Society, Economy, and Politics in Restoration Italy: Towards a Regional Synthesis

Abstract

. 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...

Monumental Italians: Machiavelli, Risorgimento and nation-building in Chile

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