Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The pre-capitalist subsistence agriculture of traditional peasant societies was largely eliminated in Italy within the first decades of the nineteenth century. At Italian unification, small property in land and sharecropping ( mezzadria ) were to be found in Piedmont, Lombardy-Veneto, the Papal States, and Tuscany; the latifundia of Latium, Naples, and Sicily employed landless agricultural workers ( braccianti ). Closer in some ways to urban proletarians than to traditional peasants with their family-based subsistence economy, the braccianti gradually became modern Italy's typical agricultural workers, and the driving force behind much rural unrest. By the turn of the century the agricultural strike had largely replaced tax boycotts and food riots as the dominant form of collective action in rural areas. The years 1845–7 brought poor harvests and high bread prices. As food riots erupted in most cities, peasant bands outside Milan attacked grain convoys. Land was occupied throughout Italy, as would be done repeatedly during the next two decades (notably in Calabria between 1850 and 1853). The occupiers typically demanded the redistribution of lands formerly held in common. Other practices observed in rural areas during the 1848 revolutions included the destruction of tax and land records and the burning of private woods. Sicily was the heartland of rural unrest during the 1850s; ... log in or subscribe to read full text