Fedeli alla terra: Scelte economiche e attivita pubbliche di una famiglia nobile bolognese nell'Ottocento (review)

Fedeli alla terra. Scelte economiche e attivitá pubbliche di una famiglia nobile bolognese nell'Ottocento. By Manuela Martini (Bologna, Il Mulino, 1999) 434 pp. Lit. 55,000

The tension between individual choices on the one hand and family and class expectations on the other often parallels the gap between the subtleties of the historical record and the abstract categories adopted by historians. How can researchers make sense of rapidly changing patterns of behavior--for example, the shift from an aristocratic ethos to a capitalist (or "bourgeois") worldview among a country's elite--without thereby reifying the categories that they employ? This is the fundamental methodological and epistemological question raised by Martini's book about the economic choices and political activities of a prominent aristocratic family in nineteenth-century Bologna. The tension between empirical detail and grand interpretative narratives runs throughout Martini's book and--maybe unsurprisingly--is never fully resolved.

Martini works her way between two influential models of the history of European aristocracies in the nineteenth century. The first model, cherished by Marxist historians, maintains that bourgeois elites replaced the aristocracy as the leading class, bringing with them novel economic and political values. The rival narrative, associated with Mayer, argues for the survival of the aristocratic ethos in seemingly new bourgeois garb.¹ Martini addresses this debate from the vantage point of economic behavior and sets out to assess the extent to which the Marquises Bolognini Amorini (and the Bolognese nobility more generally) transformed their social and managerial choices in response to the momentous changes shaking their world. In the Italian case, this economic perspective poses particular challenges, since the main material basis of both the nobility and the bourgeoisie remained land ownership throughout the nineteenth century. The fundamental issue becomes whether the marquises' unwavering "loyalty to the land" was compatible with the emerging capitalist ethos. Martini responds to this question in the affirmative.

By examining a variety of quantitative sources--ranging from marriage records and the forced loans of 1798 and 1848 to family budgets and farm accounting books--Martini documents the Bolognese aristocrats' uneasy compromise between the traditional norms of their class and the flexibility and creativity necessary to compete in an increasingly open economy. The marquises' separatist marriage strategies of the late eighteenth century gave way to a fortunate alliance with a family of rich parvenus, who carried their name into the twentieth century. By the same token, starting in the early 1840s, the marquises proved receptive to the tenets of the new husbandry by combining rice and hemp cultivation with the rational management of their diverse holdings. This process of modernization, however, coexisted with the traditional paternalistic practices typical of sharecropping.

The marquises also successfully translated this social and economic flexibility into enduring political clout in the face of stark institutional discontinuities. Martini employs a qualitative version of network analysis to map the resilient presence of the Bolognese aristocracy in the city's government as well as in the institutions of civil society, including not only traditional charities but also innovative business banks. For reasons that Martini only hints at, the onset of the economic depression in the 1870s and the agricultural crisis in the 1880s sealed the end of this relative economic and political dynamism: The marquises relinquished the direct management of their land by renting their holdings to nonnoble intermediaries. Both budget and network analysis, the two main methods deftly employed in the book, allow Martini convincingly to document the flexibility of Bologna's aristocracy. This empirical thrust, however, falls short of replacing the need for clearly stated theoretical commitments.

Dario Gaggio
Northwestern University

Note

1. See, for example, Arno Mayer, Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York, 1981).

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