Features and problems in the construction of the postunitary Italian banking system

Resumen

The study of the evolution of Italian economy experienced, in recent years, new interpretive hypotheses, themselves based on the use of more updated series of historical data, The latter have brought scholars to reconsider, especially taking long-term viewpoints into account, the path Italy followed in joining the global economic system. Therefore, both Italian and international historiography have striven to highlight the most favorable elements, as well as the limits and the contradictions accompanying the nevertheless robust growth Italy experienced during the last 150 years. All this began for Italy as it joined, during the later 1800s, the productive mechanisms of the Second Industrial Revolution, fully maturing during the Golden Age. To fully understand such a path it is necessary to integrate, following a comparative, systemic and interdisciplinary approach, the behavioral analysis of some specific industrial sectors with the so-called system prerequisites to development including, and in an important position at that, the construction of the financial market and the shaping of the banking system. Within such a context, studying the period between the Unification of Italy and the “end of the century crisis” appears particularly important, as it is during this phase that some of the lines through which the model Italy used to join the process of the Second Industrial Revolution were shaped. Such a situation will challenge the future reforms, themselves a prelude to the takeoff Italy experienced during the Giolitti era.

This contribution intends to highlight some features of the buildup of the Italian banking system within the framework of Italian nation building, between 1861 and 1893. In order to do that, besides offering an analysis of the political, economic and financial situation of the time, it examines the path, the uses and the crossings of capital which, starting with the financial movements recorded between the end of the 1860s and the beginning of the 1870s between the Centre-North of Italy, Germany and Austria and then pouring into the activities of the Banca Tiberina, based in Rome and one of the main protagonists of the growing phenomenon joining banks and companies during that time. Therefore, this work of mine does not only focus on the descending parable the Banca Tiberina experienced (something well known in economic historiography, especially when examining the end of the century crisis) but rather more on the whole three previous decades, from the beginning to the expansion phase.

Therefore, a composite framework emerges, striving to keep the features of the political, social and economic features of Italy with those events being only apparently local and between these and the evolution of the banking system after the Italian Unification.