Rassegna storica del Risorgimento

Banche e ferrovie in Piemonte
187
advances in banking and railroads could not have taken place without the foundation provided by the graduai growth and transformation of the kingdom's entire economy in the decades before unification. In this the kingdom followed a northern and western European pattern of graduai transformation based on an expansion and intensification of market rela-tions and the adoption of improved (but not necessarily the most advanced) techniques and organization, in industriai and agricultural production and in Communications and commercial intermediation.66* The Kingdom of Sardinia's experience suggests that it can be misleading to look for a brief period of explosive growth and change fueled by the adoption of the most advanced technologies and economies of scale of the day. It is true that joint-stock banks and railroads were highly visible and dramatic symbols and exponents of change in the Kingdom of Sardinia in the 1850s, but they were but part and parcel of a longer-term process of growth and change.
For the history of united Italy the implications of the Kingdom of Sardinia's experience are manifold. The most striking, perhaps, is the impact of politicai factors on the timing and pace of economie development. In the decades preceding unification most of northern and centrai Italy shared, at the very least, the growth possibilities of the Kingdom of Sardinia, but the restrictive and repressive politics of regimes fearful of the rwin causes of politicai freedom and national independence held those regions back precisely when the pace of change was accelerating elsewhere. This much is perhaps so obvious that it scarcely needs to be mentioned. It has, however, more subtle corollardes which must not be overlooked. One is that by 1859 the relative social and economie homogeneity of much of northern and centrai Italy was not matched by a comparable degree of similarity on the level of politicai and economie institutions, so the magnitude of the task of creatìng unity was ali the greater. Another, related corollary is that to some extent, after 1859 the resources of Piedmont and Liguria were deflected away from further, cumulative progress at home and diverted to other regions to help dose the gaps which had opened in the 1840s and, in particular, in the 1850s. In the same way, northern and centrai resources were poured into the massive poverty of the south, more in a patriotic effort to drag the Mezzogiorno into the nineteenth century than in an exploitative desire to reap profits from government subsidies, and so the pace of progress in northern and centrai regions was undermined.
Ali of these considerations underline how misleading it is to begin the quantitative and qualitative analysis of united Italy's economie develop­ment with 1861, the year in which the new Kingdom of Italy was formaJly constituted. To do so obscures the higly significant long-term trends of growth and development which characterized many of the new kingdom's regional economies and allows ihem to be confounded by the secular poverty and stagnation of the south. The notion that Italy experienced
w) See Howell, pp. 7-9; and Franklin Mendels, Proto-industrialization: The First Phase in the Industrialization Process , in Journal of Economie History 32 (1972).