Violence and the Great Estates in the South of Italy
Apulia, 1900–1922

A vivid history of Apulian farm workers' struggle to win the ordinary decencies of life.

Frank M. Snowden (Author)

9780521527101, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 7 June 2004

256 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.5 cm, 0.355 kg

'Frank Snowden has produced a devastating account of the horrors inflected by the new agro-capitalists but he has also done a moving job in charting the marvellous story of resistance that developed among Puglia's agricultural workers …'. Socialist Review

Until Italian unification, vast areas of Apulia were an uninhabited sheep walk. In the late nineteenth century this frontier area was settled and agro-business established. In the quasi-colonial context of the South of Italy, the relations between landowners and farm workers were characterized by extreme forms of oppression and brutality. This book is a study of the world the landlords made and of the harsh structures of profit, tenure, and climate they faced. It is also a powerful investigation of the appallingly grim conditions in the teeming agricultural centres of the region and a vivid history of the struggle by the farm workers to win the ordinary decencies of life - clothes, clean water, and bread. In the process, the labourers formed a potent anarcho-syndicalist movement whose history the book relates from the first general strikes in 1901 to the restoration of the landlords' power by fascist terror in 1922.

List of illustrations
Preface
Glossary of Italian terms
Introduction
1. Wheat and sheep
2. Day labour
3. Grapes
4. The company town
5. Seeds of rebellion
6. Revolutionary syndicalism
7. Work discipline
8. The Great War
9. The closed shop
10. Fascism
Notes and sources
Index.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD]