Far from the passive property. An entrepreneurial landowner in the nineteenth century Papal State

Abstract

Relying on various primary sources, this article aims to explore the experience of the Roman Prince Alessandro Torlonia as entrepreneurial landowner during the nineteenth century. The analysis of two specific cases in different areas of the Papal State will be used to identify the peculiar features of Torlonia agrarian entrepreneurship that granted him high profitability. His experience is even more interesting if considered in the light of the backward context of the country, on the economic periphery of Europe; at the same time it suggests a reconsideration of the consolidated vision of absolute immobilism of the area.

Keywords:

• Agrarian entrepreneurship
• innovation
• aristocratic economic behaviour
• investments
• élites’ business activities
• Italian landownership
• Rome
• Papal State
• Italy
• nineteenth century
• Ager Romanus
• reclamation

Disclosure statement

In accordance with Taylor & Francis policy and my ethical obligation as a researcher, I declare that there is no potential conflict of interest.

Notes

1 A copy of the manuscript of de Vernouillet, with the title De l’état actuel de l’agriculture dans les Etats Romains, dated April 1855, has been consulted in French Archives Diplomatiques du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Mémoires et documents. Rome. Vol. 105. The authoritative study, carried out in the field, was taken up by many journals of the period and was translated into Italian and published in 1860 in the prestigious series Biblioteca dell’Economista with the title Roma agricola. Stato attuale dell’agricoltura negli Stati romani (version cited in this article).

2 According to the historian Marco Meriggi (1994), in the Italian aristocratic mentality it was common ‘an idea of land as a source of rents, pleasure in status, and convenient deposit for capital that should be achieved using the most favourable and least risky methods possible’ (pp. 169–170). See also Malatesta (1999), Huggett (1975), Spring (1977), and Bush (1984). These authors deal with the large estates in European agriculture, both in their diffuse passive property model of administration and in the more active management style emerging in some areas.

3 Document in Archivio Torlonia, file 265, Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS).

4 This attitude was penetratingly observed in 1836 by the Milanese philosopher Carlo Cattaneo (2006, p. 98).

5 On these aspects see the French economist Alfred de Foville (1893) and the Italian economist and politician Francesco Saverio Nitti (1904).

6 The deeds of those purchases, by Notaio Felice Argenti, are stored in Segretari e Cancellieri della RCA, Vol. 192, Archivio di Stato di Roma (ASR).

7 On the crisis of Papal State’s finances in the 1830s, see Felisini (1990, pp. 35–58).

8 Documents relating to the purchase in Chirografi pontifici dal 1827 al 1831, Coll. C, n. 287, ASR.

9 Documents relating to the purchase in Chirografi pontifici dal 1827 al 1831, Coll. C, n. 454, ASR.

10 Documents relating to the purchases and deeds by Notaio Filippo Bacchetti, 1853–1856, are in Trenta Notai Capitolini, ASR.

11 Direzione generale del Censo di Roma. ‘Notizie statistiche dell’Agro Romano’, Cancelleria del Censo, Serie XIX, ASR. See also Zucchini (1956).

12 Papal brief by Gregory XVI of 7 July 1840, stored in Archivio Torlonia, file 150, ACS.

13 See the authors cited in note 2.

14 Giovanni Torlonia bought the land for 94,000 scudi at the end of the eighteenth century from the Arciconfraternita del Sancta Sanctorum. Deed by Notaio Nardi of 21 March 1797, in Archivio Torlonia, file 197/2, ACS.

15 Documents in Archivio Torlonia, file 80, ACS.

16 Documents in Archivio Torlonia, files 74 and 197, ACS.

17 Documents in Archivio Torlonia, file 66, ACS.

18 This trend explained the increasing surface assigned to grazing in the nineteenth century Latium countryside, in a system linked to archaic social conditions, but flexible to the market trends; see Valenti (1893, pp. 128–130).

19 Ministero di Agricoltura Industria e Commercio. Commissione Agraria, Perizie sui fondi compresi nella zona soggetta al bonificamento agrario, in virtù della legge 8 luglio 1883 n. 1489; and Bonificamento dell’Agro Romano, Rapporto della Commissione Agraria sulle Proprietà del Signor Principe D. Alessandro Torlonia, 1883, MAIC, V, files 429–430, in ACS. See Bevilacqua and Rossi-Doria (1984).

20 Documents in Archivio Torlonia, file 74, ACS.

21 Documents in Archivio Torlonia, file 74, ACS. See the case of Vicenza, in the Veneto region, considered by C. Fumian (1996) in his book Possidenti, and the case of Tuscany studied by G. Biagioli (2000) in her book Il modello del proprietario imprenditore nella Toscana dell’Ottocento.

22 Documents in Archivio Torlonia, file 74, ACS.

23 Documents in Archivio Torlonia, file 123, ACS.See also Regione Emilia Romagna. Ente Regionale di Sviluppo Agricolo (1984).

24 Documents in Archivio Torlonia, file 104, ACS.

25 Documents are under the heading ‘Ufficio tecnico’ in Archivio Torlonia, file 25, ACS.

26 The close linkage established between one text and another meant that this topos had entered into the travellers’ imagination in a way so powerful as to influence their expectations and narrations of it; see Ditchfield (2000, p. 70).

27 Pescosolido (1979), Terra e nobiltà.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniela Felisini

Daniela Felisini is full professor in economic and business history – Jean Monnet Chair; director of MA in European History; member of the Scientific Committee of PhD School in History and Social Sciences; president of AUSE (Italian branch of ECSA – European Community Study Association); member of a number of scientific boards (Fondazione ASSI, Istituto Storico per la storia del Risorgimento Italiano, Fondazione Gramsci et al.); she is rapporteur to a large number of national and international conferences, and participant to national and international research projects. Her main fields of research are: role of the state in the economy and state-owned enterprises (managers); economic élites; banks and bankers in the European financial market (nineteenth–twentieth century); history of the European economic integration process and of transnational economic relations.