Rassegna storica del Risorgimento

188
Paul Martin Howell
its industriai revolution, a brief, explosive transition to modernity, whether in the 1880s or in the first decade of the twentieth century, has to be shelved.67) It ignores far too much of what carne before.
We must also bow to the fact that as a nation Italy simply wiìl not conform to any strictly European models and cannot be analyzed solely with the terms of reference developed for the other nation-states of Europe. The gap separating the most and least developed regional States which became part of the new kingdom was unprecedentedly large and the change from a collection of regional states to a single, unified one was unprecedentedly abrupt. Unification did not just obscure the long-term trends characteristic of Italy's various regional economies; it dramatically altered them. Any analysis of Italian economie development must take these realities fully into account.
The history of banking and railroads in the Kingdom of Sardinia in the 1850s highlights one particularly important dimension of unification's impact on the course of development. In general, the system that developed in the Kingdom of Sardinia was characterized by a relatively unified approach to economie matters generally and to institutional and organiza-tional ones in particular, on the part of businessmen, politicai leaders, and the state bureaucracy. The state remained strong and assertive, in a conservatively liberal way, and did not hesitate to cooperate closely with and direct businessmen in the pursuit of commonly accepted goals judged to be in the general interest. The range of interests gathered around the new state in united Italy was such that the state was not permitted an aggressively interventionist role; yet that was precisely what had helped to produce success in the Kingdom of Sardinia and it was what was needed in the new Kingdom of Italy.
The reduced role for the state was but one manifestation of the lack of unity of outlook which characterized the coalition of business and politicai interests joined together in support of the new state. Consequently, despite the apparent continuity from the old Piedmontese state to the new Italian one, and the seeming domination of old Piedmontese interests, in practical terms there was a dramatic new departure.
Conflicting interests led the leadership of united Italy to turn its back on what were for the most part the most sophisticated arrangements and practices of the day and the ones best suited to the needs and conditions of the new nation. The most prominent instance of this development probably was the decision to reject the experience and examples of France,
*7) See Howell, pp. 5-7; Alexander Gerschenkron, Economie Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), chaptera 1, 2, 4, 5, and Postscript, esp. 88, 117, 163, and the same author's Continuiti in History and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 104ff; W. W. Rostow, The Stages oj Economie Growth. A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, Eng., 1971); Alberto Caracciolo, ed., La formazione dell'Italia Industriale {Bari, 1977); and Valerio Castronovo, The Italian Take-off: A Criticai Re-examination of the Problem , in Journal of Italian History 1 (1978): 492-510.