The latifundia is the umpteenth permutation of a variety of landed estate prevalent in european agriculture, and their name is derived directly from their Roman counterparts. However, there are a number of factors unique to Southern Italy (and Sicily in particular) which allowed the Latifondi to remain integral to the economic system there in spite of drastic changes to the economic and political system in Italy during the 19th century.

The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was the largest Italian state: by 1860, seven million people lived in the Kingdom’s mainland, and another 2.3 million lived on the island of Sicily. This is directly contrastable to the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, whose population stood at only 4.5 million. The Two Sicilies population even outnumbered the whole of the northwest: only 2.8 million people lived in Austrian-held Lombardy, meaning that the population of the future “Industrial Triangle” was 7.3 million, two million less than in the Two Sicilies. With the northwest split between the Austrian Empire and Piedmont, there was certainly a greater potential for an industrial consumer base in southern Italy. However, urbanization in the south was greatly skewered towards Naples, where nearly half of the kingdom’s population lived, a dramatic and disheartening consequence of ineffective agricultural practices which will be analyzed in detail below.

If the Kingdom of Two Sicilies had a population size large enough to justify industrial economies of scale, it certainly did not have the literacy rate to supply a workforce able to operate complex machinery and engage in advanced commercial activity. Indeed, in southern Italy there was a near total lack of any sort of education policy, and the public sector gradually reduced its role in the organization of education, culminating in 1843 when the entire public education system was handed over to the clergy. As a result, in 1861, 90% of southern Italians were illiterate, while only 20% of children were able or willing to enroll in primary education. This stands in stark contrast with Piedmont and Liguria, where in 1861 literacy stood at 53%, and, 93% children were enrolled in primary education. Indeed, public education was significant rendering the male literacy rate in Piedmont the highest in Italy, increasing from 56% to 70% between 1821 and 1861.

In the realm of higher education, there was no lack of institutions of higher learning: the Universities of Genoa and Turin in the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont both predated the sixteenth century, as did the University of Pavia in Lombardy, while the foundation of University in Naples dates back to the thirteenth century. Rather, the gap between north and south was instead marked by technical education, which is a vital tool to develop an increasingly specialized workforce, lifting the working poor into the middle class. The first Italian technical institute was founded in Lombardy in the 1840s, and was a private institution financed by Milanese entrepreneurs offering education chemistry, physics, drafting and engineering. In 1859, the Piedmontese government passed a decree modeling their own technical education on the Lombard precedent. No such attempts at creating technical education took place in the south, where companies working with advanced machinery were instead hired expensive foreign engineers.

All this had the effect of impeding the Southern Italian economy of diversifying, and keeping the lower classes on the latifondi. And indeed, the main difference in agriculture in north and south can by summarily described “intensive agriculture” in the north with more workers extracting higher productivity per square mile, and “extensive agriculture” in the south, with fewer workers, lower productivity, but a much larger cultivated land-area. This is confirmed by the data available: the total value of agricultural production in Piedmont in 1857 stood at 516 million lira, or 169 lira per hectare. In the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the total value of agriculture in the same year was 870 million lira, the equivalent of 81 lira per hectare.

Industrialization, such as it was, constituted a marginal aspect of the Italian economy in the period preceding unification. Although there certainly were structural restrictions on industrial growth, complacency by the moneyed classes is also to blame. In spite of being surpassed in development by England and the Netherlands and having spent centuries subject to the whims of larger, more powerful, and better organized states, in 1820 Italian GDP was still the third-highest in Europe, and the Italian capitalist class saw little or no incentive to innovate. Even the Milanese entrepreneurs, invited multiple times by the Viennese government to join diplomatic visits in North and South America to explore new export markets, almost always declined to participate. It is only after Italian unification that there is any feeling of urgency with regards to the need to industrialize. Industrial production was also hampered by lack of demand. Abundant agricultural production kept prices low and most Italians employed in agriculture did not constitute a true consumer class. The small urban bourgeoisie was more than satisfied by artisanal domestic production, and adherence to free trade policies made foreign industrial goods readily available. Often, only when modernization became necessary in sectors of interest to the government (notably, transport and armaments) did the Italian governing class look around to only find itself at the mercy of foreign suppliers charging high premiums.

In the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, less than half of its 1835 steel requirement was fulfilled by domestic producers, with records indicating that of the 58,854 cantaia (a unit of measure equal to 89.09 kilograms) which domestic demand required, only 22,900 were supplied by domestic producers. In both the Two Sicilies and Piedmont, the domestic steel was not used in railway construction, depriving domestic producers of a convenient means to grow and amortize the sunk costs necessary for modernization. As a consequence, the Italian metalworking sector remained small. The mechanical engineering industry also remained small and generally within the purview of small workshops, although a notable exception can be made for arms manufacturers in the province of Brescia, suppliers of the Austrian garrisons in Italy. Overall, the cost of developing the know-how to produce complex machinery, as well as the cost of transporting Austrian material over the Alps, led Italian entrepreneurs to favor shipping ready-made English machinery through the ports of Genoa, Naples, and Trieste.

Further, the demand for complex modern machinery was low. In the industrious Lombardy, outside of the thirty-three factories in Milan which made use of steam power in 1840, modern machinery was nearly absent in the provinces: a representative example is that only six of the of 137 industries in the Province of Como used steam powered machinery. Piedmonts’ industry, although in some sectors like silk production not far behind that in Lombardy by the 1840s, was no more mechanized. In all, there was no industrial revolution to speak of anywhere in pre-unification Italy. However, there can be no doubt that by 1861, the industrial development of the north greatly outpaced that out the south. Regarding textiles; silk production was 5.1 times greater, cotton mills were five times more numerous, wool looms 2.7 times more numerous. There were 2.9 times as many people employed in metalworking, while paper production was four times greater, while leather production was 2.2 times greater. An indirect testament to the greater economic activity, as well as a direct consequence literacy level achieved, is the statistic regarding mail sent in 1862: 6.1 letters per inhabitant were mailed in Piedmont, while only 1.6 letters per inhabitant were mailed in the Two Sicilies.

As a testament to the greater consumption of both raw materials and finished goods, the total number of imports in northern Italy amounted to 3.6 times the total number of imports in the south. Exports were small in all pre-unification Italian states; a testament to their overall lack of industrialization. However, there were some activities of note: The Kingdom of Piedmont exported Ligurian sea salt to landlocked countries like Switzerland and the German states, a significant force behind the desire to construct rail and road connections northwards. Silk production, revealed to be one of Italy’s few internationally competitive sectors, accounted for 40% of the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont’s total shipments abroad and became a major driver of Italian industrialization. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies subsidized the exportation of olive oil to Great Britain, and also shipped a number of cash crops like grapes abroad. On the Island of Sicily, the exportation of sulfur accounted for 50% of exports. However, by 1861 northern exports were 2.7 times more numerous than those in the south.

I hope I've explained how agriculture remained so important to southern Italy. If you'd like to learn more, Italy in the Nineteenth Century, 1796-1900 by John A. Davis (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print) is one of my favorite english-language histories of Italy. A more specific, Italian-language resource on economic development is Storia Economica d’Italia nel secolo XIX by Mario Romani (Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino. 1983. Print.) and specific to pre-unification Southern Italy, Il mezzogiorno prima dell’unità by P. Malanima and N. Ostuni (Soveria Mannelli (CZ): Rubbettino. 2013.)