Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy by Enrico Dal Lago

Abstract

Reviewed by: Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy by Enrico Dal Lago J. William Harris Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy. By Enrico Dal Lago. Cambridge Studies on the American South. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 465. $59.99, ISBN 978-1-107-03842-4.) Enrico Dal Lago is the author of a number of comparative studies focused on Italy and the United States, including Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815–1861 (Baton Rouge, 2005). Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy is in some ways a sequel to that earlier study, but with a focus on peasants, small farmers, and enslaved people rather than on ruling elites. It is an original and significant contribution to the ongoing globalization of American historical scholarship. In the mid-nineteenth century, southern Italy (the Mezzogiorno) was ruled from Naples by the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a Bourbon dynasty. In 1861, that kingdom was conquered and incorporated into the newly consolidated Kingdom of Italy; Francis II, the Bourbon ruler in Naples, went into exile in Rome. More than four years of conflict known as the Great Brigandage ensued in the Mezzogiorno. For two years, resistance to the new regime focused on the restoration of Francis II as the legitimate ruler; afterward, guerrilla bands of poor peasants invaded and destroyed the properties of big landowners, many of whom had prospered by seizing common lands. Only a concerted effort by the Italian army and National Guard, which operated under draconian emergency laws, was able to suppress this “‘inner civil war’” at the cost of more than five thousand lives (p. 4). Dal Lago offers an analytical comparison of the Great Brigandage with simultaneous conflicts in the Confederate States of America. His “central question,” he writes, is “[h]ow did nineteenth-century newly formed nations cope with internal dissent, and how crucial was the role played by the latter in threatening the survival of those new nations?” (p. 7). In Part 1, he compares the pro-Bourbon legitimist movement of 1860–1863 in northern Terra di Lavoro with resistance to the Confederate government by southern whites in East Tennessee. In Part 2, he moves to a comparison of “The Revolts of the Lower Strata” from 1862 to 1865: slaves’ resistance to the Confederacy (and, later, to Union army attempts to keep them working on plantations), with a focus on the Lower Mississippi Valley, and peasant guerrilla war against Italian landowners, especially in Upper Basilicata (p. 227). [End Page 916] In broad terms, Dal Lago argues that this comparison of “parallel processes” in a “contrast of contexts” (the latter phrase he takes from an essay by Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers) shows that both “‘inner civil wars’” should be understood as products of two overarching developments: on the one hand, the formation of new nation-states, some by consolidation and others by separation from larger states; and on the other hand, conflicts between agrarian masses—slaves, serfs, and free peasants—and the agricultural elites who profited from their labor during the nineteenth-century expansion of international commodity markets (p. 9). Dal Lago’s study is based on a mastery of two different national historiographies as well as a deep familiarity with the methodologies of comparative history. It is also informed by his research in primary sources, both published and archival, in both countries. In a short review, it is impossible to do more than suggest some of the implications of his interpretations. His theme of “agrarian unrest” offers, from an innovative angle, support for scholars such as Steven Hahn, David Williams, and Stephanie McCurry, who have emphasized internal social conflict as an explanation for the end of slavery and the fall of the Confederacy (p. 19). At the same time, this approach largely ignores the questions that arise when we focus on the relationship, not of agrarian masses to agrarian elites, but of individuals to the state. For example, in the Confederacy, unlike in the Mezzogiorno, there was remarkably little overt violence by slaves against slaveholders and their families. Instead, former slaves killed white Confederates while serving...