Aristocrats in Bourgeois Italy
Aristocrats in Bourgeois Italy
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This book provides a full account of the Italian nobility in the post-unification era. It challenges interpretations which have stressed the rapid fusion of old and new elites in Italy and the marginality of the nobility after 1861, and instead highlights the continuing economic strength, social power and political influence of Italy's most prominent regional aristocracy. In Piedmont, the nobles were able to develop more indirect forms of influence to satisfy their hunger for leadership based on something older than constitutions or electoral politics. They remained a largely separate group within local society, distinguished by their attachment to the values of lineage, military service, landownership, and social exclusivity. This aristocratic exclusivity and influence survived the agricultural depression of the nineteenth century, before succumbing finally to the devastating effects of World War I.
- A full account of the Italian nobility in the period after national unification
- Challenges revisionist scholarship by emphasising the enduring social, economic and political power of the aristocracy
- Uses previously neglected records which provide a rich source of information on Italian elites
Reviews & endorsements
"An important contribution to Italian history and useful generally to historians of modern Europe. Upper-division undergraduates and above." Choice
"...Cardoza has produced a splendid account of an important component of Italian life. This book is recommended for college and university libraries, especially where graduate courses are offered." Andrew Rolle, History
"...a fine piece of scholarship." Rudolph M. Bell, American Historical Review
"...a valuable contribution to modern Italian historiography....another piece of the puzzle that is the unification and formation of the Italian nation....willprove useful to scholars who study either the history of railways or the European nobility." Charles L. Bertrand, Canadian Journal of History
"Anthony L. Cardoza of Loyola University of Chicago is the winner of the American Historical Association's Helen and Howard F. Marrano Prize. The book has been praised as a major contribution to our understanding of both the Italian and wider European nobility." The Historian
Product details
March 2011Adobe eBook Reader
9780511824296
0 pages
0kg
33 tables
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1. The making of the Piedmontese nobility, 1600–1848
- 2. The long goodbye: aristocrats in politics and public life, 1848–1914
- 3. Old money: the scale and structure of aristocratic wealth
- 4. Perpetuating an aristocratic social elite
- 5. The limits of fusion: aristocratic-bourgeois relations in nineteenth-century Piedmont
- 6. Retreat and adaptation in the twentieth century
- Bibliography
- Index.
