Agrarian Elites
Subtitle: American Slaveholders And Southern Italian Landowners, 1815-1861
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Published: November 2005
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 372
ISBN-13: 9780807130872
Subjects: Social classes; Social history; United States - State & Local - South; c 1800 to c 1900; General; Economic aspects; Southern States; History; History - U.S.; History: World; Italy; USA; Europe - Italy; United States - Antebellum Era; Agriculture; Slaveholders; Modern - 19th Century; United States - General; 19th century; Elite (Social sciences)
Description: "Between 1815 and 1861, American slaveholders and southern Italian landowners presided over the economic and social life of two predominantly agricultural regions, the U.S. South and Italy's Mezzogiorno. Enrico Dal Lago ingeniously compares these agrarian elites, demonstrating how the study of each enhances our understanding of the other as well as of their shared nineteenth-century world."

"Agrarian Elites charts the parallel developments of plantations and latifondi in relation to changes in the world economy. At the same time, it examines the spread of "paternalistic" models of family relations and of slave and free-labor management that accompanied the rise of large groups of American slaveholders and southern Italian landed proprietors in the early-to-mid-1800s."

"Dal Lago brings together two subjects that have generated considerable debate and research: systems of slave and nominally free labor and the elites who employed them, and nineteenth-century nationalism. With its pathbreaking approach and singular and comparative insights, Agrarian Elites will inform not only American and Italian studies but also the very practice of comparative history."--Jacket.