Enrico Dal Lago

"Between 1815 and 1861, American slaveholders and southern Italian landowners presided over the economic and social life of two predominantly agricultural regions, the U.S. South and Italy's Mezzogiorno. Enrico Dal Lago ingeniously compares these agrarian elites, demonstrating how the study of each enhances our understanding of the other as well as of their shared nineteenth-century world." "Agrarian Elites charts the parallel developments of plantations and latifondi in relation to changes in the world economy. At the same time, it examines the spread of "paternalistic" models of family relations and of slave and free-labor management that accompanied the rise of large groups of American slaveholders and southern Italian landed proprietors in the early-to-mid-1800s." "Dal Lago brings together two subjects that have generated considerable debate and research: systems of slave and nominally free labor and the elites who employed them, and nineteenth-century nationalism. With its pathbreaking approach and singular and comparative insights, Agrarian Elites will inform not only American and Italian studies but also the very practice of comparative history."--Jacket.

"Between 1861 and 1865, both the Confederate South and Southern Italy underwent dramatic processes of nation-building, with the creation of the Confederate States of America and the Kingdom of Italy, in the midst of civil wars. This is the first book that compares these parallel developments by focusing on the Unionist and pro-Bourbon political forces that opposed the two new nations in inner civil conflicts. Overlapping these conflicts were the social revolutions triggered by the rebellions of American slaves and Southern Italian peasants against the slaveholding and landowning elites. Utilizing a comparative perspective, Enrico Dal Lago sheds light on the reasons why these combined factors of internal opposition proved fatal for the Confederacy in the American Civil War, while the Italian Kingdom survived its own civil war. At the heart of this comparison is a desire to understand how and why nineteenth-century nations rose and either endured or disappeared"--

"Scholars have generally assumed the objects of colonialism to have been non-European peoples, especially those living in Africa and Asia. Acknowledging the significance of current historiographical debates about different colonial experiences, this book breaks new ground in investigating the extent to which European peoples living in Europe were also subjected to colonialism. The image of the shadow, with its connotations of darkness, distortion, and elasticity, highlights the pervasive, yet uneven, influence of the ideologies and practices of colonialism across the European continent and its consequences for the lives of ordinary Europeans in peripheral regions. This shadow reached its height in the century between the 1860s and 1960s, as nation-states were consolidated and colonial empires expanded and then contracted. The chapters of this volume explore this phenomenon in case studies featuring Ireland, southern Italy, Schleswig, Alsace, Poland, Algeria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ukraine and Hungary"--Provided by publisher.