Lack of commerce and of industry went hand in hand. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, native industry hardly existed except at a household level. Basic products such as shoes, nails, pins, buttons and knives were imported, and so even were bricks. Raw materials for making soap and glass abounded locally, for example soda, olive oil, castor oil and linseed; but they were generally exported for manufacture elsewhere and the finished products then brought back again. Cotton, wool, flax, hemp, silk, all these were grown in some quantity and were used by housewives as the basis of a domestic industry, and yet textile manufactures remained the most costly item in Sicilian imports. By 1825, Baron Turrisi had several small factories making enough paper for home consumption. The leather workers of Palermo were a numerous community, as were the silk workers of Messina and Catania, but export markets had shrunk and were still shrinking. Although hats, gloves, glue, starch and snuff were now being produced in or near Palermo, this was only in small workshops which generally seem to have had a short life; and still there was no quantity production of ceramics and household hardware.
Most Sicilian economists, and this included Balsamo, Scrofani, Palmeri, Ferrara and Busacca, were not enthusiastic about artificially encouraging manufactures if this required excessive protectionism and transferring scanty capital away from agriculture where they thought it could be more usefully employed. According to one French consul, Sicilians of rank were unenthusiastic about the establishment of local industry, and it was obvious that Turrisi’s paper factories, needing high protective duties, meant high prices to the consumer. It was equally obvious that Sicily lacked the main pre-requirements of an industrial revolution. She had no iron that could be mined economically, no coal except a little bad quality lignite, no navigable canals and rivers at all, and very poor internal communications of any sort. Charcoal was expensive and, like timber, was now having to be imported in Considerable amounts. The exhaustion of native fuel supplies was One reason why the glass, silk and sugar-refining industries of Sicily had declined. Water power was uncertain, since most rivers were now completely dry for much of the year, and some water-Propelled machinery, for instance in the sugar industry, had thereby become useless. This left imported coal; but the pattern of demand shown in the British consular figures suggests that Sicily in 1839 was spending five times as much on coffee imports as coal, and twenty-five times as much on imports of sugar: and smuggling probably made this a huge under-estimate of the true figures.
Lack of skilled labour was another factor. Ferrara mentioned a Stanhope printing machine brought to Palermo in the 183os but which no one could operate, and this was probably not untypical. The maestranze had deliberately restricted industrial education in order to keep out newcomers and preserve each trade as much as possible a privileged monopoly for a few families. Because food taxes were high, ordinary labour was not all that cheap by international standards, but skilled labour was just not available at all, and this twin handicap was a permanent incubus on local industry. Most Sicilians were still absolutely without any formal education:
in some villages the priest and the magistrate alone knew how to read. Ordinary citizens, furthermore, lacked the purchasing power to provide much of a market for manufactured goods. The great inequalities in wealth meant that money was used for buying sugar, coffee and fine clothes from overseas, not on fostering the basic industries and the infrastructure necessary for an industrial revolution.
The Neapolitan government after 1815 tried to encourage local industries by protecting them against imports from Naples, but the amount of protection was either insufficient as an incentive, or else was too high to be much inducement to increased efficiency; and British, French and Spanish merchants at first made things yet more difficult by insolently asserting an ancient right to be exempt from customs visitation. In 1824, some of the surviving taxes on exports were abolished and higher duties placed on imported manufactures; but the good effects of this were counteracted by the freeing of trade with Naples, and Sicily was thus exposed to imports from a country which over the previous century had outstripped the island in economic growth. Neapolitan, British and French manufactures continued to take the lion’s share of the market after 1824, and certain local businesses collapsed. Some interested parties clamoured for still higher government protection and accused Naples of exploitation. Most local intellectuals, however, and among them Ferrara who was soon to be generally acknowledged the leading Italian economist of his day, concluded that free trade was best for the economy, especially as "the nation is not industrially minded".
An inevitable accompaniment of industrial protection was smuggling. The extent of contraband is still impossible to document, especially as even official statistics of trade were so unreliable, but some outsiders said that there was no country where the laws were more openly evaded: as one foreigner explained, "the import and export duties are so excessively high that it becomes not only profitable but absolutely necessary for the trader to evade them". The French consul in the 183os estimated that six to eight times as much coffee and tobacco was imported into Sicily as the official figures recorded; and one confirmation of this was that tobacco" which was sometimes used even by women and children "could retail for less than the tax due on it. Yet conviction for smuggling was rare, "the offence being generally compounded before the trial comes on", commented the British consul, John Goodwin. Customs officers were paid too little, and they themselves engaged fairly openly in contraband, with the result that the amount of duty received was not large. The smuggling was mainly of imports. Exports were usually too bulky and too little in demand, though there seems to have been a substantial illicit trade to Malta. As for the network of illegal traffic between one part of Sicily and another, all one can say is that it must have been enormous.
Vicenzo Florio was one individual who showed by his example what could be done in both commerce and industry. Florio was a mainlander, born in Calabria, whose family had exiled itself to Sicily with the King. He began as a commercial traveller and, according to general belief, made his first money by smuggling. Then he set up a business in groceries. Later he took over the tunny fishery at Favignana; here he made a small industry out of conserving fish in oil, using the residue for fertiliser. At the same time he extended into sulphur mining and put up a spinning mill which employed steam power. Realising the importance of credit, for a time he seems to have had a virtual monopoly of banking in Palermo, and this may have been a very lucrative operation. In 1841, profiting from government support, he opened the Oretea machine shop and foundry, the only establishment of its kind in Sicily; here he made steam engines, pumps and mining machinery, and by 1860 was employing two hundred people.
As he was an agent for the Rothschilds, some of Florio’s capital may have come from them. Foreign investors were certainly interested in Sicily. As soon as the Marsala wine industry was established by British merchants, Florio joined them; and when one of these, Benjamin Ingham, organised a shipping combine in 1838-9, Florio became the second largest shareholder, a number of Sicilian aristocrats joined foreign investors in supporting this Company. His first steamship was launched in 1849. His variegated Career shows that there were considerable profits to be made by people who did not accept the conventional disinclination for COmmerce and who were prepared to take risks with their money.
But few followed him along this unfashionable path. Two of the young Orlando brothers after 1840 were making engines to mill wheat and sumac leaves, but, for political as well as economic reasons, they eventually emigrated to the more favourable atmosphere of northern Italy like many other enterprising sons of Sicily. The Florio family itself married into the aristocracy and became part of the local establishment, though they never entirely overcame the snobbish aloofness of aristocratic Palermo society.
The one export industry of any note had traditionally been silk, but for some time it had been falling behindhand in quality and price. Mulberries were being planted more frequently in other parts of Italy, and foreigners were finding cheaper silks in France and as far away as China. The tax on manufactured exports from Sicily still placed a gratuitous premium on smuggling and on the export of raw silk rather than manufactures, while prohibitions against the import of manufactured silk cloth from abroad could never be properly enforced. The government introduced more silk weavers from the mainland, as well as new weaving machinery, but nearly all production remained in private houses where it was almost impossible to change traditional methods of manufacture.
The silk guild at Messina was at most periods reasonably successful in keeping up standards of quality, yet it was a narrow vested interest which, by discouraging competition and technical innovation, also kept the industry artificially small and backward. The wholesalers and guildsmen of Messina held a virtual monopoly of outlets for a large area of the countryside, and from a parliamentary protest in 1794 it can be seen that they could not restrain themselves from using their monopoly to exploit the farmers, with the result that mulberry growing sometimes became uneconomic and stopped entirely. The Messinese had tried hard to get the government to reinforce their position by forbidding all silk manufacture at Catania. They asked to be empowered to employ an army of inspectors to check how much silk was grown and exactly to record all sales and purchases at every stage of manufacture. Their guild had strict regulations against paying piecework rates, and insisted that permission must be sought before any changes in technique could be made. Supervisors had to be consulted before any dyeing operation of any kind could be undertaken. Even when the King put up the money for a technical school to teach poor people a trade, the guild was strong enough to remove weaving from the subjects included, and instruction was therefore limited to such innocuous arts as baking and cart making.
This attitude of mind helps to explain why the industry was not more dynamic and why the silk-cultivating areas of the north-east were not increasing their prosperity. Up to a certain point Catania managed to defy the restrictionism of Messina, and here the aristocratic houses of Paternô and Biscari had fewer misgivings about trade than their brethren at Palermo. A quarter of the Catania population in 1727 was said to be engaged in the silk industry, most of them no doubt being women working in their own homes. Catania itself, however, joined Messina and Palermo in trying to persuade the government to forbid silk weaving at Acireale, for in this small town the growers had been trying to break free from the mercantilist regulations favouring the three big cities.
The English commanding officer at Messina in 1810 reported that the single silk factory of any size at Catania had no water power but only "human beings acting on the great wheel like turnspits". The silk industry at Palermo, he found, was smaller; but, owing to the generosity of Monsignor Gioeni, the poor house had a factory run by two Frenchmen where a water wheel provided power and there was employment for four hundred orphan girls. Slightly better days for Sicilian silk came after the arrival of Jaeger from Hanover in 1818 and Hallam from England, who eventually set up mechanised Jacquard looms and in the i 8~os introduced the much better white oriental mulberry. Evidently there was some scope for development, but in practice Sicily’s important share of the European market was never recaptured. As for domestic sales, not only did rich people prefer imports from France, but poorer people (many of whom had still been wearing silk as late as the 1780s), ceased to be able to afford it as their standard of life went down.
More cotton was grown in Sicily than anywhere else in Italy, but again the system of taxes and protection helped to create a high-cost industry; again the same restrictive attitudes suggested incapacity for spontaneous growth, and most of the crop therefore went overseas as a raw material for foreign workers. Sergio and de Cosmi had complained at the end of the eighteenth century that, except for the very coarsest cloth, Sicily had to import all its manufactured cotton, wool and linen requirements; and sometimes even the woollen mantillas of the peasant women turned out to be of foreign make. Fine woollens were hardly possible until the King introduced merino sheep for breeding after 1820. By the early 1830s there were some Arkwright cotton mills in operation, and outside Palermo a Swiss industrialist, Albrecht, was using quite advanced techniques for printing fabrics. By 1840 the Ruggieri brothers and an English firm each had a large factory at Messina said to be employing about a thousand people, nearly all women and girls, and using flying shuttles. But there were still complaints at the lack of enterprise among manufacturers (foreign as well as Sicilian), at the lack of support among the public for home-made goods, and at the difficulty of instructing spinners and weavers in the basic skills required. It is probable, moreover, that female labour was a product of poverty, and that any increase in wealth, whether of a family or of an area, led not to an increase but to a reduction of those willing to take this kind of industrial employment.
Sicily’s mineral deposits were well known, and at various times in the past there had been production on a commercial scale of iron, lead, silver, alum and antimony. But difficulties of internal transport and the lack of fuel were insuperable problems. About 1750, the government was still trying to work the mines which the Austrians had re-opened, but Saxon and Hungarian labour proved too expensive, and though Sicilians were sent to Germany to learn the art, in the end lack of skilled workers brought this experiment to an end. Apart from these mines, mineral oil and seepages of natural gas were found in many places, though the oil was used only for lanterns or medicinally.
Most promising of all were the large deposits of easily workable sulphur stretching over several thousand square miles of central and southern Sicily. For many centuries there had been a small trade in sulphur for gunpowder and medical use. Then, in 1794, the discovery of the Leblanc soda process opened up a whole new industry, and British capitalists began to interest themselves during the war in those areas near Sicilian ports where open-cast mining of sulphur was possible. Landowners near Girgenti and Caltanissetta suddenly discovered that they owned a near world monopoly in an essential commodity needed by the industrial revolution in Europe and America. When Ferdinand in 1808 waived his royal monopoly rights over mining in order to please the Sicilian aristocracy, a rosy future opened to many latifondisti and smallholders.
Soon after the restoration of peace in 1815, there was a rush into sulphur mining as England began to use the Leblanc process and a number of French firms also set up in Sicily. Thousands of new industrial uses for sulphuric acid were soon being developed. It seemed for a time as though the economy of Sicily might be about to change dramatically. Despite some casualties, output greatly expanded, and, by the peak year of 1834, exports of sulphur were almost three times the value of wine exports which came next on the list. About two ships a week were calling at Licata, one at Girgenti, and over two hundred mines were in operation. The bulk of these exports went to Britain, and over twenty British firms were actively engaged on the spot either in production or export. A fair amount of capital came with these foreign firms, as well as skilled labour from as far distant as Cornwall and Scotland. One British manager in 1837 replaced the dangerous hand pumps by steam pumps for keeping the mines free of water, and this must have been one of the first uses of steam in Sicilian industry.
Labour was cheap in the mines, because the workers were not townsmen but drawn largely from farms in the off season; steam power, on the other hand, would have been enormously expensive because coal had to come on muleback like everything else. Cheap labour and guaranteed exports meant that there was thus no great incentive to improve methods of production. Because of fuel costs, it was general practice for the mined ore to be ignited so that the sulphur could be melted out of the gypsum and limestone by the heat of its own combustion. This was dangerous as well as wasteful: mines used to catch fire, and the underground seams could go on burning for years over a wide area; also the gases released by this primitive method of smelting were injurious to health and ruined the surrounding vegetation, so that mining had by government order to stop near harvest time. Another danger was that, since pit props were too expensive, there were many accidents as soon as mine shafts were sunk underground.
The chief lack outside and inside the mines was wheeled transport. All the ore had to be brought to the surface on the backs of carusi, mostly small boys who were indentured to the trade by their families as what one can only call slave labour. Women, too, were employed as carriers, but the galleries were very low and hence boys or girls were preferred. Even on pittance wages this primitive method of transport could account for half the running expenses of a mine. As there were no proper roads, the sulphur was then taken on mules to the coast; and as there were no port establishments, stevedores waded deep into the sea to load lighters which then rowed out to ships lying beyond the dangerous inshore. This was slow and expensive. Already in the 18205 there was also evidence of restrictive practices among stevedores and muleteers which helped to keep these inefficient methods in being for the next century or more. Labour troubles were also encountered by a small French refinery at Girgenti and a British sulphuric acid plant at Messina, so that foreign firms found it cheaper to export the raw material.
The true profit and loss involved in these operations took some time to become known, just because open-cast mining was at first so easy; but by the middle 1830s, sulphur output was seen to be growing faster than the market, and a sudden fall in prices dramatically exposed the underlying weaknesses of this new industry. A number of people who had taken leases on mines went bankrupt. Attempts to get set voluntary limits on production were unthinkable in a world of such individualism and mutual distrust, and an urgent appeal therefore went up for government protection.
A French company, Taix & Aycard, who were caught with a great deal of unsold sulphur, eventually suggested that they should run a government-sponsored monopoly. The French and British governments, both of whom feared a price increase, tried to stop this project, and so did Busacca and other Sicilian economists, but the King was attracted to the idea. Not only did it promise to control output and reduce exploitation of Sicily by foreigners, but a very substantial revenue would accrue to the government at Na pies, and Taix also undertook to set up a local industry for caustic soda and sulphuric acid, as well as to build twenty miles of road a year. In 1838, therefore, the French syndicate, with considerable local backing, was given a virtual monopoly, and other producers were obliged either to sell to it at a controlled price or else pay a royalty on their exports. The King himself proposed to become a shareholder in the enterprise.
Promising in theory, the idea worked badly, mainly because Taix was so anxious to clear his debts that he quickly tripled the price to the maximum permitted level and so aroused too much opposition too soon. Sulphur exports in 1839 dropped by three-quarters until they were less than half the value of exported sumac leaves. The new price stimulated the exploration of alternative sulphur deposits in Belgium and Iceland, and already people were beginning to investigate the vast quantities known to exist in the United States. Even worse, there was developed a substitute method of extracting sulphur cheaply from pyrites. In any case the monopoly proved unworkable, for extra export licences could be obtained by bribery, or else exporters sent their sulphur via Naples for which no licence was required. Palmerston, in his most bullying vein, accused Ferdinand of violating treaty and property rights and retaliated by sequestrating Sicilian ships; the King therefore ended the monopoly and made an empty promise to indemnify Taix. British merchants also put in preposterous claims for indemnification.
Sicily had to pay for this costly failure. Her extractive industry remained chaotic, and the promised chemical factories were not built, while she lost a valuable monopoly position when Germany and other countries switched to pyrites for their sulphur supplies. The mines went on working, and considerable profits continued to be made by Sicilian landowners; but the money did not go to research, or to develop new markets, or to buy the expensive excavating machinery which was already seen to be necessary, let alone to build the roads which alone could have made sulphur mining genuinely competitive.
The Neapolitan government had some hopes that landowners would co-operate in making the industry succeed. The King set an example by renouncing his legal right to io per cent of the sulphur produced, but this generous gift was taken very much as a matter of course and met no similar spirit among the landlords who, almost alone, gained from it. Hardly any of them mined their own land, and this was a serious handicap to the industry. Just as with their latifondi, they used the gabella system for the mines, and the great profits of the 1830s had taught them to keep leases short; but short leases only encouraged the manager or gabelloto to overproduce, to exploit both mines and labour uneconomically, and to resist any temptation to introduce any long-term improvements; towards the end of his lease he might even abandon the pumps and ruin the whole mine. The "immorality and greed of producers" was given by a government inspector in 1850 as one of his main problems. Landowners, it was repeatedly said, insisted on taking between 20 per cent and 40 per cent of the sulphur as their ground rent, and this royalty must have contributed more than anything else towards making Sicilian sulphur too expensive. Nor did they ever show any enthusiasm for using their profits to build up a local chemical industry which could use this precious raw material at home, and this despite the fact that yields were sometimes reported of up to 200 per cent p.a. net on invested capital.
Another obstacle, wrote the British consul, is the mutual distrust of the Sicilian capitalists. Suspicious of his countrymen, the Sicilian possessed of money shrinks from risking his capital by engaging in commercial associations or entering into partnership. The French consul in the 1830s agreed in singling out the complete lack of ‘la bonne foi’. "Ii n’y a point d’esprit d’association", he commented; "chacun vent gagner seul." Landowners could not agree among themselves, not even where, as so often happened, a mine could be properly worked only if it was extended into Someone else’s property. This was why there were so many hundreds of mines, so many tangled law suits between heirs, and why such a reliance had to be placed on government help.
LATER BOURBON SICILY 1800-1837
One cause of poverty was the high crime rate and the diversion of so much talent and energy into underworld activities which crippled economic life. Here the Bourbons were as powerless as every previous regime. To Bentinck it had seemed that as many murders were committed in Palermo as in all the rest of Europe put together, and Bentinck’s secretary had commented on the special difficulties of a social environment where personal revenge was regarded as a pleasure and a duty. The British army had reported the mysterious disappearance of many mule loads of guns on the trackless paths which served for roads; and indeed the presence of British and then Austrian troops, together with the experience of conscription and guerrilla warfare in 1820, all helped to make firearms readily available. Bands of brigands were again able to work right up to the walls of Palermo, and excellent cover was now afforded by the high walls put up by enclosing landlords to protect their orchards and hunting reserves near the city. It as still as true as it ever had been that few people dared to go unarmed in the countryside.
As usual, one of the most common crimes was the smuggling of food into towns past the excisemen. Much less common, but still serious, was the illicit control of water supplies, and we know from official reports that the drying out of the water table south of Palermo had made this quite rewarding by the 184os. The most Common crime of all was abigeato, the stealing of animals, which Was made easy by the semi-nomadic system of husbandry in the roadless interior. The threat of stealing cattle, or of setting fire to Sulphur at the mines, was commonly used to extort protection money from landowners, and strong pressure was then used to make the latfrndisti employ criminals as guardiani on their estates. These early forms of protection racket did a great deal to establish the paramount force of the gangs in the interior. Kidnapping for ransom was frequent, and once again priests, since they were literate and could write the ransom letters, were sometimes employed as go-betweens. Once we hear of a whole village moving with guns and scythes to attack a near-by village over some local controversy. Terroristic activities of all kinds were deliberately used in order to inculcate fear: a surgeon in a scientific journal of 1831 described the terrible wounds created by the sawn-off shotgun, the lupara, and noted the extreme difficulty of making any victim give the name of his assailant.
All the ingredients of the mafia were present except the word itself. Early in the century, British troops had come up against secret brotherhoods with a reputation for courage, honour, cruelty and complete disrepect for the law. Many stories were told of landowners harbouring bandit groups, sometimes leading them, but more usually just employing them as field guards. Other such groups existed which seem to have been composed of peasants defending themselves against feudal usurpation, and we hear of one commanded by the local archpriest. Not all their activities were illegal. They could be active in politics either in favour of the Bourbons or against them. One way or another the more successful of them acquired resources to corrupt witnesses, to bribe functionaries, or, if need be, to secure the conviction of innocent victims. A leading theme in the countryside was the efforts of one gang to eliminate competitors and establish boss rule over a certain area, but sometimes they worked together so that a flock of sheep could disappear and be quickly sold in a distant town. Mediators existed who might obtain the return of stolen goods for a fee, and foreign visitors quickly learnt where to go to purchase protection. All that was lacking for this intricate, illegal sub-world was a name, and that would be forthcoming in the 1860s.
It was impossible to control crime of this nature and on this scale. Twenty-five Companies at Arms policed the countryside, but altogether there were usually fewer than 350 such policemen for the whole island. Two or three times a year a company of troops would arrive in each village and round up a token number of malefactors, but this would be followed by another few months of complete impunity. Honest and efficient policemen evoked universal detestation. Dislike of the police, indeed, was one of the most important elements in the growth of opposition to the Bourbons. The Companies at Arms were privately recruited groups which contracted with the government for a fee and could then be held to account for thefts: sometimes they were the feudal retainers of a landowner in whose interest they continued to work; sometimes they extorted protection money much like any other gang, and acted in collusion with criminals so as to be able to find stolen property in return for payment. At worst the police companies were brigand bands in their own right. Not unexpectedly, therefore, in this world of omertà there were proportionally far fewer arrests, let alone convictions, than in Naples, and the problem was rather how to live with crime than how to control it. The King promised that any brigand who brought another to book would be pardoned, and if he managed to kill the leader of a band he would be rewarded as well; but other remedies were generally wishful thinking. The government once arranged with Portugal to deport some Sicilian bandits to southern Africa, but it came to nothing.
The courts were still a weak point in the system. Some things had improved: for example, justice was public, and torture was in theory abolished; there were, again in theory, monthly visits to prisons to hear complaints; and nearly all the rival systems of courts and jurisdictions had been abolished. But there was still a quite disproportionate number of lawyers in Sicily, and to all appearance they were as much involved in evading justice as in enforcing it. The salary of all except the highest judges was still so low that the best lawyers would not take the office. Hence many magistrates remained grossly ignorant of the law. Sometimes, perhaps often, judges bought their posts; and it seems to have been not uncommon for them to recoup by accepting bribes or a retainer from some powerful clients who needed an occasional victory in the courts for his prestige and his pocket. Clerks of the court, too, were generally not paid but had to live on presents, and it could be thought disrespectful if a litigant did not call privately on court officials before a case.
Application of the law therefore depended on money and power. In subsequent history, the phrase ‘Bourbon justice’ was sometimes popularly used to mean honest and independent justice, but this is probably because so many Sicilians have always been tempted to look back on the past as better than the present. Although Ferdinand introduced some admirable Neapolitan judges into Sicily, they did not understand the language and could not easily make themselves understood. Nor did they like what they found. One Neapolitan magistrate at Trapani reported that “there is scarcely a single official here who does not prostrate himself before the aristocracy and who does not intend to profit from his post”; he also mentioned that the chief government prosecutor at Catania was a known smuggler, and the jailer at Trapani used to sell back to his prisoners the very arms he had confiscated from them.
On Roads and Public Services
Where the central government might have compensated for this tariff was in the provision of essential public services, but Sicily with 10 per cent of Italy’s population received less than 3 per cent of government expenditure on such a fundamental matter as irrigation and water control. Nor was road building greatly accelerated despite all the resources of the new government, and the main road across difficult country in the centre of the island still took thirty years to complete. Because Piedmontese laws were extended to the south, all except main roads became a charge on local authorities; but this was to apply northern experience to areas where utterly different conditions applied, and the poverty and tax policy of Sicilian villages (to say nothing of the greater cost of road-building in mountainous country) meant that few local roads were built. In the thirty years after the law on provincial highways, Messina did not complete even one of the routes prescribed. Furthermore local authorities, which were dominated by the landowners, took no action to recover the sheep runs from illegal enclosure. Half a dozen proprietors constructed private roads; a few thought of clubbing together to build routes of common access, only to find that mutual distrust was an insuperable obstacle; some, on the other hand, misused their power not only to enclose existing public highways but to hinder the building of new ones, perhaps fearing that faster travel would mean the end of feudal Sicily.
The results were crippling, because half the villages remained with no access by road, and some could not even be approached on horseback, while dried-out river beds often remained the chief means of communication. Bonfadini and his committee in 1876 were prevented by rainy weather from reaching the sizable town of Sciacca by land, and yet there was not even a proper harbour or quay for those who arrived by sea. Travel from Palermo to Girgenti still involved fording a river, and Catania was still two days’ journey away. The interior of the island was so remote that news of the King’s death in 1878 took several weeks to penetrate; and to go from Bivona to Ribera twenty-five kilometres away meant following a sometimes precipitous track for five times the distance, fording a river a dozen times. Wheeled transport was thus impossible, and the Lorenzoni report of 1910 said that many Sicilians had never seen a wheeled cart. Lack of roads was therefore still a primary fact in keeping Sicily backward and much of it uninhabited. The price of wheat, the main crop in the interior, still rose to being twice as high by the time it reached the coast. For the same reason, mechanisation on the farm and artificial fertilisers were too expensive.
The Sulphur Industry
The sulphur industry, above all, needed better communications, for most of the mines were in the undeveloped provinces of Caltanissetta and Girgenti. Sulphur prices began to decline about I875, but output went on increasing till the end of the century. By that time about five hundred mines were being worked and it was said that nearly a quarter of a million people were dependent on them. But a new steam process then opened up the huge deposits in Louisiana, and soon American sulphur began to reach Europe at under the cost price of all Sicilian produce except that from about a dozen mines. This was a tremendous blow, yet for many reasons little could be done about it, and mutual distrust among owners and managers made it very hard for them to take collective action. Demand was increasing for pesticides, as also for sulphate of ammonia and superphosphates, but insufficient was done to develop ancillary sulphuric acid or fertiliser plants, and production techniques were so imperfect that a third of the sulphur was still burnt as a fuel to smelt the rest. The new Gill method made the process much cheaper, but its foreign inventor could not secure payment of royalties, and this was typical of a general attitude which hindered the introduction of technical improvements. Seventy-five families, the latfondisti of the area, owned most of the sulphur industry, and such was their political pressure that the Piedmontese mining law, quite exceptionally, was not extended to Sicily in 1861. In northern Italy the government controlled subsoil rights, and property could if necessary be expropriated for mining, just as neighbouring mines could also be forced to run as one unit. In Sicily, however, the landowners kept their rights of property, lamentable though this seemed to those who wanted large mines, rationally developed, and efficiently costed and financed. Small-holders, moreover, proved as restrictive and unenterprising as anyone. The mines were mostly let to gabelloti, and the fact that leases were generally for only nine years, or less, discouraged the introduction of machines and encouraged wasteful overproduction. According to official figures the landlords continued to take between 20 and 40 per cent of the profits in return for no work and no monetary investment, and one instance was mentioned in parliament of 67 per cent. This alone would explain why Sicilian sulphur became uncompetitive. Quite apart from the additional percentage due to the gabelloto, ground rent for a mine could be more than the wages of all the miners put together.
Inside the mines, most of the ore was still carried to the surface on the backs of children whose daily stint might be thirty journeys to the surface and who worked anything from six to twelve hours a day. A government commission in 1875 recommended a total prohibition against using women, or children under 14, as carriers; but a first tentative law in 1879 merely forbade the employment of girls and allowed that of boys only if they were over ten years old. Even this could not be enforced, and any further attempt to reduce child labour encountered dozens of well-organised representations from mine owners, municipalities and Chambers of Commerce. These representatives claimed to speak in the interests of the carusi themselves and their parents, but it was also stated specifically that, without child labour, most mines would be unprofitable. Few people made it their business to consider whether this cheap labour, by preventing mechanisation and keeping inefficient mines productive, was not a major economic as well as a moral disaster. The contratto di carusato was unknown elsewhere in Italy, even in the equally poor mining region of Sardinia; though in the pumice caves of the Sicilian Lipari islands, according to a private report by Norman Douglas in 1895, children were given some of the more strenuous jobs and could be employed as early as the age of five.
The effects were appalling. The mining areas of Sicily had more homicides than anywhere in Italy, and much of their male population was totally unfit for military service. Many miners lived in underground grottos; others, and many of the children, lived permanently inside the mines. Labour was regularly organised by mafiosi to whom payments were due from both sides of the industry, and a caruso who fled from a mine without redeeming his indenture did so at his peril. Other criminal organisations existed at the ports and took a cut on exports. Pirandello’s father, the manager of a sulphur mine, reported five attempts on his life by the local mafia, and probably violence was used to prevent price cuts or labour economies. Road and rail construction were forcibly opposed by the mule owners, because the wheeled transport which might have saved the industry would have forced them to change their job. Likewise at Ragusa, the muleteers refused to carry asphalt from the local mines to the railway station, because they obtained much more money for going all the way to the coastal ports; and they, too, were quite ready to back their monopoly by violence.
Government policy was therefore only one factor, and not the most important, in delaying economic development. Some Sicilians had irrationally imagined that the risorgimento would mean lower taxes and greater prosperity, and were disappointed when the reality proved more complicated and upsetting. The change from paternalism was no doubt harsher than it need have been; but in order to make Italy industrially strong, Sicily had to make some sacrifices. The exposure of her industry and agriculture to northern competition, however harsh, was a prerequisite of economic progress. It may be added that Sicily sometimes suffered when exceptions were made to the general rule: for instance, Florio was strong enough to extract a large official bounty for Sicilian shipping, but this eliminated some of the competition which might have reduced freight charges, and still did not prevent a catastrophic bankruptcy of one of his rivals in 1876. To take another exception, tax differentials favoured the latfondi, just as mining laws favoured the sulphur mine owners, but in both cases this was money wasted and ultimately a depressant to the Sicilian economy.
Government investment continued to be far heavier in the north, and there was bound to be some chafing by Sicilians against such apparently unfair treatment; but grumbling was also an excuse for not having to examine their own shortcomings.