Sicily and the Unification of Italy Liberal Policy and Local Power 1859-1866 [Hardcover]

This is the first in-depth analysis of the impact of Italian unification on the hitherto isolated communities of rural Sicily. Beginning with the period prior to the revolution of 1860, Dr Riall shows why successive attempts at political reform failed, and analyzes the effects of this failure. Through an examination of the problems of local government - tax collection, conscription, the organization of policing - and of attempts to suppress peasant disturbances and control crime, she shows that the modernization of the Sicilian countryside both undermined the control of the central government and made the countryside itself more unstable.

A provocative account of an 'ungovernable' region deflecting the project of nation-state formation in unintended ways. It also brims with insight into the genesis of organized crime....Her analysis has much to contribute to today's debate over governance and corruption in Russia....A graceful writer with a good eye for pithy quotations, she offers a lively narrative. --Journal of Modern Italian Studies

Fair-mindedness can be refreshing, and in Lucy Riall's monograph, a study that carefully builds to its last chapter on the weeklong uprising in Palermo in 1866, it is....[The book] includes balanced and well-informed assessments of the literature on Sicilian politics in the nineteenth century and on the early years of Italian rule. Seeking not so much to assess the well-known debates as to rise above them, Riall presents an account full of tragedy but without villains....If there is more to be said, Lucy Riall is clearly well equipped to say it. To ask for more is to praise this lucid, judicious study, which will prove valuable to all scholars of modern Italy. --Journal of Modern History