Coercion and equity with centralization of government: how the unification of Italy impacted the southern regions

Italy was created in 1861 through military annexation by the Kingdom of Savoy (with capital city Torino in Piedmont) of other Italian territories. Immediately thereafter, the new national government started to extend Piedmontese laws to the new nation’s southern regions, introducing conscription and heavy taxation. The institutions and body politics of the pre-unification Italian states differed considerably. The new state centralized governmental power to level those differences. The southern people, were subjected to heavy-handed coercion, if not exploitation. The paper focuses on the coercion imposed by fiscal policies on the South. It asks whether coercion from the center was attenuated by redistribution operated at the regional and, especially, at the personal level with a focus on the poor. The answers confirm that fiscal coercion was indeed formidable. The Italian state imposed a heavy tax burden on the poor of all regions. When public expenditure also is brought in the picture, the poor in the southern regions remained disadvantaged, but less than they were before unification.