| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Enrico Dal Lago. Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815–1861. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2005. Pp. xviii, 372. $62.95.
Enrico Dal Lago's book is an exemplary model of lucid comparative history. He has read widely in two fields: the American South that formed its own new country in 1861, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies that was incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy the same year. Hence two styles of nationalism passed in the night; the Risorgimento in Italy finished the Bourbon state, and war and reconstruction soon ended the other. Dal Lago's nuanced study will appeal to readers in these and other fields.	1
Dal Lago required a sensible basis for this comparative study, and he found the agrarian elites. Slavery and racism, largely absent in the standard history of southern Italy (the Mezzogiorno), did not provide a common theme and possibly made laboring people—Italian peasants and American slaves—simply incomparable. Hence this study treats the two regions from the point of view of their reforming elites, who practiced distinctive styles of patriarchy and paternalism. Common impulses among Bourbon planters and nobles yielded many valuable insights, sustained by Dal Lago's archival research in Naples and Charleston, among other places. Contemporary letters illuminate the hopes and attitudes of powerful families like the Allstons, Bruces, Balls, and the Pignatelli, Lanza, and Savarese. Articulate and literate members of these elites left many records to exploit. To the extent that they were modernizers and agricultural reformers, they helped to shape the new nineteenth-century economies of regions where cotton, and wine, citrus, and sulfur emerged to enrich those who understood their possibilities. Anyone interested in elites will find this study teeming with fresh insights on how they replenish and inspire their ranks.	. . .

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