Nowadays, there are many different approaches to economic history in Italy. Some authors maintain that historical processes can be read and discovered only through cliometric methods, without recourse to knowledge or judgement gained from direct encounters with primary sources: what matters is to discover, or glean, contradictory data with which to construct time series of dubious quality, or even to reduce explanation to some kind of formula. This approach stems from an economist's vision in which economic history becomes reduced to a ‘sub-discipline’, without the scientific autonomy (methodological, analytical or interpretative) which was originally the basis for its contribution to the social sciences, including economics.
Other authors, following in the path of a traditional approach that boasts solid roots within the discipline of economic history, have developed lines of research based on the critical use of sources and insights gained from previous historians, in keeping with the scientific principles that have characterised the discipline of economic history throughout the long process of its establishment in Italy. Guido Alfani belongs to this latter tradition. The way in which this monograph has been constructed marks a considerable distance between him and ‘New Economic History’ Italian-style. Whereas the latter approach limits itself to the uncritical application to the past of concepts derived from another discipline, imagining that it is possible to interpret economic processes in the past thus, more traditional methodologies submit dominant paradigms to a critical revision. When such a revision is undertaken with rigour and accompanied by new knowledge derived from new primary sources, it becomes possible to replace the paradigm with a new one: thus begins a process of deconstruction and reconstruction of interpretations that expands the boundaries of the discipline.
Alfani has followed this route by proposing an intelligent re-reading of an important period in Italian history. In summary, the monograph's main aim is to question Carlo Cipolla's concept of ‘negative production’. To do so, the author analyses the influence of the ‘Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ on the processes of transformation of the economy and society of the former Italian states during the long sixteenth century. The analysis of the impact of war, epidemics and dearth aims to bring together two sets of findings: first, a reassessment of the real incidence in economic terms of each Horseman; and second, to understand the indirect benefits which the spread of these factors produced.
The Italian wars, considered in all their multiple manifestations (battles, sieges, sacking of cities, exploitation of the countryside), certainly caused significant losses in terms of people and resources. Nonetheless, the uneven nature of their distribution meant that certain social groups were more heavily penalised, sometimes exclusively so: not so much the weakest as those who were not fully included in the urban community. The expulsion of ‘useless mouths’ by local authorities is emblematic of one of the most forceful arguments in the book, namely, the extent to which the actions of the authorities conditioned economic processes. Alfani focuses attention on political authorities in times of crisis not just as instruments of defensive action (such as the cordons sanitaires imposed to prevent the spread of epidemics or extraordinary provisioning of grain), but also as experts who reallocated available resources in order to bring about a successive recovery. Politics here are not used as a guide to general movements but rather to explain the complexity of the crisis.
The book has the merit of revealing a multidimensional framework that includes the Italian territories as geomorphological entities (plains, mountains), political entities (the specific characteristics of each state), economic entities (cities, countryside and particularly the relationship between them) and social entities (the diverse features of the different social groups that made up Ancien Régime society). In essence, the analysis places the crisis in context, understanding its most intense manifestations, without, however, neglecting to draw out factors that softened the crisis and even factors that appeared to be moving in the opposite direction. This approach is certainly innovative and, in my opinion, the author goes beyond simply distancing himself from Cipolla in order to ally himself with Fernand Braudel, but also provides a range of specific interpretations of the many and often contradictory elements of the crisis. He takes up the challenge posed by the complexity of the crisis, one which demands interdisciplinary and often, necessarily, incomplete interpretations, renouncing (fortunately) the temptation to find a single, simplifying explanation.
The methodological care taken shows up clearly in the use of quantitative demographic sources. Alfani does not just bring together a considerable quantity of random data in the increasingly prevalent fashion of the New Economic History. Instead, he focuses on a few indicators, in particular trends in births, which he analyses intelligently to demonstrate that plague and dearth made an impact upon population in various different ways. The first part of the book, while dedicated to classic themes in economic history such as demographic and agrarian crises, constitutes a fresh look that calls into question the catastrophic view of the sixteenth-century economy.
The second part deals with the processes of redistribution that emerged from the crisis, in order to explain long-term economic and demographic trends. Here also the analysis works on many levels (state, community, individual). The passage of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse harmed the Italian states in different ways, thus determining different conditions for recovery. Even within individual states, however, different conditions prevailed, leading to different trajectories for city and countryside. The role of smaller urban centres emerges as important for understanding not only the effects of the crisis, but also the different responses to it. As I mentioned above, Alfani interprets the different choices made, paying particular attention to institutional frameworks but in an innovative manner: institutions matter not because of what they are in terms of organisations, but because of what they do. What happens during the crisis and at the moment of recovery is neither entirely nor even mostly the product of a natural process; rather, the response to the crisis and the attempt at a new phase of development both derive from ‘intentional politics’, to use a term favoured in development studies. In my opinion, this kind of approach lends itself well to the study of sixteenth-century Italy, with the potential to challenge current hypotheses in depth.
This is therefore a fine book and above all an excellent lesson in how to advance the discipline of economic history by studying the distant past, using archival research and, most of all, by distancing oneself from a creeping conformism which sees adherence to the dominant explanatory framework as the best means to achieve results in economic history research.
