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To date, only a handful of scholars, most notably C.L.R. James and Eugene Genovese, have seen slave rebellions and peasant revolts as having anything in common. Fewer scholars still would be prepared to accept the assumption that slaves and peasants were agrarian working classes that shared significant characteristics. Yet, the issues of rural unrest and class formation continue to haunt the historiography of both slave and peasant societies long after James' and Genovese's studies, and have forced several historians to revise and broaden their definitions of class conflict as a means to describe the social transformations of several rural regions. In this essay, I focus on the American South as a case study of a slave society and on the Italian South, or Mezzogiorno, as a case study of a peasant society. Notwithstanding the fundamental differences between the social structures of these two regions, in both cases debates on the class character of rural workers began when leftist historians raised the possibility of applying Marxist categories to their particular historical conditions. In both cases, they were dealing with a ‘south’ characterized by a preeminently agricultural economy and a persistent social and political conservatism. In both cases, too, the debate has moved from broad theoretical positions to the explanation of specific instances of class conflict in a rural setting—the slaves' resistance to their masters and the peasants' resistance to their landlords, respectively—and then on to a criticism of the Marxist approach to the problem.

. Recent scholarship on the Restoration period in Italy (-) has put the accent on regional diversity and on particular developments within the different pre-unification states. In particular, recent studies on the Kingdom of Sardinia have added much to our view of the Piedmontese nobility's peculiar character and ability to maintain its identity through time. Equally, detailed studies of the economy of nineteenth-century Tuscany have emphasized the importance of banking and silk manufacturing, whilst studies of governmental policies in the Papal State have shed new light over a particular administrative monarchy's attempt at pursuing a policy of reconciliation between modernization and conservatism. Whilst these studies have shown the significance of regional developments during the Restoration, other studies have argued that the process of ' inventing ' the Italian nation-state has led to a conscious obliteration of regional administrative and juridical traditions and have shown the way to the construction of an up-to-date regional synthesis of a historical period which is much more than a simple prelude to the unification of the country.In recent years, scholars of nineteenth-century Italy have increasingly turned their attention to the study of the Restoration period (-) as a crucial time of change which anticipated many features of the Liberal era. Central to their study is the ideasupported by most revisionist Italian historians -of continuity between forms of government from the time of Napoleon to the time of unification. After the collapse of the Napoleonic regimes, the Restoration governments largely maintained the bureaucratic apparatus installed during the French decennio (-) creating a type of hybrid institution called ' administrative monarchy ' ; throughout the Restoration, the administrative monarchies faced problems of legitimacy largely similar to the ones faced by the Piedmontese administration after unification. Therefore, the study of the Restoration period is crucial in understanding the deep roots of the post-unification crisis of the Liberal state and in providing historians with important insights on the origins of those issues of conflict which the Piedmontese administration inherited from pre-unification governments."One of the most important results of the recent flood of studies on Restoration Italy has been the re-evaluation of the regional governments of the Italian peninsula, an issue " The revisionist historiography's point on continuity between administrative monarchies and Liberal state is explored in L. Riall, The Italian Risorgimento : state, society, and national unification (London, ) ; and J. Davis, ' Economy, society, and the state ', in J. Davis, ed., Italy in the nineteenth century (New York, ).     strongly related to the questioning of previous assumptions over the process of ' invention ' of the Italian nation in -.# Indeed, regional diversity has become the lens through which revisionist historians have construc...

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