No abstract

The Fascist Reorganisation of Historical Studies and «Istituto italiano per la storia antica»

Istituto Italiano per la storia antica has just celebrated the eightieth anniversary of its foundation. It was established on 25 February 1935, within the context of the systematic reorganization of historical studies that the Fascist regime carried out in the mid-1930s. This paper provides a survey of the fifty years of history of the previous organization (starting in 1883, the foundation year of Istituto storico italiano); the historiographical debate that led to the creation of an Institute devoted specifically to Ancient History; and the centralist logic that underpinned the regime’s organizational and political choices in that endeavour. It then offers an overview of the history of the Institute since its foundation. The early history of the Institute (1935-43) stands out as especially instructive. It was created as a national centre for the promotion and coordination of the study of ancient (especially Roman) history in Fascist Italy. It emerges as an instance of the dissociation between rhetoric and practice that was a distinctive feature of many aspects of Fascism, and is especially apparent in its ideological exploitation of Roman antiquity.

Guilds and Economic Growth (Eleventh-eighteenth Centuries). Returns to Scale, Demand, Pareto-optimality

This essay concludes a series of three unitary contributions on corporatism and economic growth.
The contemporary ideology of perfect competition and of the competitive society postulates decreasing returns to scale. The literature reveals a historical context of increasing returns since the Middle Ages, invalidating most contemporary conventional wisdom on competition. The success of expanding secondary activities, the search for expanding demand, the growth in size of firms belonging to guilds, and the expansion of towns provide evidence of the prevalence of increasing returns to scale. Division of labour, centralization, improvement of quality, new techniques, and natural energy sources are the determinants of such a trend. The extent of demand appears to be one of the main limits to economic growth.
Competition intrinsically engenders a risk of failure of some firms, and hence of non-Pareto-optimality. Guilds attempt to counter non-Pareto-optimality mainly by ex ante norms that provide insurance against fatal losses of revenue by their members, but hinder efficient allocation of resources. Nineteenth-century forerunners of modern corporative economic thought first formulate the outlines of a social insurance that intervenes after efficient resource allocation. Justice and insurance goods are actually seen as crucial components of the concept of economic development.

Buried Alive. Justice, Propaganda and Literary Inventions (Naples, 1757-1764)

This study focuses on the case of Leopoldo di San Pasquale, an Augustinian friar who had been tried in Naples in 1757 by his brethren on charges of financial fraud, heresy and sexual immorality. He claimed to have been buried alive, accusing his superiors of subjecting him to a series of inhuman cruelties.
The whole corpus of texts produced after the chosen event/case study (with the explicit or implicit aim to give an account of the «fact») has been taken into consideration, in order to reconstruct what lies «inside» and «outside» these writings, and to understand the social and cultural use people made of these texts. Although they were not only aimed to inform, and they probably had little to do with political reality, they still conveyed a political message and a general view of politics. They reveal the richness of a world permeable to the circulation of conflicting beliefs and ideas on religion and morality. At the same time, they testify to the movement of words, metaphors, themes, images, and practices which shift from the elite to «popular» culture and vice versa.

The State and Southern Italy

In the Republican period, the new democratic State overturned the conditions of marginalization experienced by the South in the liberal age, and especially during the Fascist regime, which had increased the gap between the country’s north and south. Associazione per lo sviluppo dell’industria nel Mezzogiorno (Svimez) and, above all, Cassa per il Mezzogiorno were very important tools in promoting and directing State intervention for the modernization of southern Italy, and, in this, joining the work played by Iri (Istituto per la ricostruzione industriale).
The recent book La dinamica economica del Mezzogiorno. Dal secondo dopoguerra alla conclusione dell’intervento straordinario, published by Svimez itself (Bologna, il Mulino, 2016), confirms the role as driver of growth exercised by State intervention in the economy, which since 1950 has favoured the process of convergence between north and south. Similarly, since the second half of the 1970s, the crisis of that approach, favoured by tendencies of localism and clientelism, has created the conditions for the gap to widen once again.

The Society of the Venetian Colony of Tana in the 1430s Based on the Notarial Deeds of Niccolò di Varsis and Benedetto di Smeritis

This article examines the society of the Venetian colony of Tana in the 1430 based on a set of notarial deeds produced in Tana by the Venetian notaries Niccolò di Varsis and Benedetto di Smeritis between 1430 and 1440. Although the describers defining one’s high or low social standing were used by the notary sporadically and inconsistently based on the frequencies of mentions of certain people and contacts among them, we can infer that the society of Tana was fairly rigidly ranked. Geographical mobility was high, but apparently there were some families closely linked to the colony, constituting what we may call «domiciled in Tana» or a «permanent population». Parish and network connections were key factors building the social ties. It was a money-oriented, stabile, corporate society serving the interests of commerce.

The Pan-Germanic Conspiracy Theory of «La Vita Italiana all’Estero» (1913-1915)

Inspired by Richard Hofstadter’s pioneering studies on conspiracy theory as a tool of historiographical investigation, the purpose of this study is to examine the specific case of the intellectual and professional life of Giovanni Preziosi and the use made by him of conspiracy as an argument and a weapon of political confrontation.

The analysis focuses on the years 1913-1915, a very intense period in Italian politics with the debate over the War, and its purpose is to investigate Giovanni Preziosi’s contribution to the interventionist cause. Focusing on the global threat of pan-Germanism and denouncing its Italian accomplices, especially the Giolittian neutralists, the future publisher of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion exposed the enormous political and commercial power of Banca Commerciale Italiana, as well as the dangers of excessive tolerance of the German elements in Italy, ascribing everything to a conspiracy to enslave Italy to Germany’s will. Divided into economic, military and political variants, the idea of the pan-German plan served as a response to the neutralists’ arguments and for authorities – who were considered accomplices of German imperialism – to invoke more nationalist war measures.

With his periodical La Vita Italiana, Preziosi anticipated many of the anti-Semitic ideas of the Fascist period, becoming a characteristic voice on the interventionist front. He was to adhere to these ideas concerning the «occult forces» of the world until his suicide in 1945.

The Roccagorga Massacre and the «Red Week»: Gramsci, «sovversivismo » and Fascism

The Roccagorga massacre (January 1913) and the «Red Week» (June 1914) are two episodes to which Gramsci refers several times in his Prison Notebooks and in various articles published between 1916 and 1926. I shall argue that these are very precise references to the harsh debate which took place in Italy in the wake of these two episodes, involving the director of the PSI newspaper and the leader of the party’s left wing, Benito Mussolini, the main representatives of the party, and several Italian politicians, writers and intellectuals. Mussolini drew a close connection between Roccagorga and the «Red Week», against and beyond the Socialist party’s official line,

The Look of Italian Communist Party about French Black Africa (1958-1961)

This article reconstructs the economic expertise of the Italian Communist Party and the French Communist Party from the second post-War period to the 1950s. It analyses the workings of the Parties’ internal and external structures in charge of economic studies and their cultural currents, and studies the role of economists and economic experts, their sociological profile, and their militancy and status in the communist partisan organization. The study shows the presence of a common economic culture in French and Italian communism during the period. Some differences bear highlighting: the more intellectual profile of the Italian communist leadership group, and a different relationship between Party and intellectuals; the importance of trade-union economic expertise and a greater influence of Soviet economic literature in the Fcp.

The Look of Italian Communist Party about French Black Africa (1958-1961)

French Sub-Saharan Africa’s decolonization – which occurred between 1958 and 1960 – had particularly interested the Italian Communist Party for ideological originality shown by anti-colonial parties into the struggle for independence. The ideas of self-determination of peoples subjected to European domination, influenced by Marxism, by the French Communist Party and by the socialist world, it developed, however, a kind of nationalism that was independent from the working-class design and taking into account a mass of underlings ready to rise again and to gain freedom and self-awareness. If the Pcf struggled to give support to those same African movements that it had influenced himself, the Pci, that was intent on carving out a political space just inside the socialist camp, was very interested in the «afromarxiste» and nationalist experimentation in the French colonies. Especially after 1956, at the end of the Cominform and at the begin of recognition of «national roads to socialism», the Italian Communists intertwined relationships with the government of independent Guinea (1958), led by Sekou Toure, with the independence movement of Cameroon, Union des populations du Cameroun (Upc), with Mali led by Modibo Keita and with the Parti africain de l’indépendance (Pai) in Senegal. The Communist Party and its idea of Africa also influenced the vision that the Italian Left and its cultural environment had about this territory.