Through the Magnifying Glass: Provincial Aspects of Industrial Growth in Post-Unification Italy

Abstract

In post-Unification Italy industrialization was ever sharply sub-regional. Initially industry was largely artisanal, and located in the former political capitals; factory industry was instead attracted by the waterfalls of the subalpine Northwest. From the 1880s, as modernization accelerated, industry concentrated: in the Lombard and Piedmontese subalpine provinces with the late-nineteenth-century boom in (protected) textiles, then particularly in Turin and Milan with the engineering boom, and novel energy-transmission, of the belle époque; and in Liguria's Genoa, which captured (subsidized) civil and naval shipbuilding. The only significant diffusion came as (newly protected) beet-sugar-extraction spread throughout Emilia.Italy, pre-1913, regional industrialization