Civil War and Agrarian Unrest
The Confederate South and Southern Italy

The first book that compares the Confederate South and Southern Italy in two contemporaneous civil wars during 1861–1865.

Enrico Dal Lago (Author)

9781107038424, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 March 2018

476 pages
23.5 x 16.5 x 3.1 cm, 0.77 kg

'Dal Lago has drawn on an impressive range of American and Italian manuscript collections, archives, printed primary sources. Moreover, the book's conclusions incorporate the ?ndings of the latest published scholarship by leading Anglo-American and Italian historians in the ?eld.' Anthony L. Cardoza, The Journal of Modern History

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.

Introduction: civil war, nation-building, and agrarian unrest in the Confederate South and Southern Italy: a comparative perspective
Part I. Inner Civil Wars and National Crises, 1860–1863: 1. Preemptive counterrevolutions: the rebellions of the elites
2. The difficult birth of two nations
3. Inner civil wars in East Tennessee and Northern Terra di Lavoro I, 1860–1861
4. Inner civil wars in East Tennessee and Northern Terra di Lavoro II, 1861–1863
Part II. Civil Wars and Social Revolutions, 1862–1865: 5. Revolutions: the revolts of the lower strata
6. Civil wars and agrarian questions
7. Social revolutions in the lower Mississippi Valley and upper Basilicata I, 1862–1863
8. Social revolutions in the lower Mississippi Valley and upper Basilicata II, 1863–1865.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK], European history [HBJD]