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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2010
THE ADVANCE OF INDUSTRIALIZATION
Italy was the first country in southern Europe to have reached a stable stage of industrialization, a remarkable outcome given the false leaps and the failures of other Mediterranean nations. Italy started to go further than what a historian defined as “a first coat of industrial paint” in the 1880s. In that decade, in addition to the traditional industries such as food and textiles, others such as metallurgy and chemical and mechanical productions become “visible.” Alexander Gerschenkron has calculated that by 1887, starting from a base of 100 in 1881, the production of the textile sector is equal to 136, food equal to 106, metallurgy is 414, mechanics equals 185, and chemicals have reached 267.
But for Italy we can really only talk of an “industrial revolution” when we reach the period that goes from 1896 through 1914, with the period from 1896 until 1908 having particular relevance. Again, Alexander Gerschenkron calculates for those years an annual rate of increase in industrial production of 6.7 percent but another reliable economic historian, Stefano Fenoaltea, writes of a 7.6 percent increase for those same years.
This phase is characterized by the following elements:
A change in the industrial structure so that heavy sectors (metallurgy, mechanics, mining) – which counted for 19.8 percent of the value of industrial production in 1895 – have reached 30.6 percent by 1914
A change in the structure of foreign trade with an increase of imports of raw materials while exports of finished products grow
An original solution to the problem of energy sources, given the lack of coal – the application of so-called white coal, hydroelectric energy […]
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