The American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno: Essays in Comparative History.

Edited by Enrico Dal Lago and Rick Halpern. (New York: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. [x], 256. $65.00, ISBN 0-333-73971-X.)

The original impetus for this collection was the 1999 Commonwealth Fund Conference in American History, organized by Enrico Dal Lago and Rick Halpern and held at University College London. Building upon the notion of the American South as "simply one of many regions of the world" that followed "a path to modernization dramatically different from northern American and European standards" (p. 3), Dal Lago and Halpern embark on an interdisciplinary project that compares the South with the Italian Mezzogiorno, one of those "many regions" whose similarities to its American counterpart in its process of modernization stood side by side with striking social and cultural differences. Yet such differences--most importantly, the presence of chattel slavery in the American South--proved no obstacle to the rich, fruitful dialogue of which this book is testimony. While the conference historians, who stand at the forefront of revisionist developments in the historiography of these regions, do not (except in two cases) present explicitly comparative analyses, they nonetheless engage in a conversation across an arc of related topics that makes for an enormously suggestive exchange.

As a tour de force of this conversation, Peter Kolchin's important essay on the actual and possible comparative investigations of the American South and the penetrating response by Piero Bevilacqua set the tone for the entire collection. Drawing upon both his encyclopedic knowledge of the American historiography and his perceptive reading of the contributions on the Mezzogiorno available in English, Kolchin shows the potential inherent in the comparison---even though it is still largely conducted, as is the case with this collection, by juxtaposing individual studies from the two areas and not by making one study of a problem in the two regions. If Kolchin appreciates the valuable contributions provided by the new historiography on both sides of the Atlantic in dismantling mythical accounts of the two regions' "backwardness" (p. 45), he also cautions scholars not to lose track of the complexity of the challenge, which entails "not just two but three comparisons ... one between the two souths, a second between Italy and the USA, and a third between Italian and American historiographies" (p. 47).

Such awareness informs the book's nine remaining chapters in various ways. The majority of them address three crucial topics: the ideologies of the landed elites, the condition of rural laborers, and gendered strategies of resistance to oppression. On landed elites, Richard Follett's article on antebellum Louisiana planters and Marta Petrusewicz's on nineteenth-century Italian latifondisti point to the coexistence of both premodern and modern characteristics in the behavior of both ruling classes. Shifting the lens onto rural laborers' struggles to assert their rights, respectively, in the Reconstruction-era American South and post-unification Mezzogiorno, articles by Steven Hahn and Lucy Riall, though stressing the notable differences between the two cases, suggest ample ground for comparison between black workers and Italian cafoni (rural laborers). Similar to the role played by family and kinship structures in the struggle for local power, the two situations diverge with regard to the strikingly different functions played by the centralized state, which was crucial to the maintenance of Italian latifondisti power, whereas in the United States, at least until 1876, planters had to deal with a federal government somewhat supportive of the ex-slaves' cause. No less valuable is J. William Harris's article on patriarchy and racism in the antebellum American South, which dovetails nicely with Giovanna Fiume's detailed analysis of female honor, transgression, and patrimony in southern Italian historiography.

Taking up Kolchin's call to insert the two regions into their broader national historical contexts, Enrico Dal Lago and Donna Gabaccia offer the only two explicitly comparative contributions of the collection. Dal Lago's study of the self-construction of radical northern politicians, Italian liberals, and American abolitionists as "liberators" provides a fresh perspective on the roots of peasant exploitation in both settings in the aftermath of the American Civil War and Italian Risorgimento (p. 200). Gabaccia's "convergent comparison" of Italian and African American migrants in turn-of-the-century's North American cities casts light on the intertwined processes of racialization and ethnicization (p. 216). Both articles show the value of further comparative study. They also confirm the soundness of Bruce Levine's insightful concluding remarks (as summarized in the editors' introduction) on how such inquiry, like this collection as a whole, "has the advantage of shedding new light on previously understudied issues, but it also has the potential of raising a host of new questions" (p. 21).

FERDINANDO FASCE 

University of Bologna at Forli'