Trust,business groups and social capital: building a Protestant entrepreneurial network in nineteenth-century Naples

Abstract

This article explores the behaviour of a group of foreign entrepreneurs (mainly Swiss and Germans) who settled in southern Italy during the nineteenth century, establishing cotton manufacturing, creating a religious community, importing technologies, machines and patterns of management. These entrepreneurs shared a high level of training and culture and they all belonged to Protestant denominations. In the context of this foreign entrepreneurial community, the article examines the role played by friendship, kinship, origins, education and religion in shaping the network that linked groups of Protestant businessmen across Europe, emphasizing how these manufacturing firms relied on forms of cooperation, solidarity and physical proximity that were consolidated and perpetuated across more than three generations.     

Archaeometric investigation of Roman tesserae from Herculaneum (Italy) by the combined use of complementary micro-destructive analytical techniques

Vitreous tesserae from two mosaics in Herculaneum (Italy) dating from the 1st century AD have been investigated in order to gather information on Imperial Age opaque glass. The combined use of complementary micro-destructive analytical techniques, namely optical microscopy (OM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) with energy dispersive spectrometry (EDS), inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD) allowed to define the nature of formers, fluxes, chromophores and opacifying compounds and to determine the type of raw materials employed for their introduction. The results confirmed the high technological level of Imperial Age glassmakers and clarified some details of the production processes. Experimental data have been obtained concerning formation of antimony-based opacifiers. The presence of tin-containing Ca- and Pb-antimonates has been ascertained in various green, yellow and turquoise tesserae. Moreover, unusual divergences from the established Roman age ‘low magnesia–low potash’ (LMLK) glass composition have been found for some red and green samples.     

Elite migrations in modern Italy: patterns of settlement,integration and identity negotiation

Abstract

Francesco Crispi has often appeared a paradoxical figure. In the earlier part of his life he was a revolutionary republican and a friend of Mazzini. After 1860 he accepted the monarchy, but remained very much a man of the Left and in many ways a quintessential democrat. Yet he ended his career as an authoritarian Prime Minister, a vigorous opponent of the Far Left, and an imperialist, who prorogued parliament and contemplated dispensing with representative government altogether. This article contends that Crispi's career has more coherence than is commonly suggested; it focuses on an important but hitherto neglected aspect of his thinking, namely the problem of how to achieve a sense of national consciousness in Italy through ‘political education’. The article traces the development of the idea of national political education throughout Crispi's career and argues that his two terms as Prime Minister in 1887–91 and 1893–6 can only be fully understood in the context of his long‐standing concern with this problem.