The Two Sicilies were already in a pretty good advanced early stage of industrialization before 1860 in all sectors, then the conquest destroyed everythingThe Two Sicilies, spared conquest, might have the potential to industrialize. Would their government take advantage of it? The Bourbons seem to have been reactionary.
How? I don't know much about Garibaldi's expedition, but I was under the impression it was relatively bloodless?The Two Sicilies were already in a pretty good advanced early stage of industrialization before 1860 in all sectors, then the conquest destroyed everything
At the time of unification a moderate upward trend was already detectible. Between 1861 and 1896 manufacturing value added grew on average by about 2.0 per cent per annum. Employment in the sector remained roughly constant, however, while the economy as a whole created 1.5 million new jobs. In 1896–1913 the growth rate of manufacturing accelerated to 3.6 per cent per annum. The sector’s workforce increased by about 1 million (growing by 1.5 per cent per annum as against 1.0 per cent for the economy as whole). Between unification and the First World War, output per full-time equivalent worker in manufacturing increased every year by 2.0 per cent (Broadberry, Giordano, and Zollino, 2013): a respectable rate by nineteenth-century international standards.
The pattern of Italy’s industrialization prior to 1914, characterized by slow growth up to the 1880s and growth acceleration thereafter, was the subject of a heated debate sparked in the late 1950s by Alexander Gerschenkron’s (1962) attempt to fit the Italian case into his paradigm of European industrialization in conditions of moderate backwardness, in which ‘agents’, such as universal banks (created in Italy in the mid-1890s), are ‘needed’ to overcome the ‘stumbling blocks’ that obstruct the path to modern industrial growth. Rosario Romeo (1959) argued instead that the sluggish growth in the first decades after unification was due to the ‘need’ for social overhead capital to be created before rapid industrialization could take place. The two scholars had a lively debate in Rome, later published by Gerschenkron (1962): Romeo spotted an industrial acceleration in the 1880s, (p.119) upon completion of the main rail network, while Gerschenkron dated Italy’s ‘big spurt’ a decade later, coinciding with the appearance of German-type universal banks. Bonelli (1978) and Cafagna (1972), on the other hand, saw Italy’s early industrialization as characterized by slow trend acceleration in industrial output, beginning before unification, rather than discontinuity at the end of the century.
In the Italy of 1861, some economic disparity probably existed in per capita GDP, but it was modest indeed. However, other indicators, show a much more pronounced disparity, in terms of the diffusion of education among the lower classes and moreover in terms of infrastructures and banks, all factors that constituted crucial prerequisites for industrialization (Felice 2007a, b). According to recent estimates of per capita GDP in 1891, the difference between the north and south was 7 per cent (Daniele and Malanima 2007).
A true north–south divide occurred at the end of the nineteenth century, i.e. when politicians and intellectuals started to discuss the causes of the backwardness of the Mezzogiorno (the so-called debate on the Questione Meridionale started in the 1880s as the backward Mezzogiorno was then becoming a central feature of the Italian economy and society).
Lolno. The Two Sicilies were the closest parallel to Russia in the area: a well-developed city, surrounded by a nation that hadn't even come out of feudalism yet. It's not like it couldn't industrialize - nothing stopped them - but the Bourbons weren't just reactionary themselves, but reigned over an incredibly reactionary order, which they could hardly shake even if they were to so desire.The Two Sicilies were already in a pretty good advanced early stage of industrialization before 1860 in all sectors, then the conquest destroyed everything
Well maybe the Garibaldi’s expedition was because they had taken the right moment for it as Two Sicilies were vulnerable after Ferdinand II’s death as Francis II was young, inexpert and bad counseled plus Garibaldi corrupted many officers who consigned themselves had their troops to him without fight...How? I don't know much about Garibaldi's expedition, but I was under the impression it was relatively bloodless?
No. Ferdinand II rightly feared the social costs (specially its effect on the pools) of a forced accelerated total industrialization so they had taken a slower way but industries of all sectors were already existing in the Kingdom and were productive (only still in the stages in which they needed state support for being profitable as always happened at the beginning).Would the Bourbons have been inclined towards the sort of rapid cultural and political change that would both cause and be a consequence of industrialization?
I do agree that the abolishment of the Two Sicilies as a state, as an administrative region even, did remove any possibility of effective local reform, top down or otherwisr. Was this local reform ever going to be adopted by the Sicilian Bourbons? My understanding is that they were so vulnerable precisely because they were not willing to be effective reformers. A TL without a destructive contest might still see the South decline.
Lolno. The Two Sicilies were the closest parallel to Russia in the area: a well-developed city, surrounded by a nation that hadn't even come out of feudalism yet. It's not like it couldn't industrialize - nothing stopped them - but the Bourbons weren't just reactionary themselves, but reigned over an incredibly reactionary order, which they could hardly shake even if they were to so desire.
The Savoia then followed and did a right mess of the area, exacerbating a lot of the issues that existed already; but exist already they did. Nothing is more significant to this than the Napoli-Portici railway line, the first trait of railway rolled out in the whole of Italy: it remained as an absolute curiosity from 1939 to the annexation of the Two Sicilies in 1860, mostly because the Bourbon kings refused to concede the permissions to lay down stock, which means that the first railway system in Italy was barely 100km or so when it was integrated into the general system of Italian railways.
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Railways in function as of 1861.
Now, saving the South is the best way to save the Risorgimento from being the absolute charade it was OTL, and saving Risorgimento means saving Italy. The Savoyard kingdom needs not to treat the former Two Sicilies as a colony, stripping it of many productive enterprises to favor Northern competition (rice production comes to mind), and at the same time, it needs to not accommodate the quasi-feudal system in place, even if it means stepping on a lot of toes. Cavour not dying at merely 51 seems to be a pretty solid bet to that end, as he did try to see the need for a strategy on the longer period and to find some way to forge a sense of national unity (that OTL would be basically absent until WW1, and even today is sparse at best). Keep him alive another ten or twenty years (entirely reasonable, I'd say), and the whole thing is likely to be less of a colonialistic mess and more of a genuine unification.