“A remote and sorrowful inheritance”. Agricultural credit, colonization and reclamation in postunitarian Sicily

Abstract

Right after the country’s unification, Italy sought to establish new rules for the modernization of its farming system, thus moving towards new credit tools for financing agricultural transactions, such as loans, notes, bills of exchange, and banker's acceptances. The politics established until the advent of Fascism and in the early Republican period were marked by several legislative actions in support of setting up dedicated offices for managing farming credit within major Italian banks, fostering volunteer, and later on mandatory, farmers’ association for claiming land ownership and consequently launching, especially in malarial areas, land reclamation. The achievement of these objectives turned out to be prevented by the inadequacy of land reform and the opposition of landowners (latifondisti). Sicily’s landscape retains traces of reform failure, especially in the remainders of the 37 villages founded by the “Ente di colonizzazione del latifondo siciliano” during the Fascist period.