The Shortest History of Italy. By Ross King. Old Street Publishing, 2024. 262pp.
This is the latest in a series of ‘Shortest History’ books with other topics that include Europe, Germany, England, war, democracy, India and Greece. Readers of the Socialist Standard will have seen last November’s review, scathing to say the least, of the one on economics. Is this one any better? The enthusiastic endorsements by various journalists and historians on its back and inside covers certainly make it seem so (‘vibrant’, ‘admirably clear and often wryly amusing’, ‘terrific … a lucid riveting history’, ‘effervescent and entertaining guide’).
Are such comments justified? Well, yes, at least in part. The author’s sparkling prose and his ability to vividly overview tumultuous events and periods in Italy’s history succeed in giving us vivid insights into certain key developments. Examples of this are: the transformation of the city state of ancient Rome into a predatory inter-continental empire; the rebirth in culture, the arts and commerce in the 15th and early 16th century that marked Italy’s rise to European prominence (ie, the Renaissance); the making of Italy as a single nation state in the 19th century, partly at least as a result of the machinations, rivalries and interests of neighbouring European powers; the 20th century phenomenon of fascism that thrust the country into a dictatorship and delayed its growth as the European economic power it eventually became after the collapse of fascism and the unleashing of advanced capitalist development.
But it must also be pointed out that this book does not entirely escape the top down, history-from-above approach that the ‘shortest history’ format lends itself to. This is noticeable here in, for example, the relative lack of examination of the economic forms that drove the machinery of Italy’s various historical stages (ie, slavery under the Roman Empire, feudalism in the Medieval period, and, more recently, capitalism, first mercantile then industrial). Above all it would have been useful for the author to give some prominence to the fact that Italy’s development on the capitalist scene (referred to by another historian as its ‘spluttering bourgeois revolution’), late as it was, was hampered by its division into small independent state units, preventing the development of a national market and militating against advanced, large-scale commodity production. This disunity, reflected as it was in striking language differences across its land mass as well as in political division and economic underdevelopment, only started to be transformed slowly and painfully (and this is covered effectively by the author) by the unification process of the second half of the nineteenth century (the ‘Risorgimento’), which then stretches into the first half of the 1900s, even though there continued to remain a social and cultural gulf between the North and the South of the country (and there still are notable differences), as Italy seriously took on the homogenised, nationalistic model of the Western nation state.
As for the author’s portrayal of today’s Italy, it would have been helpful, from a socialist point of view at least, for him to have explained that the many different governments and parties which have administered the country since the end of the Second World War have all actually been engaged in the same fundamental undertaking – administering and ensuring the continuation of the capitalist system with its mass ownership of wealth by a tiny minority of the population and compulsory wage work for the majority. He might also have mentioned that, though parties calling themselves ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ have had involvement in this, their programmes and policies have borne no resemblance whatever to the concept of socialism (or communism) put forward by the Socialist Party of a moneyless, wageless world society of free access to all goods and services based on from each according to ability to each according to need. But the author would no doubt have considered that to do this would have exceeded his ‘shortest history’ brief. And it may not correspond anyway to the view of the world that he himself holds.
Howard Moss
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