L'impresa italiana nel Novecento (review)

Italian business history is not well known abroad. This is quite obvious. Even though Italy has been industrialized since the 1920s, it is a small country, with little international influence. Its historical patterns of evolution privileged the internal market, and although its domestic corporations have traditionally not been very active abroad, foreign firms have also manifested openly their reluctance to invest in a promising but too turbulent environment. As a result, Italian business history has from the beginning been a domestic story, scarcely appealing for foreign scholars. The Italian historiographic climate was partially responsible for this situation. Business history as a discipline has only recently been "legitimized" in Italy (still there are no chairs in the field). For a long time, the history of the business enterprise was squeezed between the Marxist/leftist stream of thought—interested basically in class conflicts and in the history of labor and trade unions—and the medieval and modernist tradition, focused on the early origin of the Italian economy, merchants, traders, bankers, and wealthy landowners. However, since the 1975 publication of the path-breaking business history of Terni steelworks by FrancoBonelli [Lo sviluppo di una grande impresa in Italia. La Terni dal 1884 al 1962 (Torino)], the situation has improved, progressively if not radically.

A generation of historians influenced by the Chandlerian model started to pin down the stories of the most important and influential corporations (both private and state-owned) in Italy, trying to compare them with the form of capitalistic development outlined by the great American business historian. At the same time, another stream of research concentrated on the determinants of the technological gap separating Italy from the other industrialized nations, as well as on the entrepreneurial model consistent with this backwardness, while other scholars started a systematic examination of the history of the country's main financial institutions. Soon, a new generation of studies followed these first attempts trying to assess in a historical perspective key elements for the understanding of the patterns of industrialization of a latecomer country: from human capital training and formation to infrastructures and transports and from the economic and industrial policies to small firms, industrial districts, and family firms. The resulting effort was captured in the 1999 edited volume by Franco Amatori, Duccio Bigazzi, Renato Giannetti, and Luciano Segreto, L'industria [Industry]. Most of the scholars' writing in that book were (and still are) members of ASSI, a voluntary association of Italian business historians; the volume is, in some sense, a snapshot of the state-of-the-art of the business history research in Italy at the beginning of the new millennium, suggesting at the same time new stimuli and research directions.

This long introduction was necessary to better locate the relevance of Giannetti and Vasta's book, which is, in my opinion, to be seen as a logical presentation of the research effort already present in L'industria. It marks another step in the exploration of Italian business history, a step ambitious and provocative, but at this stage of the evolution of the discipline, necessary and most welcome.

The book is based (apart from two chapters—an introductory "framework" by Giovanni Federico and one on strategies and structures by Federico and Pier Angelo Toninelli) on a huge database collecting the information published by the Annuario Statistico delle Società per Azioni [Statistic Yearbook of Joint Stock Corporations]. The Yearbook gathered data from the balance sheets of Italian private and publicly traded companies, which at the end of the year had a share capital above a given threshold, changing over time. The database Imita.db (which is now freely available, also in English, on the Web at the address http://www.essetiweb.it/imitadb/index.asp) has been built through the collective financial effort by a network of Italian universities, among which are (in alphabetical order) Bocconi, Bologna, Florence, and Siena, and thanks to the support of the Ministry for University and Scientific Research and of...