than that of all the branches in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, as shown in the adjacent table.
There was also a wide gap in the field of savings institutions; in 1860 savings banks were widely spread in the central and northern territories, while they began to spread in the south only after unification, reaching in 1863 the number of 15 savings banks with 4,607 savings accounts for 1,181,693 lire out of a national total of 154 savings banks with 284,002 savings accounts for 188,629,594 lire, a partial figure and not including the institutions of Lazio, Veneto, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Trentino not yet annexed, as per the diagram on the side.
Commenting on Bourbon policy, Giustino Fortunato, in his analysis of conditions in southern Italy at the time of the unification, said:
Fortunato noted what is clearly proven about the budgets of the Bourbon state: expenditure was overwhelmingly directed to the court or the armed forces, charged with protecting the very narrow ruling caste of the kingdom, leaving very little for investment in public works, health and education, and the truly classist nature of Bourbon economic policy is evident from the following figures on state budgets. In 1854, Bourbon government expenditure totalled 31.4 million ducats, of which 1.2 million were spent on education, health and public works, while as much as 14 million ducats were spent on the armed forces and 6.5 million on interest payments on the public debt, in addition to the huge expenditure on the royal court.
The budget of the Bourbon state projected for 1860, before Garibaldi's landing in Marsala, in a state of peace and not of war, once again showed the disproportion between military expenditure and expenditure on the population. The planned expenditure, excluding Sicily, adding up the budget spent directly by the central state and that distributed to the local authorities, for a total of 35,450,812 ducats, was distributed as follows: Army 11,307,220; Navy 3,000,000; Foreign Affairs 298,800; Central Government 1,644,792; Prior debts 13,000,000; Public Works 3,400,000; Clergy and Education 360,000; Police, Justice 2,440,000.
Military expenditure accounted for about 40 per cent of the total budget, and if police and judicial expenditure are included, this figure rises to 47 per cent, while expenditure on education and the clergy accounted for only 1 per cent of the total budget of 35,450,812 ducats. Sicily had the last ascertainable budget, expressed in 41,618,200 lire, which at the 1859 exchange rate of 4.25 lire to the ducat was estimated to be equivalent to 9,793,000 ducats.
A careful and critical analysis of the financial system of the Bourbons was described in detail by Giovanni Carano Donvito, in which he highlighted how the former Neapolitan government "...although it demanded little of its subjects, it spent very little on them, and what little it did spend, it spent badly...".
With the unification of 1861–1862, considerable funds were also allocated to public works in the new Kingdom of Italy, including roads, bridges, harbours, beaches and lighthouses. In the south of the mainland, the works cost 25,648,123 lire, in Sicily 37,218,898 lire and in Sardinia 23,293,121 lire, while the expenditure for Lombardy was 8,267,282 lire and for Tuscany 7,271,844 lire, partly because these areas had already been provided with public works during the previous pre-unitary states.
Correspondence at the time of the unification of Italy recorded a national average of 3.29 letters and 1.88 prints per inhabitant in 1862, rising to 6.09 letters and 5.28 prints per inhabitant in the Piedmont postal district, 3.07 letters and 1.26 prints per inhabitant in Tuscany and Umbria, and falling further to 1.66 letters and 0.69 prints per inhabitant in the Naples postal district. At the time of the unification, the number of telegraphic dispatches also showed a great disparity: the district of Turin alone recorded an annual income of 747,882 lire, Milan 379,253 lire, Bologna 230,340 lire, Pisa 357,127 lire and Cagliari 40,428 lire, while the districts of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies recorded annual revenues of 313,889 lire for Naples, 130,405 lire for Foggia, 45,700 lire for Cosenza and 230,701 lire for Palermo. In practice, the district of Turin alone recorded more for telegraphic dispatches than the whole of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. These figures do not take into account the dispatches sent from the 91 offices of the railway companies, which were also open to the public service and private individuals, a fact that increases the number of dispatches sent from the north-central offices, since at that time the railways were largely assigned to the north-central part of the peninsula.
The scarcity of postal and telegraph traffic in the southern territories was indicative of reduced economic exchanges and low literacy; in fact, in the territories of the former Kingdom of Sardinia and Lombardy, the literate were the majority among men, with 539 literate and 461 illiterate out of 1,000 male inhabitants, while out of 1,000 female inhabitants the literate were 426 and the illiterate 574. Illiteracy tended to increase in the territories of Emilia, Tuscany, Marche and Umbria, where out of 1,000 male inhabitants there were 359 literate and 641 illiterate, while out of 1,000 female inhabitants there were 250 literate and 750 illiterate. In the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the presence of literate people decreased, and out of 1,000 male inhabitants only 164 were literate and the rest 835 illiterate, while out of 1,000 female inhabitants there were only 62 literate and 938 illiterate. The level of secondary education was also generally lower in the southern regions than in the rest of the peninsula.
In the south of Italy, in the first years of unification, the damage caused by the insecurity of internal transport due to brigandage was more serious than that caused by liberalism, as was the reduction in demand for goods and services due to the fact that Naples was no longer the capital and that public contracts and state concessions were open to the national market and no longer restricted to the south.