Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento: Essays in Honour of Denis Mack Smith

Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento contains ten essays written in honour of Denis Mack Smith by leading British and Italian specialists. The volume is intended both as a tribute to Denis Mack Smith’s outstanding contribution to Italian history and as an attempt to open up wider debate on Italian society and politics in the period of the Risorgimento, bringing aspects of nineteenth-century Italian politics and social history into a comparative European context. Topics discussed in the volume include the collapse of the ancien regime in southern Italy; the Italian armies in the Napoleonic period; debates on poverty in Italy and Europe in the early nineteenth century; family and marriage; the origins of the mafia in Sicily; peasant protest in the Po valley; Garibaldi and England in the 1860s; the emergence of an Italian middle class; women workers; and the politics of the critic Francesco De Sanctis.