Rassegna storica del Risorgimento

Banche e ferrovie in Piemonte
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iron grew by some fifty percent from the 1840s to the 1850s. Average annual consumption of rolled iron increased by roughly 375 percent in the same period, with domestic production accounting for roughly 80 percent of total consumption at the end of the 1850s. Relatedly, employment in the kingdom's engineering sector olimbed by more than 500 percent and the average number of workers per finn increased by nearly two and a half times between 1844 and 1861.Q
Naval construction in Liguria rose and fell cyclically in the first three decades after Waterloo, then started to climb steadily. The average annual tonnage launched climbed by 121 percent from 1840-1844 to 1855-1859.7) The volume of trade also grew substantially: the average annual tonnage entering the port of 'Genoa rose by nearly ninety-two percent from 1830-1934 to 1855-1859)
liberal reform penetrated the Kingdom of Sardinia gradually under Charles Albert's rule. It started in 1835 when the government gave way in the kingdom's first great battle to liberalize trade and dropped a Restoration-era ban on the export of raw silk, resulting in a boom in cocoon and thread production. Tariffs on cotton products were lowered at the same time, and again in 1842.9) In 1842 a new commercial code was .promulgated in the kingdom and the basis established for the regular appearance of joint-stock companies.10) It represented the con-solidation of a systematic policy of accomodation stimulated by the insistence of domestic capitaliste and critics and by the example of other Continental countries, where joint-stock banks and railroads had started to proliferate in the 1830s.
Almost without exception, the first joint-stock banks established in Europe were commercial (discount and deposit) banks of note issue. The Bank of England, founded at the end of the seventeenth century, was the first modem bank of note issue. Lesser similar institutions appeared in Scotland and the English provinces in succeeding decades, but, despite sporadic experiments, the institutional innovation was not successfully transferred to the Continent until the establishment of the Banque de France in 1800. Eight more issue banks followed intermittently between 1814 and 1829, then fifteen onore were founded in rapid succession between 1834 and 1838, three of them capitalized and operated by public authorities, in a period which also witnessed the first rash of railroad development on
6) Abrate, pp. 167, 201-202; and Luraghi, p. 133.
7) Ugo Marchese, L'industria ligure delle costruzioni navali dal 1816 al 1859 , in Archìvio Economico dell'Unificazione Italiana, series 1, 7 (1957): 9; and Howell, p. 225.
8) Felloni, Popolazione, p. 44.
9) Bulferetti and Costantini, pp. 440452; Bulferetti and Luraghi, pp. 97-98; and Luraghi, PP. 158-159,
io) Ernesto Rossi and Gian Paolo Nitti, eds., Banche, Governo e Parlamento negli Stati Sardi, 3 vols (Turin, 1968), 1:3.