Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy

• Published in: Journal of Southern History Vol. 85; no. 4; pp. 916 - 917
• Main Author: Harris, J. William
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Houston Southern Historical Association 01.11.2019
• Subjects: 19th century; American Civil War; Hahn, David; Insurgency; Landowners; Peasants; Rebellions; War; White people; New York; Italy; Mississippi Valley; Baton Rouge Louisiana; United States > US; Tennessee
• ISSN: 0022-4642; 2325-6893
• DOI: 10.1353/soh.2019.0286

Enrico Dal Lago is the author of a number of comparative studies focused on Italy and the United States, including Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815-1861 (Baton Rouge, 2005). Only a concerted effort by the Italian army and National Guard, which operated under draconian emergency laws, was able to suppress this "'inner civil war'" at the cost of more than five thousand lives (p. 4). In broad terms, Dal Lago argues that this comparison of "parallel processes" in a "contrast of contexts" (the latter phrase he takes from an essay by Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers) shows that both "'inner civil wars'" should be understood as products of two overarching developments: on the one hand, the formation of new nation-states, some by consolidation and others by separation from larger states; and on the other hand, conflicts between agrarian masses-slaves, serfs, and free peasants-and the agricultural elites who profited from their labor during the nineteenth-century expansion of international commodity markets (p. 9). [...]as illuminating as Dal Lago's comparison of pro-Bourbon legitimists to East Tennessee's anti-Confederates might be, a comparison instead of the Italian legitimist insurrection to what Mark Grimsley has termed the insurgency of southern whites against Republican Party rule during Reconstruction might be more apt ("Wars for the American South: The First and Second Reconstructions Considered as Insurgencies," Civil War History, 58 [March 2012], pp. 6-36).