Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento contains ten essays written in honour of Denis Mack Smith by leading British and Italian specialists. The volume is intended both as a tribute to Denis Mack Smith's outstanding contribution to Italian history and as an attempt to open up wider debate on Italian society and politics in the period of the Risorgimento, bringing aspects of nineteenth-century Italian politics and social history into a comparative European context. Topics discussed in the volume include the collapse of the ancien régime in southern Italy; the Italian armies in the Napoleonic period; debates on poverty in Italy and Europe in the early nineteenth century; family and marriage; the origins of the mafia in Sicily; peasant protest in the Po valley; Garibaldi and England in the 1860s; the emergence of an Italian middle class; women workers; and the politics of the critic Francesco De Sanctis.
List of figures and maps; List of contributors; Preface; 1. 1799: the Santafede and the crisis of the ancien régime in southern Italy John A. Davis; 2. War and society in Napoleonic Italy: the armies of the Kingdom of Italy at home and abroad Franco Della Peruta; 3. The poor and how to relieve them: the Restoration debate on poverty in Italy and Europe Stuart Woolf; 4. Bandits, violence and the organization of power in Sicily in the early nineteenth century Giovanna Fiume; 5. Marriage and the family in Italy in the early nineteenth century Marzio Barbagli; 6. After the Revolution: bandits on the plains of the Po 1848-54 Paul Ginsborg; 7. Labouring women in northern and central Italy in the nineteenth century Simonetta Ortaggi Cammarosano; 8. Garibaldi in England: the politics of Italian enthusiasm Derek Beales; 9. The middle classes in Liberal Italy Adrian Lyttelton; 10. Francesco De Sanctis: the politics of a literary critic Denis Mack Smith; Bibliography of Denis Mack Smith's writings on nineteenth-century Italy; Index.
