Maurice Aymard From Feudalism To Capitalism in Italy - The Case That Doesn't Fit PDF

Research Foundation of State University of New York
From Feudalism to Capitalism in Italy: The Case That Doesn't Fit

Author(s): Maurice Aymard
Source: Review (Fernand Braudel Center), Vol. 6, No. 2 (Fall, 1982), pp. 131-208
Published by: Research Foundation of State University of New York for and on behalf of
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Review, VI, 2, Fall 1982, 131-208
From Feudalism to
Capitalism in Italy:
The Case That Doesn't Fit*
Maurice Aymar d
Anyone who carefully analyzes rural Italy between the

fifteenth and sixteenth centuries cannot help but feel uncom-
fortable with the theoretical debates of the 1950's concerning
the transition from feudalism to capitalism (Hilton, 1976).
Italy has played virtually no role whatsoever in these debates,
from which it has been either excluded entirely or treated
marginally. The discussion has been dominated from the
beginning, up to and including the recent article by Brenner
(1976),1 by a comparison between the historical evolution of
England and of France. The idea, however, of including in this
debate only the victors in the "race to transition" has certainly
not helped historical analysis. Failures are after all as significant
as successes, and the analysis has to take account of them as
well. This is all the more so when it's a matter of the failure, not
♦Translated from the French original. Appeared previously in Italian in R. Romano
and C. Vivanti, coord., Storia d' Italia, [Annali I: " Dal feudalismo al capitalismo" ]
Torino: Einaudi, 1978, 1133-1192.
1 . See also the various replies to Brenner in Past and Present , Nos. 78, 79, 80, 85
(1978-79).
© 1982 Research Foundation of S UN Y
131
132 Maurice Aymar d
of also-rans or of late starters, bu

in the lead and who therefore s
It's all a matter of definition, no doubt. But whether one
takes the key element of feudalism to be serfdom and the
organization of production around the seigniorial domain
(Dobb), or the development of trade and production for the
market, the growth of new consumer needs, and the strength-
ening of the urban economy (Sweezy), or the particular form of
articulation between the direct producers and their landlords
who also controlled the rural seigniories (Takahashi; and, more
recently, for the case of Normandy, Guy Bois [1976]), it is
always difficult to make Renaissance Italy fit the model. Nor is
this so only for northern Italy, in which case we could argue
that its precocious development was balanced by the many
backwardnesses of southern Italy which slowed down or
blocked entirely the capitalist transformation that had already
begun, thus making northern Italy into a mere enclave
(Zangheri, 1973). No, the whole of the peninsula does not fit
the model; the two Italys or even, more exactly, the three- that
of the large estate of the lower Lombardy plains, which was
already capitalist in organization and management by 1500;
that of the much discussed mezzadria, often taken as a transi-
tional form; and that of the southern latifundium, readily
abandoned to its millenary state of sinful immobility.
In fact from the north to the south, despite the fundamental
differences of the final outcomes at the economic and social
level, the principal transformations that are generally taken
into account in the process of transition, and which are
normally considered its indispensable prerequisites, had al-
ready taken place between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries
and seemed to be well entrenched by the beginning of the
modern era.
I. Crisis in the Relations of Dependence

and the Expropriation of the Peasantry
All the evidence points to the very early weakening of

juridically constraining ties of personal dependence to the land
Feudalism to Capitalism in Italy 133
of all forms: the tie of serfdom, whose last traces disap

from Sicily to Friuli, about 1400-1450; that of the
which was insignificant economically even where it tec
survived; and the attachment de facto or de jure to the
even to a family tenure. As early as 1450 in Calabria
1967), people were free to move about and to sell th
where they wished, or very quickly where they co
freedom of the individual to move was not sufficient to
labor market. If at this time the links of dependency se
be better preserved in the mountainous regions - the A
the Tuscan and Ligurian Appenines, Friuli (Battistell
08) - they already seemed to be merely survivals an
archaic. This did not mean that feudalism in the form
rural seigniory and the jurisdiction exercised over the m
resided there had disappeared. Quite the contrar
jurisdiction was in fact vigorously reaffirmed and r
throughout the center and south of the peninsula, wher
it had never really declined. But the payments dem
individuals by the seigniors, either in money or in kin
much less frequently associated with rents or cust
tenures than with the administration of justice and
with economic monopolies and banalities that were still
enforced (use of the furnace and the mill, the wine and
the butchery and the tavern, the fulling-mills and dye
and with excises on the consumption of bread and w
meat and spices (Aymard, 1972). Both in the south an
north the system of customary tenures also disappe
declined quite early. The expropriation of the peasantry
characterized the England of the enclosures, began in I
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and followed d
paths in the various regions. P. J. Jones (1964, 1968) ha
the model trajectory for Tuscany: the decline of the m
economy was immediately compensated by the adoption
part of the large lay and ecclesiastical landowners, of t
more rational methods of management of their patrim
they gave up the direct cultivation of their reserves, e
corvée or the use of wage-labor, it was not in order to p
the land to the benefit of a sedentary peasantry wh
have long-term contracts. Rather they created hom
134 Maurice Aymar d
compact farm units which t

short-term lease (affitto) or o
(mezzadria). A few of the old ten
rents which had become nearly
sometimes formally transferr
actually farmed them, i.e., peasa
classes. But, in the case of the m
reaffirm the rights of the masters
to increase the size of the pay
money with rent in kind, and to
abandoned or poorly managed
into the central landholding.
The primary beneficiaries of th
have been the richest of the la
their share of the whole. This was true no matter what the
juridical or social status of these landowners: monasteries,
ancient fiefholders, large merchants, or new seigniorial fami-
lies. The emerging pattern of the countryside presented a sharp
contrast between, on the one hand, the ancient nuclei of
residences that were grouped together in villages, towns, and
castles, in which there continued to reside a population
composed of artisans, of owners of small scattered farm units,
and of braccianti (day-workers) who were tied to the land given
to them either in short-term lease or perpetual quit-rent and,
on the other hand, the newer network of farm units, the poderi
(30-100 ha.) and the mezzadrie (5-25 ha.) which dominated the
flatlands.
At the same time, and in a totally different context, southern
Italy, especially Apulia and Sicily, was undergoing an even
more abrupt transformation which had begun even earlier,
toward the end of the twelfth century. This involved the sys-
tematic elimination of residences dispersed in hamlets (casali)
which constituted the economic and social base of the feudal
order that had been put in place by the Norman conquerors. In
its place came the forced regrouping of the inhabitants in a very
loose network of large rural villages, old towns, or newly created
ones, and this has remained the pattern up to today (Aymard &
Bresc, 1973).
The rural countryside was thus reconstituted in t

cessive waves of abandonment of the hamlets. The seco
and parcel of the all-European pattern of Wustung
cided with the catastrophic decline of population a
Black Death. Sicily in the middle of the fifteenth centu
population of 400,000 at the most, less than one-ten
present population. But the first wave, which can be p
dated between 1 1 80- 1 250, occurred in a period of dem
growth and therefore requires other explanations. The
revolts repressed by Frederick II constituted the im
cause, or at least the pretext, for a large part of the de
and regrouping (Giustiniani, 1 805). These were social a
religious revolts. They reflected the growing gap betw
peasantry, the villani (who were in part, but only
Muslims, more or less superficially converted), and th
masters, to whom they owed both corvée-labor and
The dimension of these hamlets varied from a sin
unit to a small village, composed of a few houses
country church, a mill, and a tavern, seldom having m
twenty to thirty families, and usually having many le
had been created only recently, dating from the c
movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. B
majority, the core of the toponymy, had shown a rem
continuity throughout the Byzantine and Arab period
face of the millenary power of the large estate, the str
these hamlets implied a relative dispersion of reside
link to the land (even if only in a dependent relationsh
agricultural population, extensive arboriculture, a
ticular mode of sharing the land between peasants
holders. Their destruction, on the other hand, ma
definitive victory of the latifundium- the reappropri
almost all land by the large lay and ecclesiastical lando
well as by the urban oligarchies, and the constitution
network of large extensive agricultural units, the mass
the expansion of the land area devoted to trans
pasturage, within the context of a rotation between c
grasses. Their expansion made possible, in the midd
fifteenth century at the point of maximum populatio
136 Maurice Ay mar d
the creation of an institution l

which encrusted this new rural p
Neapolitan rulers. But one coul
there was no longer much distinc
and the feudal estate of the seig
times being: "cum villani dicant
mortuis et eiectis de Sicilia" ("sinc
been Saracens, they have either
Sicily").
This structural change went along with the transformation
of southern Italy into an exporter of agricultural cash crops, in
particular of wheat. As in northern Italy, it led to the
elimination of the traditional feudal system founded on
peasant landholdings, the corvée, rents in kind or in money,
and the constitution of a new agricultural system which
emptied the countryside of its inhabitants. In contrast, the
fattorie and the poderi in the center and north of Italy tended to
create an evenly-spaced residential distribution.
II. The Weakening of Communal Practices
This defeat, or at the very least this relative decline, of small

peasant holdings left to the landlords, old or new, fiefholders
or not, full and free disposition of almost all the arable land,
and involved the weakening, once again almost everywhere, of
communal practices. These had never had, no doubt, the
amplitude and economic importance which they had known
elsewhere, notably in France. In the absence of a system of a
collectively organized rotation of cereal crops that constrained
individual peasants, communal practices primarily affected
grazing on the commons or on uncultivated lands, on the
stubble, and in the forests. But these practices declined rapidly,
beginning in the thirteenth century. They were not even
mentioned in the first urban statutes of the Lombard plains. The
right of commons and of gleaning were little by little strictly
limited, even abolished, throughout the hills and plains of cen-
tral and northern Italy from Piedmont to Tuscany (Jones, 1964:
312-1 3). From the end of the Middle Ages private land came to
be virtually totally free of collective constraints, whic

traditional explanations of the agricultural revolut
sidered to be an essential stage of the process. In the sam
the process of clearing new land, of improvement, of usu
and of sales largely eliminated the former common
process furthermore continued throughout the modern
the calculations of Beltrami show for the case of Venice (
1961). If these communal rights survived better in the m
ous regions where pasturage and transhumance rem
important as ever, the victory of the latifundium mea
decline in the southern countryside as well. Only a few
sities", such as Caltagirone or Noto in Sicily, succee
maintaining direct control over large land areas, and ev
large financial needs forced them very rapidly to rent th
out, that is, to manage them as though they were fief
where, futhermore, the agreements (capitoli) negotiate
communal authorities with the seignior or his repre
sought to maintain, even to expand, free or inexpensiv
to transit zones of fallow or waste land. The demograp
cline of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries enabled
obtain some concessions, since manpower had becom
and lands were abandoned, and the fiefholder felt it ne
to give facilities for pasturage to the livestock of the town
and the massari. But soon thereafter, from the beginnin
sixteenth century, the advantage was once again to
owners who readily revoked their previous concessio
Neither the "universities" nor the rural communes ha
means or often the will to resist this evolution. In n
and central Italy their autonomy was wiped out un
double pressure of the seigniors and the urban commun
latter established a strict and efficacious control ove
countryside (contado), thereby creating a new larger p
economic entity based on new rules, to the benefit
dominant urban center. As to the southern "univer
whether their status was seigniorial or domanial, p
judicial, and administrative power was consolidated earl
the hands of a few great local families which monopoli
urban officeholding (access being limited to gentiluom
138 Maurice Aymar d
boni virî) and the farming of

These families served as the essential intermediaries for tax
collection and for the supply and supervision of the local
market.
Since, however, they also engaged in active or passive
resistance to higher authorities from time to time, these
"universities" might take on the appearance, in certain times
and in certain places, of being relatively more democratic or
more egalitarian. They defended at the time the principle of
direct taxation proportionate to visible wealth as opposed to
the extension of excises on consumer goods. They furnished
services such as medical assistance and primary schooling
either free or at low cost. When they were domanial, they stood
in opposition to the successive alienations of the "university" to
the seigniors by a royal administration which was always short
of money. When they were seigniorial, the "universities"
negotiated with vigor and astuteness the agreements which
governed and set the rates for customary rents, and for the
rights to use the forests, the pasture lands, and the waterways.
They retained, furthermore, real economic power to fix prices,
wages, and hours of work. Nonetheless, as is suggested by all
the economic literature of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries
that discussed contracts alla voce (Naples) or alla meta (Sicily),
the fair and balanced exercise of these powers always seemed to
be an ideal of the past that was eternally declining. The very
size of the southern towns (true urban centers rather than
villages), the ever sharper nature of the social gaps that were
developing, and the importance of the interests at stake
contributed to exacerbating rather than to reducing the
internal conflicts within the "universities" and to turning them
into the main arena of the most violent economic and social
conflicts.
III. Changes in the Landholding System
The expropriation of the peasantry and the increased con-

centration of landholdings (of land, furthermore, that had been
largely freed from any collective constraint) in the hands of
large landowners (noble, ecclesiastical, or urban) bot

possible and went along with a movement to restruct
landholding system, a movement which would contin
develop throughout the modern era, but which was alrea
enough along in 1500 to have left its mark on th
countryside. In place of a system with small, sca
interspersed units based on short-term or life-time l
system of compact homogeneous production units w
ated. Their size varied considerably, from 10-20 hect
some regions to several hundreds in others, as did the siz
farm buildings, the livestock, and the farm equipment.
was great variety also in the crops and the purpo
cultivation which developed differently in terms of agr
and technology. Some areas featured intensive cultiv
One possibility was more cattle and dairy products, than
the development of forage crops on irrigated or drained
as for example in the Milan region and a part of the
plains. Another possibility was more arboriculture (vine
olive trees, fruit trees) and industrial crops (hemp, linen
utilizing a peasant labor force, as was the case in those r
where the mezzadria developed. Other areas featured ext
agriculture, alternating between cereals and grass
leaving a large role to fallow lands put to pasture. This w
case in the Maremma, in the Roman plains, and in th
southern cereal-growing areas. In these regions, howeve
preoccupations and economic behavior seemed very mod
tendency to invest important amounts of capital, bot
and variable, in production; the role of variations in
and prices in the decision of what to grow and how muc
calculation of the costs of production; and, lastly, the ef
increase the productivity of invested capital both in the
rent from the land and in the form of profit from the
The best indicator of this new attitude toward land and
agricultural production, even better than the widely revived
agricultural manuals which tended to alternate between delib-
erate idealizations of reality and exaltation of the prestigious
example of ancient Roman agronomists, and also between
economic analysis and prescriptions for the social behavior of
large landlords "on their estate", w

books and their increasing prec
fifteenth century. The recent disc
account books has shifted resea
production and productivity in th
study of the various categories of
other European countries, tithe
source to establish trends and g
Flinn, 1978: 113-61; Van der W
1978). The almost complete absenc
significant in itself. The land ther
of payment at a very early period,
a large role on most agricultura
Europe throughout the early mode
just like all other social categories,
from the direct possession of i
which it managed, once, that is, it
a watchful landowner and resis
(Chittolini, 1973).
The Church owed its ability to
books that we possess today to its
it didn't have a monopoly on
accounting, including double-en
gressively adopted, refined, and b
the merchants. The latter indee
keepers as, for example, those fro
into the service of the large seigni
of the seventeenth century, the S
use of the principles worked ou
holdings throughout the world (
accounting for agricultural enterp
precision. It was no longer mere
expenses and monetary receipts bu
with the cost of draught cattle an
the books for production (a balanc
at the end of the annual cycle) fr
profits and losses noted for the
they issued separate annual report
products, of animals, of leather) and for the variation in

monetary value (through an increase or decrease in their
the aging or the rejuvenation of the stock).
New behavior and new economic structures meant new
actors and new roles for these new actors. These new roles
prefigured the Physiocratic model of the eighteenth century:
landlords, large-scale tenant-farmers (fermiers), wage-work-
ers. No doubt the landlord, despite have reestablished absolute
rights over a large part of the land, still hesitated. The
conjoncture of the fifteenth century- scarce manpower and
low cereal prices- reduced land rents to their lowest levels and
gave the advantage for a while to direct producers. Further-
more, persons willing to play the role of large tenant-farmers
were still few and far-between, and lacking financial resources.
Direct management, which gave the landowner both the
profits from the crops and the rent, still remained the best,
often the only, solution. His only alternative was a rental with
payment in wheat proportional to the land area actually sown.
The lessees were a middle stratum of farmers (laboureurs)
having sufficient capital in draught cattle, in grain, and in
money to cultivate 25-50 hectares with their family labor,
bringing in at harvest time some external wage-labor to assist
them. This was known asfictum a blado or rental a ten agio.
About 1480 the massari, between whom the Ospedale Mag-
giore divided its lands in Bertonico in this fashion (Chittolini,
1978), curiously resembled the burgisi of the Sicilian country-
side whose land rents (in kind) remained small in size, much
smaller than those of the Milan region.
Nonetheless, quite soon there appeared on the scene more
powerful personages, such as the bovattieri and the mercantidi
campagna, who, as early as the second half of the fourteenth
century, took control of cultivation of the large estates of the
Roman plain as well as the grain supplied to the Papal capital
via the Annona (Gennaro, 1967). The fittabili of Lombardy
and the gabelloti or the larger massari of Sicily and Apulia all
possessed more captial, and therefore were able to impose
themselves as middlemen and agricultural entrepreneurs.
Given their experience in forming associations, they could take
on the large-scale tenant-farmin

sometimes several thousand, h
production and the merchandisin
They either cultivated the land
the old massari on whom they i
themselves of urban origin, t
techniques and the preoccupati
1496 to 1520 the Ospedale Maggi
companies (one which made the
by a Florentine) some 1100 h
requiring these companies to u
works linked to the Roggia nuova which was over 30
kilometers long. This process brought almost 800 hectares into
irrigation wherein grains and forage crops were rotated
uninterruptedly. This operation then made possible the redivi-
sion of the land unit among about 10 cascine, each 50-150
hectares in size, each with its own buildings, stables, and barns,
each based on mixed husbandry. The cascine were turned over
to a equal number of fittabili with nine-year contracts, the rent
payable in money (Chittolini, 1978).
By comparison, the Sicilian gabelloti and the massari of
Apulia seemed to be more conservative, as were the Roman
bovattieri. In these areas there was no change in the technical
conditions of agriculture. There was rather a strict respect of
the practice of extensive grain cultivation and transhumant
pasturage. In these areas there was a choice, depending on
market conditions, between the direct administration of at
least a part of the land and systematic sub-rental of the entirety
to small farmers or precarious tenants. The prices on the
export or urban market primarily determined profits, more
than the amount produced. This led to the frequent participa-
tion in this kind of business of Genoese and Tuscan merchants,
either alone or in partnership with members of the local
oligarchy (whose support remained useful to overcome local
difficulties, recruit the labor force, etc.) and sometimes with the
fiefholder himself, who rented his land to a "company" in
which he himself was a partner for a third or a quarter of the
whole. This latter was a way for him to gain at both ends, that
of rent and that of profit from production. Even if they seemed
to be more speculative or usurious than directly pro

investments by these merchants were indispensabl
functioning of southern agriculture and they remained
the nineteenth century. Thus, they had a very imp
impact, which is what matters, on the balance of social
Wherever possible the use of family labor remain
dominant practice. It continued to account for a lar
probably the majority, of all agricultural producti
general organization of the mezzadria from the thirtee
the twentieth centuries was based on its systematic use
whenever there was a period of decline in external e
the gabelloti created various forms of sharecropping an
carious sub-rentals to metaterii. Still, no agricultural sy
western Europe gave as large a role during this period t
labor, the wages usually being paid in money. This r
larger with the constitution of still larger productive un
it was a distinctive feature of the rural countryside, affe
residential patterns. Statistics are impossible to come
we can easily distinguish the different patterns.
In those areas where land ws not inherited, from Mar
to grain-growing Sicily, the large fat torie or massari em
throughout the year only a handful of full-time wage-
But they all used a period of sowing and particularly of
the crop. Manpower came from the towns or fr
mountains in annual migrations which repeated themse
regular rhythms that were often very ancient. Towa
the Sicilian censuses (riveli di béni e anime) gave a figu
70% dayworkers in the countryside, and to this must b
the groups of migrants from Calabria. These day work
may have owned their house and a minute parcel of a g
a vineyard, were nonetheless already totally separated
means of production, even if they did retain for a very
the dream of owning their own land. The communal st
the fifteenth century reminded them of their duty to b
on the field of the master from sunrise and not to retu
town before sunset. The journey to work was on their t
that of the return home was on the time of the emplo
the registers of the notary showed an abundance of co
for locazione di opere by the year and by the mon
144 Maurice Aymar d
contracts provided for advance p

well as for the issuance of foo
levels. Known ever since the
migrant reapers were, on the c
vised by team leaders (caporali
months in advance with the larg
with their large tenant-farmer
male rural slave force, and not o
domestic, between 1400 and 1550
existed in Sicily in the labor m
slaves imported from Bornu in
owners of the large massarie th
they had a hard time recruiting
In central and northern Italy th
and the possessioni tended to inc
one hand, the mezzadri and the f
the land with their families a
population of the village, which
tage of rural day-workers, either
mezzadri sought to limit the u
absolute minimum, trying to d
between poderi. However, the lan
them on whenever the immediate
met by the numerous members
tilled the land. As for the cas
surrounded by houses to shelt
workers (the permanent wage-w
llari, campari d'acque), whose
gleaning rights, rights to raise
money wages. One has to add t
the season, the mass of avventizi
intensification of modes of crop
crops that required more manp
IV. The Market and the

Commodification of Agriculture
This development of a rural wage-labor force was itself

linked to another phenomenon, also very modern in appear-
ance, which placed sixteenth-century Italy in advance

rest of Europe, with the sole exception of the Netherland
is, the very large role of the market and the high de
commodification of agriculture. The demographic, eco
and political strengthening of an urban network, bot
tively dense and hierarchical, led to a two-fold restructu
agricultural production at the expense of peasant sub
consumption. The first involved the immediate zone
the towns. Large or small, the towns laid claim to the ce
the wine, the oils, and the meat of their contado. They
their export out of the zone without authorization, and
the urban landowners to deliver them inside the walls in
to supply the urban market first. The countryside was p
last, quantitatively and qualitatively, in the hierarc
consumption, to its great disadvantage. The count
consumed the "lesser grains" (barley, oats, etc.), quit
chestnut bread, and also, later on, maize, whereas the to
wheat, white bread for the rich, black bread for the poo
was an entire literature which unabashedly expound
egoistic view of the towns. The peasants were accused of
the grain given them by the padrone for purposes of sow
in the case of the mezzadria, of taking more care with th
which was for their own use than with the wheat or the
commercial crops which were for the landowners.
By means of advances given to cultivators and of the
corresponding debts that they incurred, the town succeeded in
controlling both the consumption of the countryside and its
productive capacity. This intervention furthermore had am-
bivalent consequences, since this policy created a market that
was strictly organized and directed within the framework of the
urban territory for the purposes of isolating it and of forbid-
ding, at least theoretically, any communication between it and
neighboring territories. This honeycombed structure blocked
for a very long time the creation of a "national market" in the
contemporary sense of the word. We should not, however,
exaggerate the constraints. The creation of new political
entities in fifteenth-century Italy enlarged the size of these
markets considerably and the profits of the large dominant
cities - Venice, Milan, Florence, and Rome. The boundaries of
146 Maurice Aymar d
their attached contados corres

possibilities of transporting he
managed to work out a syste
square kilometers of plains in o
and meat, was scarcely able to s
Marches, from which it could
conditions and at exorbitant
normally allowed to be exporte
The organization of long-te
furnished, if need be, a further
the twelfth and fourteenth cen
the various regions of the peni
changed.2 The principal ma
agricultural materials were the
while the merchant cities of the north took over commercial
control, international exchange, and the production of manu-
factured products. Wheat from Apulia and Sicily, wool from
the sheep of the Abruzzi centralized in the customs house of
Foggia, silk and sugar from Sicily and Calabria, oil and wine
from the Kingdom of Naples, saffron from Aquilia - all these
important exports from southern Italy provided evidence of a
new and quite different economic structure. This geographical
specialization of production was in part a function of natural
factors, of course, but also of political and commercial
decisions. The strict control of production and of sales, which
the organization of the Sicilian wheat market through the joint
intervention of royal authorities and of northern merchants
offered, was no doubt the best example of this: concentration of
the grains in the port granaries (caricatori), the unification of a
system of fixed prices, concession of contracts (traite), the
system of a shifting scale of prices, etc. This production
furthermore became dependent on external capital. The sums
advanced were not only essential for production but permitted
the lenders to obtain products under the best possible condi-
tions. The large volume of these exchanges, their dynamism as
soon as there was a more favorable conjoncture beginning in
2. On this transformation, linked to a veritable destruction of the economy of

southern Italy, see Abulafia (1977).
the last decades of the fifteenth century, sufficed to sh

the frontiers, far from constituting an obstacle to the
penetration of capital and of men, in fact facilitat
penetration. The only parallel to the interregional d
labor that was systematically strengthened between th
and the south in the Italian peninsula as of 1500 was th
was established between the Netherlands and the Baltic
regions.
V. Money and its Various Arenas of Use
The role of money confirmed this domination of the market

and accentuated even further the subordination of the country-
side. Its circulation was always controlled by the cities, and by
the most powerful among them, which created a hierarchy of
currencies to their benefit. There were four main varieties: the
small coins of copper and bronze, money of account, letters of
exchange, and coins of gold and silver. Historians have tended
to pay attention mostly to the upper noble levels of this edifice
instead of considering the structure as a whole. In reality, the
multiplicity of forms of money was a very functional and
supple instrument of unequal exchange between rural labor
and urban capital (Da Silva, 1973). It also, however, corre-
sponded to different arenas of use.
There was first of all the arena of consumption. The creation
of a wage-earning proletariat of braccianti, who were landless
or who had at most a tiny garden or vineyard, added a second
group, in addition to the urban population, who needed access
to a market to buy their food, and first of all to buy bread. The
rural towns of southern Italy once again provided the best
example. More than half of the population and, according to
the sources, "the poorest part", bought bread from the local
bakeries. The local authorities were obliged during grain crises
to engage in the same efforts to ensure provisions as were those
of the large cities, except that they found themselves in a
weaker financial and commercial position vis-à-vis the large
suppliers. The largest part of the revenue of these local
authorities came from the excises

and wine, oil and meat, cheese a
There was, secondly, the arena
In addition to the regular migrati
from the overpopulated mountai
lowlands in the harvest season, th
level of the peninsula favored,
specialization. For the most part t
of manufactures for agricultural p
paid for their purchases of raw m
cloths, metals, and paper, and mai
network of merchants and factors
capital cities and in the ports, or
They were well aware of this str
markets. In 1606, clothmakers i
view of the famine which has stru
the last two years, they have sold
but with the new harvest which s
hope for an upturn in their sale
later the merchants of Barcel
financing of the projected canal o
by the landowners of western C
able to reduce the risk of grain sh
for the merchant to sell foreign w
money from Sicily to Spain, or
money in Spain to send to Sicily
600).
But it was the mountainous regions of Calabria and
northeastern Sicily where the production of raw silk was
located which offered the clearest example of a new situation,
one that involved not bilateral but triangular exchanges. It was
their sales of silk to Genoa, Florence, and Lucca which enabled
them to pay for their now regular purchases of grain from
Apulia and from the caricatori of Sicily, where they entered
into competition with the purchasers from the large cities who
had priority. This posed in new ways the problems of the terms
of trade and increased the likelihood of a development model
based on the intensification of arboriculture.
Thirdly, there was the arena of the social relat

production. The role of money in this arena was not li
being simply a means of payment of wages and of ren
more diffuse, more insidiuous, more complex, and even
constraining. The system of advance sales, aile met
voce, was the basis of the functioning of agriculture in
Italy. These sales were the quid pro quo for advances of
of grain for sowing or for food, of cattle, and sometim
cost of tilling the fallows done by a team of oxen
gabelloto. The price that was paid was a "political" price
right after the harvest by the local administrations, a
intended to remunerate the "legitimate" interests of t
that was advanced by the merchants. If the debt w
settled, either in money or in kind, it was deferred to
season, but the tomoli of wheat and the libbre of silk
not been delivered were then billed at the considerably
price of the market. The mete of oil in January and of
July thus regulated the entire organization of medi
credit in Sicily in the period around 1600, even in the t
the city-dwellers themselves. But even then they cont
integrate peasant producers into a network that con
them but nonetheless excluded them in fact from dire
to the market and therefore from the possible be
commercialization.
By a different route, the general organization of the
mezzadria led to a similar outcome. There is nothing theore-
tically more clear or more classical than splitting 50-50 the
expenses of cultivation and of harvesting between a landowner
who makes available all the capital and a peasant family which
does all the labor. In fact, there grew up a vertical division
between the share of the cultivator which was entirely devoted
to family subsistence, hence to the reproduction of the labor
force, and that of the padrone which was used for his own
consumption or for sale in the urban market. A certain level of
debt of the producer to his padrone had to be attained but not
surpassed in order to make this division still more rigorous. It
permitted confiscating at a low price the surplus of the
mezzadro in the good years, and lending him back his share of
150 Maurice Aymard
the seed or what he needed to f

left to him all the maize and al
from him all the grain, all the
hemp. Finally, it required them
the mezzadrile family was stric
else and which was therefore also excluded from the market. In
extreme cases the system functioned without the physical
intervention of money. Everything could be arranged in kind,
but the landowner kept minute account of the debits and
credits, and the prices were always fixed in a way that favored
him.
VI. Changes in Technology and Production
The transformations of which we have been speaking dealt

for the most part, it is true, with the social relations of
production and were important only to the degree that they
made possible the transformation of productive forces or the
conditions of their use. The reorganization of agricultural
labor has been considered, ever since the Physiocrats, as the
indispensable prerequisite to a lasting increase in production.
Only thus could one overcome the "Malthusian" limits of
increasing population, about which most historians have
seemed to be in agreement for at least two decades, even if they
don't all accord these limits the same role in the explanatory
model.3 Beyond a rapidly reached optimal level of cultivation,
it is believed, the need to utilize ever-poorer lands and to
exhaust the soil by repeating the same crop and reducing the
fallow period, as well as the reduction of the land area that
could be devoted to cattle and therefore the reduction in the
production of manure, undid the fragile agro-sylvo-pastoral
equilibrium which constituted the base of traditional agri-
culture. Everything seemed to conspire ineluctably to lower
both marginal productivity and the global production of the
soil and of labor. This is the classic distinction of Marx
3. Guy Bois (1976) utilizes in regard to this question the "Malthusian" conclusions
of Abel, Postan, and Le Roy Lad u rie, but he integrates them into a schema dominated
by the evolution of feudal rent; see, in particular, the diagrams on pages 357 and 459.
between the "formal" and "real subsumption" of la

capital. As long as the new social relations did not ch
former organization of work, as long as production
were regulated by custom and thus left in the hand
peasant producers themselves, as long as the dominan
limited themselves to the role of receiving the rent paid
peasants and selling their share of the agricultural pro
production processes remained fundamentally the sa
Contra Slicher van Bath (1963a, 1963b), who was the p
of such work, recent research on agricultural producti
productivity (Goy & Le Roy Ladurie, 1972, 1978) has
sized that, from the twelfth through the eighteenth c
both the techniques and the level of performance of W
agriculture were stagnant. Unchanging agricultural equ
meant unchanging yield ratios, which have been taken t
best index of agricultural productivity. Everywhere
covers the same inertia of the longue durée. At best he
there some minor progress occurred, a catching-up
ward areas to maxima which were rather modest and which
went back at least to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
(Morineau, 1 97 1 ), if not to the Roman era when Cicero already
mentioned the "marvelous" Sicilian yields of 8:1, still celebrated
in these terms in 1750. Nothing seems to have happened, or
almost nothing, in the European countryside between the intro-
duction of the plow with wheels and the fodder-crop revolution
which began in England in the eighteenth century. This was
true for an even longer period in the Italian countryside which
by and large remained faithful to the traditional plow and was
very slow to adopt more "modern" equipment (Poni, 1963;
Farolfi, 1969). There the genetic patrimony of vegetation re-
mained dominated by the association of cereals, vineyards, and
olive trees which went back to the Roman era.
This presumed millenary stability presents a seductive
image. But the image is deformed, presenting with excessive
rigidity a reality that was infinitely more subtle and more
changing. This can be seen readily by looking at the list of crops
that were cultivated. Between the thirteenth and the fifteenth
centuries, among the cereals that can be made into bread, there
was a shift to wheat and rye on the more sandy terrain at the
152 Maurice Aymar d
expense of all the lesser wheat

and of barley which was hence
and mules. Bread tended to rep
introduction of new cereals and
first appeared in Lombardy at th
and was diffused from the fiftee
from Piedmont to Venice, indu
important irrigation and drain
"triumphful march" would elim
eighteenth centuries the marz
rotations of the Po valley, to th
staple of the northern country
high zones up to the southern en
also the introduction througho
teenth century on, of fodder pla
crops. In 1515 they occupied m
cultivated area in the Pavese an
ment of animal husbandry sp
There was the rise as well of in
cultivated in the sixteenth cen
located all along the Tyrrhenian
There were the dye and textile p
Abruzzi around Aquila produced
quality saffron (zima), even be
Lombardy. But, most important
silkworm production, the expans
to the north between the fifte
would constitute one of the p
agricultural history. Silk pro
Sicilian and Calabrian in the six
subsequently take off, to a rem
and Venice. In 1600 the value
600,000 pounds, or about 1 mil
value of wheat exports from t
with more than 7 million poun
two-thirds of the European raw
industrial demand (Poni, 1976
Furthermore, one must add to
spectacular successes the more di
patrimony of trees, vegetables, and flowers accumulated

on in the huertas of southern Italy and renewed and enla
the sixteenth century by new plants brought in from Sy
Egypt. From this patrimony, the gardeners of western
have never stopped drawing, borrowing its grains, it
and its agronomic techniques. Given all this, it makes no
to use merely the wheat production and yield ratio se
one does for France and Germany) as an index of cha
Italian agricultural production. From the thirteenth
eighteenth century, this production was profoundly alte
its composition. The relative "inertia" of traditional crop
balanced by the dynamism of the new crops. These were
closely associated with the older crops, interspersed with
and integrated into the system of crop rotation. But som
on the other hand, they were grown quite separately as
ized monocultures, often on speculative bases, and a
produced for the market.
Does the so-called stability of techniques stand up any
on close analysis? If nothing else, the adoption of new
already often involved a transformation of the proce
rhythms of work. Maize matures at the end of August o
first days of September, two months or more af
marzatelli and the vegetables whose place it took, and re
by that much the time available to prepare winter sowin
favoring techniques of tillage that were perhaps more
ficial but swifter (Poni, 1963: 47-51). To make this mere
a question of passive or open resistance by peasants
improvements imposed or decided upon by the landown
their large tenant-farmers, following a tradition wh
back to the Academies of Agriculture in the eighteenth c
and even further back still to an agronomic literatu
reflected the viewpoint of the ruling classes, is far too
Far from remaining passive or external to the proc
production, landlords were able to transform it wherev
wished. They turned the rural countryside upside do
mode of work, the relationship of men to the earth- in o
adapt the peasants to their decisions about which cr
grow. This was true for the rice fields. This was true even
for the large sugar plantations in Sicily and Calabria
154 Maurice Aymar d
mous enterprises which emplo

average in the sixteenth century
of more than 10,000 ecus (Re
plantations were located right
extensive cereal production. The
age and irrigation plans whic
engineers. In the second half o
Venetian Republic gave to the c
corporations (enti di diritto pu
was greater even than those deri
All landowners in the area co
participate and to pay the camp
works, or pay the penalty of the
which many had to do anyway to
The communities and the "suddit
the forced alienation of a part of
"revolutionary" policy which per
to increase their share (Ventura,
inexorable transfer of property
nobility, which had started with
accumulate in its hands by 1750
cultivated land area of the Terraferma.
Was this an extreme case? The general organization of the
mezzadria furnishes a still more striking example since it was
precisely on the work obligations of the peasantry and on the
detailed control of their day-by-day execution that the padroni
seemed to have lavished the most minute attention. They
specified exactly how many men were needed, the schedule of
the various operations, the tools that should be used, the crops
to be grown and the methods to be used, the number of trees to
be planted and to be grafted, and the obligation to dig deeply
(vangare) each year one-third or one-quarter of the soil which
would eventually lead to eliminating the need for fallows. No
doubt it is true that, despite the continuing threat to expel
recalcitrant peasants, some parts of these regulations were not
carried out, but such peasant astuteness (Poni, 1976b) was
located precisely on the narrow boundary line which separated
"formal subsumption" of labor from its "real subsumption".
That they had to resort to pretense, to giving the illusion that
work was done according to the prescriptions the land

down, is enough to demonstrate the fragility of
opposition which had to use such devices without being
express itself more openly. But it has the virtue of rem
that we cannot simply discuss in terms of "progre
"resistance" the history of work technology which i
inseparable from the totality of social history. What th
rather is the stability of techniques on the lands of gr
grass rotation of the Mezzogiorno. The persistence
rotation system in which fallow played a large role, th
choice of crops, the same mediocre equipment, and
poor draught cattle coexisted nonetheless with i
agricultural practices in the very same regions in i
meadows (Bresc, 1972), sugar plantations, and th
specialized orchards. But they were also closely link
new rural order imposed since the thirteenth century
fiefholders and perpetuated by the wide ranging po
their gabelloti. Some of the large landowners were onc
obliged to give lifetime leases to their peasants, as i
regions of the Kingdom of Naples following the plague
and in these cases the latter demonstrated their cap
break with traditional habits, to expand their orch
diversify their production, and to develop a different
model (Delille, 1973).
VII. The Achievements and Limits of

Agricultural Development at the
Beginning of Modern Times
Classical analysts of the English agricultural revolution

have given historians the image of a single model of economic
takeoff, that of the one which historically permitted north-
western Europe to overcome the technical, social, and eco-
nomic obstacles of an agriculture which had been hitherto
dominated by the imperialism of bread grains, to improve its
productivity, to increase its production, and thus to ensure
food for the towns in the best conditions and with a smaller
work force at the time when industrialization would expand
the population of the towns spec

this revolutionary transformat
absolute and decisive importanc
graphical context. The concentra
large landowners through the ex
and the occupation of the common
of mortmain and of the inalienab
cal lands, and the constitution o
benefitting from long-term lea
tions, both necessary and sufficie
ment, marked by the elimination
had engaged in subsistence pro
new rotations that included f
fallows (therefore promoting
concentration on grains, whose yi
by the increased commercializatio
decline of rural industry organized
establishment of a regular separat
industry, and by the aggressiv
market. In the case of Italy this
paradox.
On the one hand, it then became necessary to explain the
slowness, the non-"revolutionary" character, of the develop-
ment of northern Italy where all the formulas of high farming
were in fact known and applied already in the fifteenth and
sixteenth century and whose level of performance in the second
half of the eighteenth century excited the admiration of the
most demanding English travelers, first of all of Arthur Young
(Romani, 1957). At the technical level there was the elimina-
tion of fallows, irrigation, permanent meadows, fodder plants
introduced into the rotation cycle, specialization in dairy
farming, and the introduction of new crops that were more
profitable than wheat (rice), more productive (maize), or
simply complementary (silk). At the economic level, urban
capital invested in the lands not only to acquire them but to
transform them and to increase their productive capacity. At
the social level, there was, alongside the "landed class", a class
of farmer-owners who utilized capitalist methods of land
management and, in particular, employed wage-labor. All of
this led to a rise of the net product and the provisionin

particularly dense urban network with a very early exp
of the manufacturing sector. Within the framework
already envied archetype of the modern state, fifteenth-
Milan developed a model of agricultural development
imitated by its neighbors from Venice and Piedmont
prefigured the English model by two or three centuries
the profitability of the capital invested by the land
(avances foncières, or the costs of clearing, of build
irrigation, etc.) and that invested by their large tenant-f
(avances primitives, or the cost of equipment) to the hig
of productivity of the land and of manpower.4 It wasn't
the nineteenth century that Carlo Cattaneo led us to
the modernity of this model. It was invented by and
cities at the height of their commercial and manufa
prosperity, assuring them prosaically, in a period of sta
and of disappointed ambitions, two centuries of the com
able life of rentiers and not the prestigious success of a t
But, on the other hand, the emphasis placed on this
road to development," which Lombardy had made the m
of discovering too soon to extract full advantage from, t
minimize, ignore, or make into something less importan
doubtless less brilliant paths followed by other regions
peninsula. Nonetheless, these paths also represented effo
rationalize production. In their way they also utilized an
output analysis to ensure maximum revenue to th
owners. If in the end they failed or were stymied by lon
blockages, it was because they had reached their limi
social and economic, which did not have anything nec
to do with the ratio of population to subsistence.
The mezzadria was the classic form of "transition" and
large geographical diffusion from Piedmont to The Mar
Tuscany. Far from declining, sharecropping increase
the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. A good ex
Tuscany after the Leopoldian reforms, which in fact ha
4. Translator's note: Avances foncières and avances primitives are conce

Quesnay's Tableau Economique. In the Kuczynski-Meek translation (1972),
are translated as "ground advances" and "original advances".
158 Maurice Aymar d
objectives. Sharecropping took o

on the region and the main crop,
try to place them all into a sin
mezzadro was extremely variab
tenant-farmer and at the very e
to, at the other end, being alm
burdened with debts to being v
threatened each year with expu
secure by reason of de facto p
descendants of several generation
vary from a few hectares to over
contracts that were extremely
who might demand increased qua
relatively free under contracts t
landowner who might only e
provisions for his house and a m
variability, however, testified pre
which provided the normative st
usable in a very wide gamut of s
was not a rigid system, its d
followed a precise economic logic
and clarification of economic a
The initial ambiguity of the rel
labor did not take long to di
"investments" were contributed b
house in which the peasant lived,
usually the tools of production, t
plows. In the end he tended t
peasant invested, most of the tim
equipment and his labor power
family, the veritable economic b
he was responsible, not only fo
production, but also for the imp
of the capital fund, its valoriza
Except in a few zones like the V
Cosentino, improvements were
dria regions as they were in the
It is nonetheless significant tha
accomplished within the frame
(Lutazzi-Gregori, 1976). As a general rule, nonethele

increase in global production required the diversifica
crops and in particular the mixed planting of cereals and
crops, a fact attested to by the spread throughout th
country of the alberata and the piantata. The costs of cl
the land and of planting were thus assumed entirely
peasants. They similarly assumed the costs of upkeep
productive capacity of the farm through deep digging (
tura), through raftering the field which was intend
facilitate the flow of water, and through the careful m
nance of the network of ditches in flood zones. As Tanara
wrote, "bread comes from the bottom of the ditches."
In this sense the mezzadria promoted the full employment
throughout the year of the peasant labor force and its
investment in the land in the form of capital. Were the cost of
labor calculated at the going market rate, the mezzadria, like
all forms of peasant economy, would seem to be economically
unprofitable. It combined a low and decreasing level of pro-
ductivity of hourly work and an increasing productivity per
person, under the constant pressure of the padrone to increase
still further. This explains the continuing concern of the land-
owners to shape the size of the family unit to that of the land
unit and, given the rigidity of the latter, the severity of social
control exercised on the farmer. (Lutazzi-Gregori, 1976; Pult-
Quaglia, 1976).5 This control could take forms that seemed to
be feudal- overseeing marriages, forbidding sons to leave their
fathers' landholding, etc. - but the intent was to increase eco-
nomic rationality. All recent studies, since that done on the
Florentine cadaster of 1422-25 (Klapisch-Zuber & Demont,
1972; Herlihy & Klapisch-Zuber, 1978), have underlined this
particularity of the families of the mezzadri described by nine-
teenth-century authors as "patriarchal" and by contemporary
demographers, following the work of the anthropologists, as
domestic or multiple households (aggregati) grouping together
several nuclear families under a single roof with common owner-
5. Kula (1972) analyzes the identical policy of the Polish seigniors seeking to
"construct" the various types of families that would correspond to the hierarchy of
agricultural units that coexisted in the villages.
160 Maurice Aymar d
ship of goods, for which the olde

Piacenza (1824), and Modena (17
dissolution. Everywhere this ty
prising ten to twenty people and
to the families of the braccianti w
in no way "traditional" but seem
appearance and strengthening of
ing according to regions and crop
limits, a strict relationship thus
tion of manpower and to specify
units per hectare cultivated. Th
oscillating between 0.5 and 1 in Em
(Pichat, 1845; Poni, 1978a).
The limits of this model, based
labor rather than on the invest
(Giorgetti, 1970a, 1970b; Mir
separation between subsistence pr
the market. Even in good years, t
keep the mezzadro from having
was reserved for the landowner
access to any form of accumulati
of production. Despite the dev
model continued to give priorit
needs of the extensive population
it did not prevent entirely, the
specialize: hemp (Bologna), wo
etc. It was based on a very smal
and made an increase in yield dep
of labor. As a model of a certain t
went to the towns, the mezzadria functioned for several
centuries as an equilibrium model. It led to the long-term
stability of the population, of the forms of management, of
social relations, of production, of productivity, and of con-
sumption. It represented a Pyrrhic victory over cyclical
oscillations, but a victory all the same.
The constant discussion and confrontation of these two
paths of agricultural development which occurred in the
northern half of Italy, each in its way intensive but unequally
revolutionary, tend to make us forget the economic logic which
inspired, from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centur

great extensive cultivation practiced in the Maremm
Roman plains, and a large part of southern Italy. It was
the 1750's that the backwardness of southern agric
became obvious to observers, and the social and econ
consequences of the latifundium began to seem unacc
especially the growing gap between a large inactive pop
and an underutilized land. Before that time, travel
administrators liked to praise the exceptional fertility
lands whose backwardness they would later attribut
lack of attention by the inhabitants and to thei
equipment, one more sign of the transformation t
occurring in the peninsula. Only this logic, however, al
to understand the installation of the system, its mom
prosperity, and its millenary forms of resistance. At th
the large units of ownership and or production were id
located on lands empty (or emptied) of their inhabitant
produced surpluses for the urban and international mar
the investment of a relatively important amount of cap
they utilized a minimum of manpower. The produc
grains, for the most part, but also meat, wool, and o
long time these regions retained the same high yield
were at best equaled or scarcely exceeded in the eig
century on the carefully irrigated lands of Lombardy o
using intensive methods. Land was cultivated one yea
three, often less frequently, the rest being left for tran
pasturage. Speculative in its objectives, this agricult
based on a high level of productivity per work unit eff
employed, hence the high wages paid in hard currency
Sicilian countryside between 1470 and 1500, when the i
of the export of wheat from the island began. It implied
a high reward for capital invested by the agricultur
preneurs.
The structural limits of the system were reached very
quickly, in fact at the end of the sixteenth century. If
agricultural profit played a major role, it was a direct function
of short-term variations of demand and of price, which the
consuming cities controlled by their capital, their merchants,
their transport fleets, their provisioning structures (the Anno-
162 Maurice Aymar d
na), and their political power

market, structured and domina
cities of the north (Genoa, Floren
capitals in the south (Rome, N
extensive agricultural structure
and deprived them of a large pa
could have derived from the in
which in the sixteenth century
more rapid than that of other pr
The area most affected by the
end of the Middle Ages, centra
that most affected by the upswi
and 1500. This upswing affected
increasing local demand. But m
twofold degredation of the posit
hand, real wages went down, sinc
as wages. On the other hand, l
divided - gardens, vineyards, sma
this land was a necessary comp
led to a multiplication of peop
to cultivate. Landowners once a
vis the direct producers. The sh
profits from agriculture and fo
difficult choices. They could cho
of cereals, stock farming, whic
which further reduced the outpu
underutilization of the land. Or
selves into gabelloti and rent the
the fief only in order to sublet it
whom they advanced the cattle
food and seed at usurious rate
confiscate almost the entire harv
situation on the land of the poor
of the rental system left them n
organizing cultivation. The small
constrained to engage in extens
simply lacked the latter's appeara
The inertia of techniques of cu
fact on the large unit of cultivati
rigid system where any prolonged increase in the am

wheat sown led to a reduction in yields (Revel, 1972). Th
way that this triple block of productivity - social, te
and economic - could be overcome was through the
ment of arboriculture. But its impact was limited to the
the outskirts of the towns, especially the very large one
large speculative vineyards were developed. Certain
specialized in production for the international markets
the area around Otranto with oil or Calabria and northea
Sicily with silk. Finally there were zones where the lar
was split up into long-term lease units and where th
position of small and medium peasants allowed invest
lasting improvements in the use of the reserves of man
that had hitherto been largely under-employed.
VIII. The Vicissitudes of Commercial and

Industrial Development
Thus far we have concentrated on agriculture and the rural

areas in this inventory of structural transformations of the
Italian economy and society. We have not more than inciden-
tally mentioned commercial and manufacturing development,
which has played, however, a central role in the whole
historiographical tradition. There is no doubt that Italy from
the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries shared with Flanders a
supremacy in these areas which made the route between them
the central axis of western Europe. It dominated the raw
material markets and the outlets for manufactured goods. It
undertook and controlled long-distance trade both of precious
goods and of bulk goods. It developed as it needed commercial
and banking techniques and put in place a financial network
which covered all of Europe and the Mediterranean. Its
consequent economic superiority and the role of both secon-
dary and tertiary activities thus explained its high degree of
urbanization and the evolution of new political structures with
a redefinition of the hierarchy of power, of wealth, of economic
activity, of social values, and of cultural models. These
successes, which were concentrated in the so-called developed
164 Maurice A y mar d
quadilateral of Milan, Venice, Flor

the dominant cities to reorganize
space of the peninsula to their ad
were responsible for most of the tr
the rural areas around 1500. They w
a exogenous cause, to use the te
debate.
On the other hand, the changes which affected the secondary
and tertiary sectors, which were the strong points of these
urban economies, seem less important today. The recent
change in historians9 views is significant in this regard. First,
they were fascinated by the political and social precocity of the
epoch of the Italian communes. Then they were bemused by
the "modernity" of the banking network of the Medicis and the
"reconversion" of the Genoese who, when chased out of the
Orient by the advance of the Ottomans, took control of the
Spanish economy. Today they emphasize the picture of a
deceptive industrial and commercial development that did not
have a revolutionary outcome, but is said to have been always
superficial, coming up against its own limits.
Do these so-called industrial products, which constituted
Italy's reputation in the fifteenth and sixteenth century (these
cloths of wool, linen, and silk, these armaments, this paper,
and this glassware), and which have bequeathed as the first
quantitative series of non-agricultural production, permit us to
establish these first indices of economic activity? These luxury
and semi-luxury products were reserved for export or for the
well-to-do clientele in the cities. Their temporary success did
not eliminate local or domestic artisanry, which continued to
supply the essential needs of the countryside and in no way
prepared the ground for a national market. Fluctuations of the
curves of their activities were much more violent than those of
the grain harvest. What Heers (1976: 1 79) has called the "fragil-
ity of the wool towns" resided in their inability to stabilize the
activities which were the base of their fortune. These towns
nonetheless survived the collapse of these activities, revealing a
two-fold structural sensitivity to variations in demand and com-
petition. Although they were capable of "mass" production of
tens of thousands of pieces of cloth and thousands of arq

or cuirasses and of a relatively standardized production,
"industries" remained tightly controlled by mercha
virtue of their orders and of their delivery of raw mate
These merchants decided on the rhythm of activity but
intervened in the technical organization of work, at mo
so from the outside. The latter was left to the artisans
themselves who spent their time controlling the transmission of
knowledge (apprenticeship) and the exercise of the trade, and
hung on to their ownership of the means of production. No
doubt the minuteness of guild regulations presented a decep-
tive image of rigidity.
It was rather easy to get around the guilds when new needs
and realities imposed themselves. They frequently offered only
the paper appearance of autonomy for the producers, and were
unable to prevent a relative concentration of the means of
production in the hands of the merchants. Though fairly strong
in the towns, they did not succeed in preventing competition
from the countryside to which the major manufactures that
had been hitherto a monopoly of the towns relocated in the
seventeenth century. This was true in particular of textiles.
This rural industry was even more tightly controlled by the
merchants, who maintained, even promoted further, the model
of the family organization of domestic industry (Romano,
1972). One might even argue that "formal subsumption" seems
clearer in the case of textile and metallurgical artisans than in
the case of agriculture where, as we have seen, the intervention
of the landlords modified the choice of crops, the seasonal
rhythms of work, and the organization of production in
essential ways.
This explains the weakness of this artisan production in the
face of competitors both in the countryside and in other
countries. Its "advantage" was not linked to more efficient
production, but to the mastery of techniques whose secret
could not be kept for very long and to the quality of its
products, which were in fact easily duplicated. The history of
the textile "industry" between the thirteenth and the eighteenth
century was that of a long series of counterfeits, of which Italy
166 Maurice Aymar d
was not always the victim, but

always won out in the end. Fo
benefits of higher productivity b
fabricated by a less costly wor
levels and its comparatively high
ineffective panopoly of prohi
worn down, the city could mai
only by maneuvering in the two
advantage. The first was techn
the case, at the turn of the sixte
(to take an area in which there
glass, in which Venice was able t
position. Secondly, and more
domain of luxury products whi
work force but could thrive desp
Good examples here were wool in
at least the noble stages of its tra
division of labor which tended to be established in sixteenth-
century Italy followed an irrefutable logic. There were many
examples of it elsewhere. It did not keep these same towns from
using the extensive manpower available in the convents and in
the Case Pie, the Conservatori, and the Alberghi dei Poveri,
which housed the poor, the widows, and the orphans, to
manufacture "urban articles" which were developed in other
places (artificial flowers, gloves, fans, perfumes, liqueurs,
crystallized fruit, etc.).
This industrial "failure" indicated, on the other hand, the
limits of the impact of urban merchant capital on the general
organization of production and on the very structures of
society. Historical research has brought out clearly the positive
and negative sides of this balance-sheet. On the other hand, the
long mastery of international exchange, primarily in the
Mediterranean but in northwest Europe as well, stimulated
unquestionable technical progress in areas such as accounting,
circulation of money, interest-bearing loans, insurance, inter-
national currency exchange, and banking. The letter of
exchange and double-entry bookkeeping were added to the
horse collar and the stern rudder to the list of the great
medieval inventions. Italy served as the schoolm

Europe's merchants. Its superiority was still clear at
levels in the 1620's. It declined only slowly, as can be see
role that Genoa continued to play in the eighteenth ce
the international capital market, notably in loans
European states (Kriedte, Medick, & Schlumbloh
Medick, 1963). These loans were added on to the alre
group of public bonds issued by urban administrati
explains the important place occupied by their dividen
total revenues both of individuals (not only the rich
those of middle-income) and of religious establishm
centrality of these dividends was not mitigated by the
speculation which very quickly took on the appeara
refined and regulated game. The dividends from public
even served as a sort of model for the creation of mont
were loans to large landowners, the dividends from wh
based on annual revenue from the land.
On the other hand, we find once again the "stru
character of merchant capital and its indifference to t
of production of those commodities that enter into cir
(Marx, Capital, III: 325)6 which led to its continued pre
for simple financial control over producers rather t
control of the processes of production. It constantly s
achieve a monopoly position, whether it was a matter o
products such as spices or of bulk goods such as alum,
wheat. The game centered on the price differentials, m
on the quantities produced, in markets that were
volume both of production and of consumption. U
arrival of grains from the Baltic, and even afterwa
principal Mediterranean wheat traffic remained fu
tally speculative, limited to the largest urban areas and
of shortage. Neither Venice nor Genoa, which controll
markets tightly, ever developed entrepôts comparable
developed later by Amsterdam, or a redistributive tra
on demand, or transformation industries like br
Whenever they could, the cities preferred the security
6. The English translation has been improved on the basis of the Germ
text and the French translation cited by the author.
provisioning, even at higher costs

sion relative to the earlier form
agriculture.
This brings us to the most seriou
level in this fictional trial of the
guilty of all the Western bourg
were richest - pure and simple "t
failed, especially in the sixteent
"revolutionary" mission, to hav
transformation of both the econo
within their grasp, to have pre
aristocratic model to "producti
ones?), to have failed to take com
off their rents, and to have boug
monti and arrendamenti, and off
sale. Worst of all, they sought t
predeliction for fiefs on which th
and revenues which had long sinc
this with even greater energy th
conduct of the Venetian patrici
criticism, because the extent o
quantified! This infusion of u
structures in Italy is said to have
and a greater capacity of resist
stability than in England or in
However, the very idea of su
inseparable from the concept of
arguments are only partially conv
be read in two ways, if not in
purchase of land: Far from exclud
it unquestionably permitted, pr
as was the case with the very fa
works on the Po valley. There we
very same people, as is shown
Cornaro (Ventura, 1968: 699), the
ment projects, who asked the V
option to the enfeoffment of
new lands. He planned to found
that many ecclesiastical benefic
ducats. Everything, furthermore, points to the fact tha

process of land acquisition did not begin only in the sixt
century but occurred in a continuous fashion over a per
several centuries. There is no evidence that such investme
land, anymore than the new habits of sumptuary consum
exhausted reserves of accumulated capital. Genoa and
both continued to have large amounts of financial ca
their disposal, for which there were insufficient fruitfu
at home. They therefore had to invest elsewhere, in loan
were more or less secure, but also to a significant degree
rival cities, and in the very sectors in which these latte
establishing their new superiority. Marx noted in q
different context (Marx, 1976: I, Ch. 31) this continuity
international dealings of capital, with the Venetian inve
in Holland in the seventeenth century, the Dutch in Eng
the eighteenth century, and, under his very eyes, the British
United States. Rather than perceiving them as the c
what might be dubiously labeled a decline, these shi
capital are the surest indicators of a transitional situa
the birth process of a new economic hierarchy.
Most of all, at the very moment when this failure
experience in development was occurring, between
teenth and the seventeenth century, one would look in
any important "structural" backwardness in Italy vis-à-v
rivals, whose commercial and industrial practices di
differ, or scarcely differed, from its own, and who imita
were competitors with Italy. The Dutch, with the VO
India Company, conducted the same kind of intern
middleman trade based on the commission system that h
engaged in by the Genoese and the Venetians, but in a di
arena, that of the whole world. The English did not place
selves in any higher level at least until the 1770's. Colonia
and bulk products, such as wheat, salt, wine, and wood,
a larger role in their trade than did their own industrial pro
As for the latter, the general tendency to move a large
the textile sector (woolens and linens) to the countrysid
the decline of the urban guilds, further reinforced the p
the merchants over the almost unlimited manpower see
available within the framework of the putting-out
(Mendels, 1972). The supremacy acq

teenth century in the Mediterrane
the cloths from Leiden derived mo
were a lighter and cheaper product,
to the demand in the Levant, than
or to a higher level of productivity
1600, was there an unquestionabl
English, and the Hanseates over G
due primarily to the proximity and
raw materials, such as wood, pitch
edged by the Italian merchants a
hesitate to order the ships they nee
or to acquire them secondhand, or
them. The crews of northern ships
tion of being smaller and less dem
On the other hand, Italian industr
and eighteenth century seems to
appreciated. It has suffered in the
coincidence between the collapse
industries, for which we have good
loss of commercial supremacy and
at a time when the peninsula was t
exporter of agricultural products a
but also of capital and of comme
suffered as well from the balance-
which were often catastrophic. In
teenth century, the industrial s
erected at the beginning of the
pletely in the face of English co
1780 with 1800 would show a sh
Italian rural industry is even l
fragmentary studies at best. It wo
naturally in a general history of "
far written exclusively in the lig
German, and Austrian experience
case was that of Venice where the p
Schio counterbalanced the decline
eighteenth century.
A multitude of small and medium enterprises coe

there with factories like the one founded in 1717 by
Tron, who in 1750 employed more than 500 people
women, and children," subject to "tight discipline w
observed" (Caizzi, 1965: 66-67) during fourteen-hou
days throughout the year. The perfect tranquility of th
which were deserted when the populace was at wor
trasted with the joy, judged to be excessive, that was e
with the aid of wine on feast days. From the Verona r
Carnia, the manufacture of linen, hemp, or cotton
totally under the control of the merchants who distri
work in the countryside, showed the same level of
Although it was only weakly supported by a state t
opted for a peace policy, and despite all the complaints
the authorities about their difficulties, the metallur
dustry of Val Trompia was able to furnish Spain betwe
and 1797 with 150,000 rifles and was able to plan in
conquer the market for nails throughout Latin
(Tucci, 1970).
Though it lacked prestige, this industry met most in
demand at that time, except for a part of the luxury tr
it retained or acquired access to certain foreign marke
southern Italy succeeded in developing possibilities t
unsuspected up to then. The relative "decoloniza
Neapolitan external trade was thus favorable, in th
between 1650 and 1750, to the prosperity of a rura
industry which was located along the axis going from
Salerno, and which serviced the still rural zones o
(Aymard, 1970). Shortly thereafter the diffusion of
growing led to the rise in the regions around Otranto
of two small manufacturing centers which export
products to Trieste and Venice. In the latter case the s
the ships from Scylla, which transported these produc
themselves sell the cloths in the fairs of the Terr
(Visceglia, 1976).
One could give many other such examples. No dou
successes were minor and fragile, but they reveal the
history of a situation that was both open and
172 Maurice Aymar d
possibilities. In the sectors re

emerging industrial division of la
capacity of initiative and innova
pleaded vigorously the case of silk
mulino alia bolognese> which an E
Po valley and Tuscany in 1677-7
goes back to the sixteenth centu
machines" integrating several p
production (winding/ first twisti
ing), and bringing together a wor
needs of the various operation
Piedmont, six enterprises each
The introduction of this system
take to be classical effects of the
the ruin of the old family domest
idealized ("before, the family was
hard each at his task, where th
anyone"); the geographical conc
(which was deemed socially dan
specialized from childhood in w
manual dexterity and who wer
delicate to return to the fields;
and discipline for the civil and re
1 726 led to drafting the first set of
which the hierarchy of overseers
(Poni, 1976a). The true limits o
reflected, not so much that the p
1772, as Poni reminds us, Italy
did cotton), but that these enterp
which Lyon and England did the
with the prior stage of thread
product).
The intervention of foreign capital and personnel reinforced
this position of inferiority, this regressive domination flowing
from the end product downstream to the raw materials. The
commissions of Lyonese and Genoese merchants throughout
southern Italy decided the volume of production of raw silk as
well as the quantity and quality of threaded silk. The first and
most important of the threading establishments of Racconigi
was founded by a Frenchman, André Peyron, and exp

by his descendants. Even so, an old weaving center lik
was not able to keep within its walls a threading industry
sought out the low wage levels of the countryside, and i
to provision its own looms, preferring to export to Fran
Switzerland. "The development of a factory system in th
ing was accompanied by a decisive process of deindust
tion" (Poni, 1976a: 494). This meant in fact that ther
regional specialization in semi-manufactured product
cated near raw material production. A veritable restruct
of industrial geography thus took place to the detrim
Venice, Florence, and Milan and to the benefit of sm
towns like Bergamo, or even small rural centers like Rac
or Bassano.
In the same period, in the Piedmontese and Lombard
countryside, an active financial bourgeoisie took leases on the
domains of the nobility and the Church and imposed itself as
the intermediary between the landowners and the peasants,
bringing about the proletarianization of the mezzadrU expel-
ling them from their lands or overburdening them with
supplementary payments, eventually transforming them into
simple agricultural day-workers (schiavandari). Agricultural
production was thus brutally reorganized so as to give these
prestigious tenant-farmers of capitalist origin speculative
control over the market. Increase in prices became the surest
guarantee of profit. Nonetheless, the change seemed for the
time at least more formal than real. Uprooting a small and
middle peasantry, transforming them into agricultural wage-
workers, and enlarging the share of the market at the expense
of subsistence production did not suffice to set in motion a
process of continuous development. Growth did not auto-
matically follow pauperization and the destruction of tradi-
tional social structures. There was no progress in production,
but rather a crisis of agriculture and of animal husbandry. The
soil was exhausted by the large tenant-farmers, who increased
the percentage of the land cultivated in cereals, cut down the
trees and neglected to plant new ones, substituted horses and
mules for oxen as animal power, and expanded sheepherding,
whereas it was the peasant who had a "direct interest ... in im-
174 Maurice Aymar d
proving cultivation" (Sereno,

there was a consolidation of l
most part passed from the hand
to those of the large tenant-fa
word the story so often descri
Italian countryside and the ro
eighteenth and the nineteenth
IX. The English Model and It
It would be pointless, howev

this fashion the interpretation
become contradictory as soon
multiplicity and diversity of It
and their general explanatory
one? The stumbling block of
correlation that has been asserted but never demonstrated be-
tween the change in the mode of production, the so-called
transition, and the shift from a rural to an industrial society.
Rural society is described as doomed to stagnation or to blocked
growth, whereas industrial society is born under the sign of a
double revolution, that of productive forces (at one and the
same time liberated and developed) and that of the relations of
production. This difficulty is often further complicated by the
insistence on locating the logic of conditions which bring about
the shift in the functioning of the prior feudal or precapitalist
system. In fact, and no doubt simplistically, an analysis on the
case of modern Italy requires bringing together several groups
of facts.
(1) The transformation of Italy into an industrialized country
occurred slowly and by stages over the last 100 years within the
framework of a unitary state, and the major changes that took
place after Italian unity was achieved played an important,
probably a decisive role in this still ongoing transformation:
the creation of a centralized state, constructing the infra-
7. Sereno's study is based on the survey of 1793, studied by Catalano (1959: 435-
69).
structure, a national market, exploitation of the south b

north, and the influx of foreign capital. These chang
accompanied, followed, or preceded by a revolution whic
even more spectacular in agriculture. In the northern re
there was both an increase in and a diversification of pr
tion, a take-off of yields, and the accentuation of its cap
character. Whatever its achievements here and there between
1750 and 1850, Italy in the middle of the nineteenth century
had still been profoundly marked in its political, economic,
and social structures by the continuing central importance of
the land and its system of values.
(2) The principal changes in the relations of production
which are usually taken into account, both as signs and as
causes of the process of transition, had on the other hand
occurred in the Italian countryside very early, beginning in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, far earlier than in the rest
of Europe. For the most part, these changes were linked to the
long economic supremacy of the Italian merchant cities. But
their combination of international exchanges (even if limited
to luxury products, to economically marginal quantities of
bulk goods, and to a range of manufactured articles which was
rather limited in relation to local consumption and demand)
permitted the first massive accumulation of capital, and this in
turn led, throughout the rural areas subject to their control, to
a reorganization of the structures of property and of land
cultivation to meet the new requirements of the market. In the
whole of central and northern Italy the old feudal relations
remained a reality only in the peripheries, especially in the
mountainous areas. And the strengthening of the southern
feudal order, based on full property rights over the land rather
than over men, was part of the new logic of a division of labor
at the level of the peninsula as a whole between producers of
primary products and manufacturing or commercial regions.
The three last centuries of the Middle Ages thus saw the
emergence of a decisive cleavage between north and south
which would define the whole subsequent history of Italy.
(3) Despite this, these changes, which parallelled those of
the "English model", had no revolutionary consequences
whatsoever in Italy, either in the short or the long run. They
176 Maurice Aymar d
seem to have been unleashed b

taneously deprived Italy of it
international arena and led to the installation and consolida-
tion of new political, religious, social, and cultural equilibria
that remained remarkably rigid throughout the modern era.
Italy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century thus lived
through all the stages of a relative decline, remaining almost
immobile in a Europe which was inventing new forms of power
and wealth. Its possibilities were becoming narrower in a
commercial space whose recent expansion at the level of world
commerce seemed from the start to have passed it by. It
reorganized its textile industry in a spectacular way, sacrificing
the "mass production" of woolens and linens intended for
export in order to specialize in the luxury sector of silk which
was then remarkably dynamic. But at the same time as it was
becoming the leading European producer of raw silk, Italy was
losing control over the market for finished products and
consequently of the complete process of transformation to the
benefit of its competitors in France and England. It invested
and continued to invest massively in the land: in its purchase; in
equipment, in buildings, and cattle and tools for cultivation;
and in its improvement through irrigation, drainage, and the
development of arboriculture. Although this is often de-
nounced as a diversion to a traditional sector of agriculture of
capital accumulated by commerce and manufacturing neces-
sary for its development, these investments permitted real
progress in the volume of agriculture production. They did not
suffice however to bring about a decisive rise in productivity.
In the eighteenth century, the yields of grain production
scarcely exceeded, on the best irrigated lands of the Lodigiano
(south of Milan), those that had been achieved through two
thousand years of extensive grain cultivation in southern Italy.
The high densities of population maintained and reinforced in
the countryside, from Lombardy to Sicily, suggest that the key
investment was that of labor rather than that of capital. This is
further proven by the long stability of agricultural equipment
whose description, in the surveys of the Napoleonic era,
seemed to be virtually unchanged from previous epochs
(Farolfi, 1969). It is shown as well in the failure of labor-saving
inventions despite their formal patenting by the invento

the agreement and assistance of the authorities (Poni
The most important conflicts between landlords and
ants, such as those concerning two different models of p
am and the pib, have to do precisely with the introduct
new agricultural implements and the conditions of th
(Poni, 1963).*
The increase in the size of the rural population cont
clearly with the stagnation of the population of the
especially in the largest cities, whose total size as of 1600
few exceptions such as Turin) was the same as it would b
centuries later.
This aggravated the situation in two ways: First, it increased
the role of agriculture in the economy vis-à-vis secondary and
tertiary activities. But, secondly, it increased the burden imposed
upon the countryside to maintain the cities. The latter, having
become or remaining idle, tenaciously defended their consump-
tion levels which, though modest from our perspective, were
nonetheless relatively high. And the ruling classes indulged in
the ostentatious luxuries of the new order: construction, whence
the theme so often repeated of the "pétrification of wealth",
which Labrot (1977) claims accounts for the rigorous logic of a
form of investment from which the nobility expected "political,
psychological, even metaphysical advantages"; clothing; and
the aristocratic pleasures of the hunt, of gambling, and (for the
more ambitious) of war. There was also the more discrete
phenomenon of education, the necessary legitimation of the
silent reproduction of social hierarchies via the Church and the
state. The sons of the Venetian patricians all went to the Uni-
versity of Padua before entering the judiciary. From Venice to
Palermo and from Milan to Naples, whatever their origin,
whether feudal or urban or merchant, the new artistocracies
closed their ranks to constitute strict castes, and revived the old
Roman practice of fideicommissum, thereby ensuring the inte-
8. Translator's note: The ara and the pib are two different types of plow. There is
no simple dictionary translation of the two, since they were subject to evolving usage.
Poni (1963) devotes a whole chapter to analyzing the distinction, culminating in the
view that essentially the pib is an arà that has become asymettrical in form.
178 Maurice Aymar d
grity and unity of the family p

laic mortmain froze in the poss
owners lands which, even in the
readily changed hands in the fo
The Church, its position threat
in consolidating its landholdi
period. Although the expropria
pleted at a very early date, new
of land grew up. Matrimonial
reinforce further the concentra
ful of families, as did legislation
against the division of lands th
inheritance patterns, dowries,
regression in one essential featu
land ceased to be, in the hands
of production like any other,
and became once again the sym
status.
Thus the long chronological separation between a preco-

cious "defeudalization" and a late industrialization added up
to a 500-year period which is hard to classify and which consti-
tutes the peculiar feature of Italian history: the longest phase of
indecisiveness of all the Western countries. In the case of the
United Provinces, dethroned in the eighteenth century by
England, the pause was scarcely a century long, and further-
more was hidden by the colonial prosperity they derived from
the exploitation of Java. Historiography has largely embellished
the contradictions from which this period suffered, writing
about it successively in optimistic and pessimistic tones, in ways
that looked backward and forward. The successes of merchant
capital, it was said, were followed by the failure of industry and
the return from commerce to the land. But on the other hand the
resistance of the urban framework inherited from the medieval
past made it impossible to go all the way back; the towns learned
how to defend their legacy. It was argued that there were new
definitions of social relations, new equilibria between social
groups, new forces which participated in power. But, on the
other hand, the tendency which won out was that which led
irresistibly to the rapid reconstitution of closed castes and to the
sclerosis of institutions. Finally, it was noted that the v

modern states were constituted around the principal c
that this was their doing and not that of the hereditar
consequently without the mediation of absolutism n
everywhere else in Europe. But the failure of the complete
tion of the peninsula was caused by the resistance of th
same states which were locked into a subtle game of b
power in which they depleted all the resources of their dip
Furthermore, these same states failed to unify th
internally, maintaining, and sometimes aggravating
privileges in the face of countrysides that were disdai
exploited.
There is therefore no modern "trait" for which one cannot
immediately find side by side its "archaic" counterpart. Wheat
bread, albeit black, became as of the fifteenth century the normal
food of the majority of towns, large and small, which was ex-
ceptional in Europe, but chestnut bread remained the lot of the
peasantry (up to today) of the poor mountainous areas from
Lunigiana to Calabria. The perfection of the most sophisticated
financial techniques from the letters of exchange to the fairs to
Besançon meant that Italy was the master of credit to princes
and to merchants and controlled the international movements
of capital. Nevertheless, on the other hand, there was the con-
tinuing practice at the base of the same men and their factors
using in their daily relations with their peasants the most tradi-
tional and oppressive forms of usury. The seigniors had to sub-
mit to urban authority, but at the same time the merchants who
became landed proprietors insisted strictly on the most minor
"feudal" rights to which they could lay claim over their lands or
over those who cultivated them. All this suggested that these
archaisms were something more than mere survivals; these
contrasts reflected more than a simple juxtaposition between
the present and the past, a past which imposed its inertia and
played the role of a brake on progress. They expressed less an
opposition between two realities which were completely differ-
ent from each other and more a couplet, less a contradiction
than a complementarity. Italian "backwardnesses", so fre-
quently described, were the product of Italy's previous "advance".
Without dwelling on it, given th

on England, the only country whe
agricultural producer" had its "c
716), Marx clearly perceived the or
an Italy which had to be analyzed
the model of an atypical evolutio
radically different order. From
their "exceptional urban develop
the Italian towns were able to ov
domination that the countryside h
production developed there ea
"Feudalism disappeared there ea
Not merely earlier, but much earl
"emancipated" had had "the tim
prescription over the lands that
hesitate to make a direct link betw
supremacy by northern Italy at th
and the decline of its manufactur
town laborers to the countryside,
before seen, to the petite cultur
gardening" (Marx, 1976: 1, 716).
ended as the stabilization of the workers on the land.
X. Three Interpretations of the Italian Anomaly
Contemporary historians take three major positions on the

exceptional situation of Italy.
The first position was developed with great passion by
Ruggiero Romano (1972) in the Storia d' Italia. It invites us to
minimize the importance of the transformations which oc-
curred in Italy between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Far
from shaking up the key structures of a society that was still
predominantly agricultural, despite its urban appearance, they
even in a curious way consolidate them. The result was massive
rigidity of a "bloc of fifteen centuries", unassailed and even
reinforced in its core. Up to the end of the nineteenth century, if
not to still later, historiography has never succeeded in doing
more than outlining its partitions or painting it with fake
windows. The most recent studies in the long stability of

and of agricultural techniques, of popular levels of co
tion (which were maintained at their lowest level), and o
general framework of material life point to the same co
sions in this regard as the durability of economic and
structures dominated by the conflict between tow
country, a conflict which was said to have lost betwe
and 1600 any dialectical virtue.
The second position possesses more nuances but
fundamentally different. It emphasizes the unequal
distribution of these transformations. They did indeed a
agriculture and not only commerce. But this "modern se
remained both too weak and too localized, limited as it w
northern Italy, to bring about a general transformation
was neither a national market nor political unification. R
there was "an expansion of regional dimensions, on too s
base, one insufficient to provoke the necessary reactions
rise to a process of industrialization." The dynamic of gr
which began so early came up continually against a
structural obstacle, one internal, the other external.
The only exception was the rich agriculture of the Po valley. T

agriculture did produce a surplus, but did not in general find
conditions necessary to take advantage of it. This surplus could h
constituted the base of industrial advance. Instead churches and
palaces absorbed it in large part. It was an agriculture which rested
upon the laurels of its previous progress, showed itself incapable in the
seventeenth and eighteenth century of further development and thus
was stopped in its tracks, surrounded by a backward Italy (Zangheri,
1973: 46, 54-55).
This sense that economic development had ceased was based

on an analysis of agricultural relations which contrasted the
restricted zone, in which a system of capitalist leasing took
hold very early, and the vast majority of Italian land (Giorgetti,
1977). The disappearance or rapid decline of customary
relations characteristic of the feudal epoch favored the diffu-
sion of a very wide gamut of forms of transition which "could
not be placed purely and simply either into the three categories
of pre-capitalist rent in labor, in kind, and in money or into the
182 Maurice Aymar d
category of true capitalism." Suc

mezzadria poderale. But it was also true of the "small
tenant-farmer who directly cultivated his plot" and of the
"sharecropping agreements entered into either for grain pro-
duction on the latifundium or for specialized wood produc-
tion" (Giorgetti, 1977: 27), which were multiplying in the
countryside of the center and the south in the place of
traditional modes of access to the land and of rent payments in
money or in kind. All these contracts were located on a
continuum, both logical and historic, which led from feudal to
capitalist rent, without however leading to the emergence of an
independent small or middle peasantry. "The livestock no
longer belonged totally, de facto or de jure, to the peasant, as
they had in the previous era, but belonged instead totally to a
capitalist" (Giorgetti, 1977: 21). In addition to rent on the land
properly speaking, there was interest, most often at usurious
rates, on the capital advanced by the landowner. But the very
slowness of the transition in modern Italy's climate of eco-
nomic stagnation favored processes of constraint, obstacles,
crystallization, and even regression and reabsorption into a
feudal framework, which had remained dominant. This is a
significant inversion of the image. It no longer opposes the
inertia of the masses to the surface changes, but rather suggests
a slow internal maturation within the framework of the stifling
constraints of the "medieval fog".
Precisely insofar as the process of transition, which had begun in some

areas of the country in the Late Middle Ages, was taking place within
property relations that were still essentially feudal, they could not
achieve with sufficient rapidity, as in the case of England, a victory for
capitalist conditions. The complex economic impulses giving rise to
this process, which occurred in Italy at the beginning of the modern
era, could not therefore become anything but attenuated or slowed
down; the new agricultural units that had emerged in this process were
thereby being consolidated in their contractual forms, which led
necessarily to their being reabsorbed into the old system and to
becoming crystallized in a climate of substantial stagnation. This
blocked ox slowed down for a long period the transition to a capitalist
agrarian economy and could be taken therefore as a regression
towards the past. The so-called process of "refeudalization" which we
know occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth century in the Italian
countryside is an example of this process (Giorgetti, 1977: 21; i

added).
The third position, recently outlined by Wallerstein (1974),

places the answers to the apparent contradictions of the Italian
situation in a different chronological and spatial framework.
Far from being identical with the transition from rural to
industrial society, the "transition" took place in two successive
phases. The first occurred with the construction about 1450 of
a new economy, a capitalist one, which was a world-economy.
The second was the Industrial Revolution which took place
only later, beginning in 1780. The three centuries of the modern
era thus appear less dominated by the greater or lesser speed of
the process of transition in the various countries of western
Europe, which are inexplicable if taken separately, than by the
changes which occur in the internal hierarchy of this world-
economy, dominated by the opposition between center, semi-
periphery, and periphery. Sixteenth-century Italy is considered
to have lost its core position, which it had long shared with the
Low Countries. The dominant role in the system was taken by
the United Provinces, which in turn lost this position in the
eighteenth century to England. It is in the degree to which it
assumed the lead of the world-system at the right moment,
neither too early nor too late, that England could in fact
achieve, for the first time in the "classical form", the expropri-
ation of the cultivators which constituted for Marx the
essential step in the history of primitive accumulation, during
which "all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for
the capitalist class information" (1976: 1, 716). There could be
only one winner in the race. Italy's loss of relative position, its
relegation to a peripheral position, if not worse, explains the
slowing down and the stopping of a process of transformation
which it had been the first to initiate in the period when it had
been in the dominant position itself.
Three positions, three different readings of Marx, three
responses to questions about the present. To the degree that
they constitute coherent systems of explanation, the three re-
main prisoners of the limits of their initial hypotheses, and they
only imperfectly explain a contradictory reality which cannot
be analyzed so neatly.
184 Maurice Aymar d
The position of Romano dogge

and social changes that modern
treats them as minor phenome
Far from seeing the rural cou
historical change, he draws the
(1972: 276). However, the stab
emphasizes can be easily found
until the middle of the ninet
agriculture in the economy and
diet dominated by grains, the p
the importance of subsistence
18S0 was behind its major Euro
gards, this in no way reflected
not explain its relative failure.
accounts before 1800 has succee
statistical constraint that the
England and France, they res
straightforward multiplication
biological minimum: from 180
posed of grains) by populatio
capita that can be observed are
(1978: 180) is able to place Fra
gory for 1830 without feeling a
fact, however, is that the struc
ment of modern industry were
They were not by and large the
past but were born between th
centuries in the first wave of
dominant economic position in
in particular to resist the great
Death.
No doubt the first phase of development had contrasting
results in different regions. But if one engages merely in a formal
classification exclusively based on the relations of production
and the analysis of land rent, one can do no more than confirm
the obvious lead that Lombardy took over the other regions
quite early on. One can explain neither its origins, nor the fact
that it was limited to a part of the Po valley, nor the spectacular
way in which it was reasserted after Italian unity, nor the extent
of backwardness elsewhere, nor the ability to slow d

nomic development that has been attributed to this "b
Italy" which made up the largest part of the penin
inequalities of development in modern Italy are neit
juxtaposed nor certainly to be contrasted; they form a
whose coherence must be explained.
Wallerstein's approach has the undoubted advan
providing a total explanation of the relative decline
beginning at the end of the sixteenth century, or at l
slowdown that the loss of its "core position" meant
economy of northern Italy. It is easy to see the conseq
such a relative decline to the benefit of the rising p
northwest Europe. The explanations given however
repeat the traditional explanations: the loss of com
supremacy (despite the revival of the Mediterrane
1550); the difficulties of acquiring supplies in gra
materials for shipbuilding; the geographical advan
Holland (Amsterdam "better placed" than Venice o
the weakened position of an industry that was the pri
its high wage levels, of its technology, or urban privil
the absence of political unification which made it impo
follow the example of France or England (Wallerste
116-21). The level of the analysis gives priority to t
industry, at the expense of the social realities of agric
and to the relations with the rest of Europe, at the ex
those which linked northern Italy to the rest of the p
and specifically to its southern periphery. Once aga
peripheries are abandoned to their "past", to their
bilism" as "feudal" societies, as though the Sicili
Neapolitan wheat market had not been the equal f
time of the Baltic market, as though the pair Genoa-S
Venice-Apulia had not functioned in the very same fas
the pair England-Poland.
XI. Crisis in the Model of Development
Any attempt to understand and explain Italy's "f

must take into account the originality of a situation th
equivalent in Europe in the fifteen

must refuse to omit factors,
unchanging the very complex art
those causes that were local and those that were international.
The extent of structural transformations that had begun or
were accomplished in Italy in 1500 cannot be minimized. They
constituted a greater rupture than for any other country with
its past. The merchant capital which was accumulated by the
cities did not confine itself to the sphere of circulation. It is
already very advanced in its control over rural production. It
defined new relations between peasants and landowners and
gave birth to a new rural civilization, one that was hard on
those who cultivated the land, and based on the maximal
exploitation in every possible way of the resources of the labor
force. That this agrarian capitalism came up in a very short
time against its own limits is another question. But one must do
more than classify the forms of land rent. On the grain-growing
lands of western Sicily or the coastal plains of Calabria rent in
money of vast areas paid to massari who owned cattle, seed,
money, and equipment alternated with the breaking-up of the
land into tiny units among peasants paying very heavy rents in
kind aggravated by usurious interest rates. Thus, at the level of
appearances, capitalist rent was located alongside feudal rent
in kind, the two being associated with each other rather than
excluding each other. And although historians are often swept
along by the images which underlie their discourse - the "bloc
of fifteen centuries", the contrast between center and periph-
ery, etc. - the picture of an "island" of modernity in the middle
of a backward Italy appears more seductive than convincing as
soon as one places it in a dynamic perspective. It was not the
accumulated backwardness of Sicily or of the Kingdom of
Naples which blocked or slowed down for three centuries the
agricultural rise of the Po-valley plain (which, in any case, as
can be seen by the example of Venice, never ceased, even if its
pace slowed down).
Renaissance Italy turns out to have been a microcosm of
Europe. More than any other region, it contained within itself
the split between center and periphery, held together by a
framework of a solidary relationship of complementar

dependence. This internal split is as essential to unders
functioning of its economy and the gaps which
between nearby zones as the ancient external orientati
trade. At the very moment that it was losing its mono
spices, the wool of Foggia, the wheat of the caricatori
or Apulia, the silk of Messina, the alum of Tolfa, the cl
the linens of the cities of Lombardy, Venice, or Tuscan
iron of Brescia, and the paper of Genoa became the
commodities that animated the interregional trade
peninsula, via the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic Seas. The
of Mediterranean trade around 1550 was the result of the
dynamism of this middle-distance trade and of the vitality of
Italian economic life, as much as it was the result of the
resumption of trade with the Levant.
Italy thus created an original model of development based,
not on the contrasts that were still dominant in a large part of
the western Europe of that era between population and
subsistence, between peasant production and seigniorial rents,
but rather on two relationships of the organization and the
exploitation of space, reinforced by the demographic depres-
sion of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. First, there was
the relationship which tied the contado to the town which it
fed. The new states that were constituted around Venice,
Milan, or Florence took a long time to escape this narrow and
egotistical definition of their structures, while the capitals of
the southern states, Rome, Naples, and Palermo, grew as fast
as the hinterland which they dominated and exploited. But,
secondly, there was the relationship which tied southern Italy,
the exporter of agricultural raw materials, to the commercial
and manufacturing metropolises of the "developed quadrilateral"
of northern Italy.
It is this model of development which failed in the sixteenth
century, and its failure illustrates well the close imbrication of
the two levels of causality which renders it pointless to oppose
one to the other. For the decline of a very old commercial
supremacy, which had begun long before, should not make us
forget the internal factors which blocked growth. All in all, the
188 Maurice Aymar d
limits were reached in the coun

seen by the moratoria that had
debt in the area of Venice and Si
confirmed by the catastrophic
affected the whole peninsula. Th
expression of the domination
however, a few more decades o
agricultural base made no furthe
incapable of responding to the de
the upper levels of the economy.
fast as industrial prices, surpas
Nowhere was the split felt as acu
the principal consequence of its f
the climate of the contraction of trade which characterized the
seventeenth century, there was a weakening of the economic
and commercial links which tied it to the towns in the north.
This weakening occurred by stages to be sure. First, the
northern towns learned to get along without the wheat that
came by sea, for it was too costly and too uncertain, and
consequently they developed their own wheat-growing zones.
Then they learned to do the same with silk, whose "triumphal
march" from the south to the north involved a massive
introduction of mulberry trees on the mezzadrie and the
fattorie of northern Italy. Even the fashion of buying fiefs in
the Kingdom of Naples tended to die out, and the Genoese in
the second half of the seventeenth century liquidated their
investments in the public bonds of Naples and Sicily which
they had acquired during the Thirty Years' War, and which
were no longer as profitable (Felloni, 1971). Everywhere the
horizon seemed to shrink. Each city tended to live within the
narrow limits of its own hinterland (contado), whence the new
primacy of landed property and of its surrogate, municipal
bonds. The precocious economic unification of Italy was
undone by this new tendency of splitting up into autonomous
zones. And when trade resumed in the eighteenth century, the
control of southern exports was no longer in the hands of
northern Italian merchants, but now instead in the hands of
other commercial powers, England, the United Provinces,
France, etc. New relations of dependence were substituted for
old ones and confirmed the breaking-up of the economic

of the peninsula. They increased even more the gaps
unified Italy would inherit without giving the north ba
lost dynamic. Beginning in 1600, the north was locke
long stability, almost an inertia, that lasted for two cen
Even in the eighteenth century it could not escape
external domination, which transformed it into an expo
semi-finished products. Paradoxically, but important
shift of textile production from the cities to the country
not lead to a reconquest of foreign markets but corresp
instead to a contraction in the markets.
Forgotten for a while by the former dominant economies,
the Mezzogiorno had to adapt itself to this new situation. If it
continued to bear the heavy weight of the feudal structures
erected and consolidated in the commercial boom of the
sixteenth century, these structures evolved slowly in the
direction of transforming the fiefholders into large land-
owners, of shifting from feudal rents to capitalist rents, at least
on the surface. The secular oscillations of external demand for
raw materials - two periods of rapid expansion, the sixteenth
and the eighteenth centuries, surrounding a century of stagna-
tion and contraction - provided the rhythms for the historical
functioning of an original model of a feudal system, different at
once from the Polish model of Witold Kula and from the classic
northwestern model recently formalized by Guy Bois.
For structures do not explain everything, not even the many
centuries of stability which lead us too easily to ignore
historical development. Whether superficial or profound, the
transformations that the structures underwent underline the
decisive role of the conjoncture, of the slow throbbing of the
local and international economies. Whether the latter de-
formed little by little the structures or provoked irreparable
ruptures or came up against the rigidity of these structures,
they illustrated their lasting and important limits, which were
difficult to overcome. We should try to analyze these limits at
two levels which are both different and complementary. The
one is that of the development of the sixteenth century and of
its failure, which revealed the incapacity of the most advanced
regions to maintain a process of continuous growth, whether
190 Maurice Aymar d
self-sustained or nourished from the outside. The other is that

of the operation throughout the longue durée of the modern
era of the feudal system in southern Italy, which was succes-
sively strengthened, rigidified, undermined, and transformed,
the better to survive within a complex relationship of internal
forces and of thrusts and stimulations that came from outside.
All in all the crucial developments occurred between 1450
and 1600. Even if the towns drew the greatest advantage from it
in the end, the initiative came from the countryside, as it did
everywhere in western Europe. Starting earlier and from a
higher baseline, Italy lived through this long period of
demographic and economic development and recuperation in
a particular way. Its indisputable progress took place within
frameworks that were fixed by the changes in structure it had
already undergone, much in advance of other countries,
between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. But the same
frameworks contributed to blocking further advancement
beyond a certain level that was quickly reached.
All the statistics which the last fifty years of historiography
have bequeathed us confirm the participation of Italy (and of
the Mediterranean world), which some had previously doubted,
in the international conjoncture of the sixteenth century.
Doubtless the demographic increase occurred in a spatially
unequal fashion, a function of the prior declines. But the
increases, which varied from 50-100%, were sufficiently great
so that the recovery had everywhere the same stimulating
effects. The expansion of demand for agricultural and manu-
factured products as well as for exotic goods brought about a
long price rise, favorable to all producers. The reconstitution
of labor reserves and a relative decline of real wages reversed
the situation on the labor market in favor of the "entrepre-
neurs" and permitted the more systematic exploitation of
largely underutilized productive capacity, especially in agri-
culture, without bringing in its train an automatic "Malthu-
sian" decline in productivity. The newly cultivated land areas
were not just the poorest peripheries of the land surface, whose
more regular cultivation leads necessarily to lower yield rates,
as it has been normal to presume ever since Abel. On the
contrary, very often the new lands were the most fertile lands.
This was the case for example in the coastal plains wh

land had been abandoned because of insecurity or m
the end of the Middle Ages, as well as in the large
growing areas of Apulia in western Sicily which ha
turned over to the sheep in the absence of sustained
demand. This was equally true for the lands of the P
plain, whose new cultivation required important inve
of capital for irrigation and drainage. Such investmen
made possible by merchant accumulation and made pr
by the forceful pressure of urban demand which le
expansion in arboriculture as well. In a parallel fash
resumption of trade and the progress of urban manufa
whether of traditional commodities like wool or new on
silk, further reinforced the division of labor between to
country and between north and south.
In this sense Italy, under the economic direction
northern metropolises, already combined the necessary
tions of continuous growth. It was characterized by the
progression of demand, prices, entrepreneurial prof
duction, and consumption. Italy had already underg
path of "intensive" development which permitted an
in or at least the stability of productivity levels. Its fa
explained above all by the very dynamism of a growth
accentuated the contradiction between the interests of t
and those of the whole range of rural producers.
The towns very quickly stopped favoring increased fr
and fluidity in the market; or rather they permit
freedom only when it served their interests. They had
their populations, whose size tended to grow faster than
the countryside. Furthermore, the rural surplus te
migrate to the towns, a migration the towns could
utilize nor stop, despite periodically repeated attempts
occasion of each famine. Whence the increase in the nu
the poor, and the necessity for all urban administra
reinforce their institutions that guaranteed the supply
There was no town that did not have its wheat bureau,
responsibilities, originally strictly limited to supp
continuously larger. The archives have kept record
minute surveillance that the towns established at the t
production, especially over cerea

regular fashion they inventoried t
and the harvests of the contad
estimates of how much needed to b
grains that they controlled directl
or through their purchases from t
rather efficaciously to block incre
of prices that occurred in times
usually) seem almost ridiculously
sees for the same period in northe
Netherlands (triple or quadruple)
The towns thus tended to stand
exploitation, and their intervent
cious to the degree that they were
ically and politically. Venice an
fundamentally different ways f
Annona constituted the most celeb
institutions. Even regions which
like Sicily, Apulia, or Maremma, di
tion of the authorities. Constrai
priority to local supply, and first o
city, the authorities forbade any
demand was met. It happened th
crises would hit the whole of the p
in 1590, or within a one-year in
crises provoked a total stoppage of
medium-distance trade. As soon
possible, the states sought to confi
the local price and the internatio
which urban consumers who were
afford to pay, by veritable royalti
the external demand became more insistent. Financial ar-
rangements concerning the export licences, receipts from
which already accounted for between one-third and one-half of
the Sicilian "budget" in the era of Philip II, became, if one
reads the advice given by persons like Scipio di Castro (1978),
one of the most difficult and risky tasks the already besieged
Viceroy had to undertake.
The cities not only controlled the market, they strengt

their control over the land, requiring decisions on produ
to be made in light of the needs of the city. This had two
overlapping effects: One was the shift of the landed arist
to residence in the towns wherever this was not already
This was particularly the case in the capitals of southern
The barons moved in order to be closer to the court,
central administration, and to the settlements of fo
merchants, who were always ready to rent their lands a
buy their wheat and silk. In the towns, they adopted m
ostentatious consumption based on sumptuary expens
the import of luxury goods. The second consequence w
transfer into the hands of the urban oligarchies of a
larger percentage of the land bought or usurped fr
Church, from the old indebted landed nobility, and from
peasants and rural communities. The widespread adop
the system of fideicommissum, which strictly limi
possibilities of alienating land, came just in time to cons
the urban quasi-monopoly over cultivable land. Even
they did not engage in direct oversight of the cultivatio
landowners nevertheless made decisions about what woul
grown and how. All the multiple forms of lease - lar
tenant-farming, sharecropping, short-term tenancy wit
payments in kind (a terragio), and even lifetime tena
migliorandum - left de facto or de jure final decision
hands of the lessors on crops and the areas to be cultiva
quantity and quality of the seed; production for the ma
for subsistence; the system of rotation and the choice o
how one should cultivate the soil and the trees; and the r
of farm work.
As proprietors of the arable land, and even more of the
grazing areas, the woods, the marshes, and the previously
abandoned arable land which at that time was being put back
into cultivation, the large landowners had a free hand to do
whatever they wished. They raised the rents considerably
wherever these were not fixed by custom. The terms of the lease
agreements became much less beneficial to the peasants. The
dynamic of land rent came to dominate clearly in the sixteenth
194 Maurice Aymar d
century, as in the eighteenth, w

tion of the profit level of the sm
the surest and most profitable in
ately attracting merchant capita
choice of the landowners. Where
to renounce the risks of product
tenant-farmers or to their pea
were tempted to do the same
themselves from large stockbr
massarie and grazing lands into s
management of the fief which
lending the latter the necessar
receiving in consequence the bene
Peasant indebtedness became the common lot of the Italian
countryside. Even if they were still subject to the uncertainties
of the harvest, only the owners of the mezzadrie could raise
their prices to make up for loss in production quantity, while
they serviced their peasants once again with loans.
The towns thus indexed their prosperity on land rent and
taxes and, whenever production resulted in insufficient reve-
nue, they asked for an increase in the rates in one form or
another, which enabled them to maintain their privileged
consumption levels. The general pressure on grain prices
accentuated this evolution. These prices increased twice as fast
between 1480 and 1680 as those of all other raw materials and
of the major manufactured products, and faster than wages,
which always lagged behind. The shift of industry that used
much manpower (such as the wool industry) to rural areas was
part of this new situation created by the reversal of the terms of
trade. The towns kept for themselves only the production of
luxury articles, primarily silk cloth.
Favorable to grain producers, or rather to those who
disposed of negotiable surpluses, this conjoncture did not
result in a decisive increase in the amount of seed sown, but on
the contrary in a limitation in its expansion. The regions most
affected were in the south where cereal monoculture reached its
limits in the 1560's. The burdens imposed by the agreements
and the amounts paid to the landed aristocracy led to the early
ruin of the massari long before all the potential arable l

put into cultivation. Between 1600 and 1830 Sicily was
double the land area for wheat cultivation. However the
viability of the large landholding, so modern in appearance,
seemed to be dubious, and the tenant-farmers, overwhelmed
with their payments and their taxes, could scarcely fill the gap;
sometimes they refused outright to cultivate the land. The
performance level of the mezzadria showed great stability.
Only the "capitalist" agriculture of the Po valley plain seemed
to be capable of quantitative and qualitative progress through
its investments, its improvements, and its innovations in the
choice of crops and the system of rotation. And in fact this kind
of progress seemed to have permitted the dense network of
populous cities to obtain more or less what they needed for
their subsistence. Little by little, Venice gave up importing
wheat by sea, except in particularly bad harvests, relying
almost exclusively on the Terraferma. The stagnation of urban
demand explains the absence of any further consequences for
development, once a level of production sufficient for immedi-
ate needs was achieved. Once these needs were met, the
northern cities could permit themselves to reduce drastically
their purchases of wheat from Sicily and Apulia, which they
needed less and less. Of course their sales of cloth in the
Kingdom of Naples tended to go down at the same time.
In the long run the specialization in arboriculture of
southern Italy created a similar menace for its welfare. The
unfavorable evolution of the terms of trade forced them to sell
more silk and oil to pay for the purchases of wheat that were
necessary to overcome the deficit of the producing regions,
northeastern Sicily, Calabria, and the area around Otranto.
But there too the limits were rapidly reached and further
exports ceased: in the case of silk, about 1660 when silkworm
breeding in northern Italy began to suffice to meet the needs of
its manufacturers; in the case of oil, somewhat later, following
the upswing of the eighteenth century with the rise of new
competitors.
The development of sixteenth-century Italy thus reached its
own limits. Beginning in 1600-20 there was a sharp and rapid
reversal of the economic situation

between complementary regio
division of labor was replaced by s
its moment of revenge. Towns d
ate surroundings for most of th
Venice and Naples, but it is also th
from Apulia by sea was partially
in land transport toward the
Tuscan, and Genoese merchant
activities and their investments in
to be a paying market for them. E
commerce completely, as can be
(Malanima, 1978), land played an e
their patrimony, and revenue com
a larger and larger role in the e
cities. The segmented structure
terized the Italian economy becam
the decline was not real; there
stagnation. Each town defended
intensive, more systematic exploi
oppressive rents, and by a sharp
peasantry by the landowners w
exactions were based on written t
social system which remained w
work of feudalism. One may speak
tion. But there were also new exactions which had no
justification other than the absolute dependence of the de-
fenseless peasants on the authority of the landowners, exac-
tions all the more surprising in that the rights to them were
claimed by Venetian patricians and Milanese or Florentine
bankers. Under the whiplash of industrialization, the most
important changes in this process of transition consolidated
the positions of a capitalism of merchant origin which created a
new agrarian base for itself outside the towns which were the
traditional base and signs of its power. Should one therefore
speak of a transition at all at that point, or of one that had no
content (Aymard & Revel, 1978)?
XII. A Counter-Example:
Feudalism in the Mezzogiorno
Further verification of the analyses can be found by

at feudalism in southern Italy. As we have noted, the la
quite original, and different from the Polish case descr
Kula which was based on the antinomy between the sei
reserve and peasant landholdings and on the use of
manpower. It is also quite different from the model wh
Bois has developed for the case of Normandy, which he
is representative of northwestern Europe, that is to
regions which are, in his view, "central" to feudalism
Norman case, the principle characteristics included the
total disappearance of the seigniorial reserve, the div
cultivable land between tenant-farmers (laboureurs
controlled the land units and owned their plows and th
to pull them. This system was based on continual c
rhythms of the feudal economy with alternating patter
on the inverse correlation of the level of seigniorial ren
rate of productivity.
The geographical situation and the place which it o
in the system of international exchange as well as
developments lead us to place southern Italy closer
Polish example than to that of Normandy. In Italy one
least eight of the ten structural elements which K
described for the Polish model: (1) the dominance of
ture in the economy; (2) limited transactions in land, w
not an "ordinary commodity"; (3) the dividing-u
productive forces between the village in which ma
resides and the seigniorial reserve, the fiefs, and forti
(6) the structuring of artisanal activities within limits
by the guild system and the seigniory; (7) the wea
inefficacy of juridical and political procedures in limit
powers of the landlords in economic matters; (8) the te
of fiefholders to overconsume luxury products and ser
the historic insertion of the feudal zone into the
space of one of the more developed regions of Europ
198 Maurice Aymar d
time, which bought from it raw

tured goods; and (10) the weaknes
intervene in the economic aren
any mercantilist initiatives.
But on two essential points th
different. Unlike Kula's fourth
obstacles to social and geographica
and of manpower had virtually di
fifth point, the payments require
owners - rents, quit-rents, banali
- had come to be paid normally in
oil, cheese) rather than in the for
utilization of a waged labor force
higher level of productivity in ter
in Sicily, it placed in the hands o
of the wheat production that w
against 5-10% in Poland). Further
that was for the market went not
(from 10-15% of the total produc
but also to a particularly well-d
Palermo, Messina, and Catania t
total production) and to a rural m
was growing whenever there was
unification of the external mar
developed for the times.
This superiority was based, not
two types of complementary pro
by the seignior with a sevile labo
units for the peasantry), but on t
between several competitive form
two extremes: One was the larg
braccianti, who were wage-worke
system of short-term rentals g
who paid a rent proportional not
area under cultivation. The re
equivalent to the seed sown, or to
fixed by custom, but the rates w
five or six times the seed for s
wherever the landlords had free
wished. Whenever the landlord
production, seigniorial rent, composed of the rents pai

small peasant landholder and by the amounts paid by t
tenant-farmers on the massarie and the feudi in mone
kind, did not depend upon the harvest yield. In the
bad harvest they might even reach record heights, s
seignior could obtain all the profit that came out of th
prices without having to bear the cost of maintaining
throughout the year. The peasants were indeed encou
engage in temporary migrations which could brin
plementary wages. The only limit placed on this irr
bility of the fiefholder was the threat of a definitive d
of his vassals, which would then turn the ratio of land
to his disadvantage and would provoke a shortf
consumption excise taxes.
As such, the system was to be transformed from the
being both shaken up and deformed by two major
thrusts derived from its capacities to export. The
internal population- 50-100% in the sixteenth cent
50% again in the eighteenth century- corresponded in
an increase in external demand for agricultural raw m
This created a particularly strong tension in the grain
but stimulated as well various forms of speculation in
culture which seemed to be less extensive, even if the
that were exported (silk, oil, etc.) were always exported
raw state, and were frequently described as being of m
quality by foreign observers who blamed this in the e
century on the primitive character of the equipment u
The various elements of feudal rent were differ
affected by these two successive periods of price in
Revenues from judicial fees or from the sale or farmin
offices, insofar as their base was fixed, expanded in pr
to the expansion of the population. They did not rise at
rate unless the fiefholder had sufficient power to i
increase in the rates or to obtain an expansion
administrative and judicial authority. This was some
case, as we know, although we can't calculate the m
significance of this in any serious fashion. Where
revenues were specified in money (10 grani for a quar
wine or a mondello of wheat), which was usually t
consumption excise income also followed the po
200 Maurice Aymard
curve; it followed the general

calculated ad valorem ( 1 tari
rent on long-term leases remain
in money terms, but were inde
whenever payment was requir
frequent. All these traditional e
increased at most in accordan
more frequently in accordan
population; quite frequently th
in monetary terms. We find he
impoverishment of the feudal a
inflation which have been well known ever since Marc Bloch.
On the other hand, land rent in the exact modern sense of
this term rose faster than the rise in agricultural product prices,
and very much faster in most cases. They rose all the faster
insofar as land rents could be freely fixed rather than being
constrained by custom. They rose twice as fast as wheat prices
in Sicily in the sixteenth century if one looks at the large tenant-
farmer leases on the big estates which were paid in money.
There, freely-fixed rentals on the small units allotted to peasant
farmers went up often four times as fast per unit of land (the
unit of land called salma, being measured ever more narrowly
in reality). The big winners of the first major secular price
rise of the modern era turned out to be the owners of those
large landed estates which had been abandoned in the course
of the two preceding centuries and were now being put
back into cultivation. On these lands, which only shortly
before had no one working them, revenues increased in a spec-
tacular manner, whereas in the zones of refuge, and in particu-
lar in the mountainous areas where peasants had remained
on the land and had obtained the long-term leases on larger
units necessary for the development of arboriculture, the gains
were much more limited, when indeed revenue did not lag.
There were thus two kinds of transformation of the revenues
that the fiefholder received: There was first an increase in land
rent in the modern sense of the term in relation to that from all
other modes of seigniorial revenue. And secondly, among the
land units the most rapid increase was on those lands given
over to wheat production in the latifundium regions where
peasants had not previously been able to affect to any
significant degree the quasi-monopoly of the fiefholder

the cultivable land. This transformation led to a signifi
redistribution of the hierarchy of the old families of the fe
aristocracy, the rise of some of them compensating (and ev
overcompensating) the ruin or decline of others. Bu
permitted as well social mobility for the cleverest and riche
the gabelloti, who confiscated a part of the profits deri
from the management of the latifundium and accumulated
necessary capital to insert themselves into the upper ranks
the feudal hierarchy.
The downturn of the economy that began in the years 16
50, which involved a fall both in prices and in land re
temporarily stopped this process of internal restructur
Those fiefholders who were deepest in debt found themsel
in difficulty, especially those who had mortgaged their pa
monies very heavily to pay for loans contracted on behalf o
dowries of their daughters who were excluded from in
tance, or to sustain the costs of a sumptuous style of life.
euphoria of the previous century had scarcely encoura
prudence in this regard. In most cases the seigniors sought
make up for this reduction in revenue, and to reinforce th
judicial and administrative revenues. They also tended to sh
to offering their lands on long-term leases whenever the re
value went down. On the whole, however, this wav
concessions did not fundamentally undo the very une
distribution of land ownership. There was one exception. T
was in those regions of the Kingdom of Naples that had
most affected by the plague of 1656. In these areas there w
agricultural reconstruction between 1680 and 1730 wh
involved a complete transformation of the structur
property and of land cultivation, including the widesp
dividing-up of feudal lands. This crisis of a system which
been previously based on a system of tenant-farming suff
to renew the process of growth, which subsequently was b
on moderate comfort for a middle peasantry that diversifie
production by planting vineyards and fruit trees (Del
1973). But such social reversals were rare. By and larg
entity of the fief remained intact, and the initial cond
remained unchanged as of the 1720's.
202 Maurice Aymard
Although the price rise of the eig
extensive as the previous one, it
precipitated the same kinds of tra
underway before 1600. The incr
increase in land rent, all the m
demand once again reached its
tionary situation created a relati
tance of judicial revenues, revenue
and from quit-rents vis-à-vis othe
Land rent proper, which had mult
century, tripled or quadrupled a
Everywhere, in Sicily as in the Ki
1972), the share of revenue com
farming of the fiefs, from the m
from small-scale leases in fixed
increased considerably, reachin
whole, whereas the share comin
fell below 10%. The gabelloti who
second half of the seventeenth cen
of lands, avoiding the auctions and
the seigniors in the middle of the
on the scene after 1730 as thou
methods, the same behavior, th
To the extent that they remained
of the soil and the subsoil, th
fiefholders could thus command t
early modern era a formidable ren
mere possession. They did not ne
found themselves transformed int
ruined by the relative decline of t
not come from land rental. It is th
they were deprived by the meas
during the Napoleonic era. Cont
that these measures did not in a
power of the large landowners, an
some beneficial effects in the ver
market those lands formerly held
and by the modification of rules o
property, a modification that took
effect. This did not prevent some
the ancient fief which had now become private property

serve as the base for an agricultural prosperity à l'an
based on enlightened management of a large landhold
the landowners and their large tenant-farmers (Aymard
72; 1975). This was nonetheless an illusory dream. M
transforming the juridical status of the land was far
sufficient to change the structural frameworks that had
elaborated and reinforced during the whole medieval and
modern period. The "French path" which involved th
presence on the land of peasant farmers, a path from
they had been historically excluded for more than 50
seemed quite reasonably to others a more likely possibil
it was already settled that the transformation of Italy i
industrialized country would take still other paths.
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From Feudalism to Capitalism in Italy: The Case That Doesn't Fit

Anyone who carefully analyzes rural Italy between the

© 1982 Research Foundation of S UN Y

of also-rans or of late starters, bu

I. Crisis in the Relations of Dependence

All the evidence points to the very early weakening of

of all forms: the tie of serfdom, whose last traces disap

compact farm units which t

The rural countryside was thus reconstituted in t

the creation of an institution l

II. The Weakening of Communal Practices

This defeat, or at the very least this relative decline, of small

be virtually totally free of collective constraints, whic

boni virî) and the farming of

III. Changes in the Landholding System

The expropriation of the peasantry and the increased con-

large landowners (noble, ecclesiastical, or urban) bot

large landlords "on their estate", w

products, of animals, of leather) and for the variation in

on the large-scale tenant-farmin

to be more speculative or usurious than directly pro

contracts provided for advance p

IV. The Market and the

This development of a rural wage-labor force was itself

ance, which placed sixteenth-century Italy in advance

their attached contados corres

2. On this transformation, linked to a veritable destruction of the economy of

the last decades of the fifteenth century, sufficed to sh

V. Money and its Various Arenas of Use

The role of money confirmed this domination of the market

authorities came from the excises

Thirdly, there was the arena of the social relat

the seed or what he needed to f

VI. Changes in Technology and Production

The transformations of which we have been speaking dealt

between the "formal" and "real subsumption" of la

expense of all the lesser wheat

patrimony of trees, vegetables, and flowers accumulated

mous enterprises which emplo

work was done according to the prescriptions the land

VII. The Achievements and Limits of

Classical analysts of the English agricultural revolution

the population of the towns spec

this led to a rise of the net product and the provisionin

4. Translator's note: Avances foncières and avances primitives are conce

objectives. Sharecropping took o

(Lutazzi-Gregori, 1976). As a general rule, nonethele

ship of goods, for which the olde

inspired, from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centur

na), and their political power

rigid system where any prolonged increase in the am

VIII. The Vicissitudes of Commercial and

Thus far we have concentrated on agriculture and the rural

quadilateral of Milan, Venice, Flor

tens of thousands of pieces of cloth and thousands of arq

was not always the victim, but

medieval inventions. Italy served as the schoolm

provisioning, even at higher costs

ducats. Everything, furthermore, points to the fact tha

(Mendels, 1972). The supremacy acq

A multitude of small and medium enterprises coe

possibilities. In the sectors re