A brief, up-to-date account of Italy's transformation from an agrarian state to an industrial powerhouse.

This text offers coverage of the AS/A-Level course and includes sample exam questions and advice on what makes a good answer. It also features help for students on how to interpret the material and plan essays.

The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy Since Unification provides, for the first time, a comprehensive, quantitative "new economic history" of Italy.

Post-unification Italy was part of a wider world within which men and money circulated freely; it developed to the extent that those mobile resources chose to locate on its soil. The economy's cyclical movements reflected conditions in international financial markets, and were little affected by domestic policies. State intervention restricted the internal and international mobility of goods, and limited Italy's development: it kept the economy weak, reduced Italy's weight in the comity of nations, and paved the way for the frustrations and adventurism that would plunge the twentieth century into world war.

After a quarter century of almost general condemnation and rebuttal of the entire nationalization experience, it appears that there are second thoughts about governmental direct intervention in the economy. Reappraising State-Owned Enterprise deals with a topic often undervalued in the past decade but which now, with the crisis of 2008-2009, calls for greater attention: the direct intervention of the State as Entrepreneur. The collection of essays in this volume – prepared by some of the leading authorities in the field – offers a contribution to this debate by providing a balanced assessment of two of the most relevant experiences of mixed economies, the United Kingdom and Italy. In this respect, a comparison between these two countries is very much appropriate since in both nations the State played an important role as "Entrepreneur" starting in the early 20th century. In Great Britain and Italy, the heyday of the "State as Entrepreneur" was in the years right after WWII when it was used as a tool for promoting a modern society in which citizens acquired a stronger sense of belonging to their nations. The UK and Italy saw the State take on a too-pervasive role in the 70s; the two nations responded in different ways. In the 1980s Great Britain embarked on a harsh process of privatizations while Italians struggled on until finally submitting to privatizations in their nation in the following decade. The deep crisis of the final years of the 21st century forced both nations to reconsider State interventions as an appropriate tool in order to protect the wellbeing of the national economy.

This book adopts a revisionist perspective on the European economy, addressing the lack of coherent study of the agricultural sector and reassessing old theories about the links between agricultural and economic development.

This is the first book to explore the causes of the decline of British manufacturing in the 20th century by focusing on the troubled relationship between banks and small firms in a comparative historical perspective. Since the mid-1970s, the 'rediscovery' of small firms and of the important role they have played in the economies of continental Europe have occupied a substantial part of the literature on the sources of economic competitiveness. In Britain, the relationship between banks and industry has been the object of intense speculation since before the First World War. Since then banks have been accused by the business community, academics and politicians of neglecting industrial finance and by doing so of reducing the competitiveness of British firms. By comparing the rise of small firms in France, Germany and Italy and their decline in Britain this book analyses how the structure of these countries' banking systems has affected small firms' growth. This analysis is placed in the historical context of the political economy of these four countries, to show how banking and industrial structures developed over the century as a consequence of the state's need to mediate between different social and economic groups. This approach allows the author to show why British banking came to be so concentrated and the negative impact that this had on the supply of finance to small firms. The experiences of France, Germany and Italy show alternative structures and policy responses towards small firms.