Economic History of Modern Italy - Detailseite

The course examines the development of Italian economy from the Napoleonic wars to our days. After the national Unification in 1861, Italy started a process of latecomer industrialisation which in a few decades turned the country in a European power. After the Second World War, during the Italian economic miracle – the so called ‘boom’ –, economic growth soared, and the country eventually caught up with the most advanced European economies such as France and the United Kingdom. However, despite the opportunity of an expanding economy, Italian institutions were not updated to meet the needs of a modern growing economy and structural reforms were deferred. In the 1990s, Italian economy faced globalisation completely unprepared. Since then, Italy has been struggling with weak economic growth, poor human capital, and inefficient institutions, together with a worrisome public debt.

Each seminar focuses on a significant problem in modern Italian economic history, relying on the existing historiography. The course intends to shed lights both on the factors that caused the expansion of Italian economy in the past, and the reasons for its recent decline. Topics include: agrarian economy in the 19th-century, Italian first industrialisation, business history, foreign trade, monetary and financial history, Italian economic thought and economic policies, labour history, migrations, standards of living, North-South divide.

Cento Bull, Anna, Modern Italy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)

Cohen, Jon and Giovanni Federico, The Growth of the Italian Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Federico, Giovanni, The Economic Development of Italy (Aldershot: Elgar, 1994)

Felice, Emanuele and Giovanni Vecchi, ‘Italy’s Growth and Decline, 1861-2011’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 44.4 (2015), 507–48

Fenoaltea, Stefano, The Reinterpretation of Italian Economic History: From Unification to the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Toniolo, Gianni ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy since Unification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)

Vecchi, Giovanni ed., Measuring Wellbeing: A History of Italian Living Standards (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017)

Zamagni, Vera, The Economic History of Italy: 1860 - 1990 (Oxford: Claredon, 1997 [1993])

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