Italy before WWI - poverty and migration.

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                        Italy Before WWI     Richard Mäekallas

In the beginning of the 20th century, Italy after its long struggles of becoming a unified country, had all characteristics of being one; a constitution, a parliament, political parties ( conservatives, liberals, radicals, socialists), army, navy, etc. Though for some reason all these key elements were of very poor quality compared to the other Great Powers.
Italy had one of the worst levels of human well- fare of Europe. Progress of economy led by king Vittorio Emanule III, only reached the northern areas of Italy. The south remained in stagnation and constant fall of economy. Due to this, there was a rapid movement of working class from the south to north, which on the other hand caused big cities such as Milano and Torino to have too many working class citizens. Suddenly, thousands of Italians per year, migrated to the United States to search for luck. In between 1900 and World War I, nine million Italians had left, mostly from the south. So what caused this immense dissatisfaction and poorness of the country?

In 1861, The Five Great Powers became The Six due to its newest member- Italy.
Looks as though Italy, who had just become a unified country (before it consisted of many different small states), was just barely a Great Power and that mostly for its size. Italy wasn’t fully unified though, it was facing two problems: Venice, which belonged under the Austrians and Rome which was ruled by the Pope. Conquering these two cities was impossible and failed on numerous occasions. Austria was too strong for Italy to defeat and so was the pope who had 100% support from France.
These problems would have been much simpler to solve if Italy would have had any money, but its unification brought a great downfall for the economy. Italy became a Great Power at a moment when the world market was dominated by other capitalist countries. Italy was too young to equally compete with them.

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The biggest obstacles for the growth of capitalism was poor land in reference to coal, iron and oil production and most importantly- remaining elements of feudalism from the past. These factors and also low industrialization (which mainly occurred in the north) is why at the end of the 19th century, Italy stayed mainly as an agricultural country.

 The situation in the countryside at that time could be described as feudalistic pre-capitalism.  South Italy and a bit of central Italy was dominated by a feudalistic use of land.  Great land owners would rent their properties to individual farmers. Half of these farmers ...

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