At the moment of Italian political unification, the Mezzogiorno (i.e. Southern Italy) was affected by a deep institutional change and it \ud
entered the wave of financial market openness, attracting all forms of investments from international capital markets. Naples – after \ud
having lost its previous role as the Bourbon kingdom’s capital city – enabled projects of large scale urban planning, beginning with basic public utilities. In this process, public and private lighting was chronologically the first area of interest – parallel with railway development planning – where international finance played a role. As evidence of the dynamics which brought this peripheral European area into the orbit of the first globalisation, this article addresses the complex business of energy supply in Naples – between 1862 and World War I – both from the point of view of its financial dynamics and the parallel evolution and organisational characteristics of the business actors involved. The Social Network Analysis (SNA) will support the reconstruction of the diversified and transnational businesses which the Neapolitan energy business was integrated in, at the same time giving evidence of both the bindings linking legally independent companies and the multiple relations between the actors involved. The transition from gas to electricity during this time marked the transition from weak to strong corporate ties according to the evolutionary trends both of technology and international financial markets
In this article, we study the effect of the Unification on the network power of economic elites in the South of Italy. We study the persistence of economic elites as evidence of the stability of the institutional set up beyond the effect of Unification, and thus as a primary explaining factor of the persistence of social forces slowing and opposing modernization. We use original archival data on the universe of Naples enterprises to build the networks of business relations between individual economic actors for the 20-year period immediately before and after Unification. The persistence of network power and its determinants is tested via a difference-in-difference model. The main finding is that economic elites persist over Unification. The long-term business relations, rooted in the Bourbon period, the persisting lobbying power of the financial industry, the close collusive ties with potential foreign competitors and the closeness to politics after 1861 are all elements that explain how the Southern economic elites were able to crowd-out the change.
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