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1. From Naples to Madrid
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
His [Charles III’s] political benevolence comes down to little more than the appearance of reform, widely proclaimed, which resulted in hypocritical illusion. Gaetano Garofalo, La monarchía borbónica a Napoli Many are already convinced that it is necessary to change things. Queen María Amalia of Spain to Minister of Justice Bernardo Tanucci A change of leadership at the highest political level in the eighteenth century often brought opportunity for policy changes, the introduction of new personnel, and renewed hope for the resolution of long-standing problems. Fernando VI’s death in August 1759 and the accession of his half-brother to the Spanish throne as Charles III promised new initiatives, not only in contrast to the drift associated with Fernando’s last years, but above all because of the political and economic activism of Charles’s twenty-Wve-year rule in Naples as king of the Two Sicilies. And, indeed, although Charles’s Neapolitan achievements may be open to question, they preWgured many of the objectives, as well as the political style, pursued during his thirty-year reign in Spain. On his arrival at Naples in 1734 at the head of an army of occupation, the eighteen-year-old Spanish infante had found a country of about three million controlled by great landowners and a structure of government complicated by ecclesiastical privilege to the point where only 20 percent of the population remained under direct royal jurisdiction.⁄ The capital, Naples, was an eighteenth-century megalopolis absorbing wealth and income, a Wnancial, commercial, and administrative center to which the underemployed of the surrounding countryside Xowed seeking jobs or charity. Like Madrid, it was the place of residence of landlords, church dignitaries, high 1. From Naples to Madrid • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • government oYcials, and lumpen proletarians—the latter always on the edge of starvation and mob violence. To stabilize his young son’s government , Philip V immediately transferred 1.8 million pesos of colonial receipts in silver to Naples, not the last of such external Wnancing from Spain.¤ The Wnancial condition of the Neapolitan state reXected the limitations of a backward, underdeveloped agrarian economy. Its fundamental problems were skewed land tenure and land utilization patterns, high taxes on production, whether for local consumption or export, commercial monopolies , and the omnipresence of ecclesiastical property. Eighty percent of rural properties (excluding those of the crown) were owned or controlled by the church. More than 70 percent of the combined annual income of the church and the landed aristocracy accrued to the church; and jurisdictional immunities permitted church authorities to supplement this income by smuggling salt, tobacco, and raw silk. Manufacture was virtually nonexistent ; even cloth for the local armed forces had to be imported, and silk manufacture was conWned by law to Naples and its immediate locale.‹ These elements should not be viewed in isolation, for just as it is today, the syndrome of underdevelopment or stagnation in the eighteenth century was more than the sum of its parts. In the kingdom of Naples on the accession of Charles, the generalized symptoms of stagnation suggest a common pattern of vested interests in a status quo that satisWed most inXuential interest groups. There were, Wrst of all, the large landlords (barone), who had acquired jurisdiction over their tenants during the breakdown of Hapsburg control in the seventeenth century. Their properties, which produced exports such as oil, silk, and to a lesser extent wool, were relatively lightly taxed; output was controlled by commission houses in Naples and other ports through the contratto della liquidazione regulating the storage and sale of such exportables, for which merchants collected a sales percentage.› Landlords and merchants were linked to the third vested interest, the ecclesiastical establishment, since landlords often registered their properties as church holdings to avoid taxation, and the large export houses also handled the production of church estates. As a whole, the church constituted a dominant group, consisting of about 75,000 wealthy, prestigious, powerful clergy, and its inXuence was enhanced by the fact that it represented papal interests.fi Wealthy merchants functioned as an essential part of the state apparatus: they farmed taxes and thereby employed an army of underpaid petty oYcials in the cities and countryside, who used and abused the complex of excise and customs duties to supplement their salaries. Under such conditions , smuggling and corruption were institutionalized at all levels. Fifth and last among those niched into the status quo were thousands of bureaucrats, 4 • Stalemate in the Metropole [54.221.159.188] Project...