Journal articles on the topic 'Industrialization – Italy – History'

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1

Tilly, Louise A., and Michael L. Blim. "Made in Italy: Small-Scale Industrialization and Its Consequences." American Historical Review 97, no. 5 (December 1992): 1562. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2166049.

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2

Kertzer, David I., and Michael L. Blim. "Made in Italy: Small-Scale Industrialization and Its Consequences." Social Forces 69, no. 4 (June 1991): 1269. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2579322.

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3

Esposto, Alfredo G. "Italian Industrialization and the Gerschenkronian “Great Spurt”: A Regional Analysis." Journal of Economic History 52, no. 2 (June 1992): 353–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022050700010780.

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Since the appearance of Gerschenkron's 1955 paper, economic historians have discussed extensively the industrial transformation of Italy from 1896 to 1908, which Gerschenkron claimed was the period of Italy's first big or great “spurt.” Those discussions, however, have been in terms of national aggregates. This article attempts to create instead a regional view of Italian industrialization for this period. My analysis of regional output for two benchmark years suggests there were three regional patterns of industrialization.
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4

Federico, Giovanni, and Michelangelo Vasta. "Was industrialization an escape from the commodity lottery? Evidence from Italy, 1861–1939." Explorations in Economic History 47, no. 2 (April 2010): 228–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2010.01.001.

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5

Rota, Mauro, and Jacob Weisdorf. "Italy and the Little Divergence in Wages and Prices: New Data, New Results." Journal of Economic History 80, no. 4 (September 24, 2020): 931–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022050720000467.

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We present new wage indices for skilled and unskilled construction workers in Italy. Our data avoid multiple issues pestering earlier wages, making our new indices the first consistent ones for early-modern Italy. Our improved wages, obtained from the St. Peter’s Church in Rome, consolidate the view that urban Italy began a prolonged downturn during the seventeenth century. They also offer sustenance to the idea that epidemics instigated the decline. Comparison with new construction wages for London shows that Roman workers outearned their early-modern English counterparts. This suggests that high wages alone were not enough to trigger industrialization.
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6

Kertzer, David I. "Class Formation and Political Mobilization in Turn-of-the-Century Milan." Social Science History 19, no. 2 (1995): 239–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0145553200017314.

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In the late nineteenth century, as today, Milan stood at the center of Italy's most advanced economic developments, and served in effect as the financial capital of the country. Well before industrialization had taken hold in most of the Italian peninsula, Milan's industry—tied to developments further north in Europe—was sprouting. Moreover, as the three articles that follow clearly show, Milan—rather than the Italian capital, Rome—was at the heart of many modern political developments in Italy.
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Bull, Anna. "THE SOUTH, THE STATE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: REMARKS ON PIERO BEVILACQUA'S ‘OLD AND NEW IN THE SOUTHERN QUESTION’." Modern Italy 2 (August 1997): 72–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13532949708454779.

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I am taking the opportunity created by the recent introduction of a section entitled ‘Contexts and Debates’ to put forward some considerations regarding Bevilacqua's contribution on the southern question, which appeared in the last number of this journal. By doing so, I hope to promote a stimulating debate on the South of Italy today and on the way forward for reversing the current process of de-industrialization in the region and the widening gap between the South and the rest of the country. Ideally, the debate should encourage different points of view and interpretations without reopening old wounds or leading to entrenched positions.
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8

Fontana, Giovanni Luigi, and Giorgio Riello. "Seamless Industrialization: The Lanificio Rossi and the Modernization of the Wool Textile Industry in Nineteenth-Century Italy." Textile History 36, no. 2 (November 2005): 168–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/004049605x61555.

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9

Amatori, Franco. "IRI: financial intermediary or entrepreneurial state?" Financial History Review 27, no. 3 (November 10, 2020): 436–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0968565020000219.

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The Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI), a state-controlled holding company, was founded in 1933. Its original mission was to prevent the collapse of Italy's largest universal banks by taking over their huge industrial shareholdings. As a consequence, the historiography traditionally associates it with the concept of ‘entrepreneurial state’. This article aims to challenge this interpretation by focusing on the ideas and actions of three prominent figures: Alberto Beneduce, the IRI's first chairman; Donato Menichella, Beneduce's right-hand man who became governor of the Bank of Italy after World War II; and Pasquale Saraceno, a technocrat who spent his entire career as one of the IRI's top managers. Beneduce and Menichella regarded the IRI as a financial intermediary open to private shareholders. To Saraceno, by contrast, the IRI was an expression of a Catholic ideology that entrusted to the state the mission of promoting the industrialization of the south. This view, which aimed at reducing regional inequalities in order to complete the country's political unification, prevailed only in the second half of the 1950s. By trying to blend profit maximization with political and social goals, this strategy sowed the seeds of the IRI's decline and eventual demise.
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10

Levy, Carl. "The centre and the suburbs: Social protest and modernization in Milan and Turin, 1898–1917." Modern Italy 7, no. 2 (November 2002): 171–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1353294022000012961.

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SummaryThis article focuses on two points of disorder and social-political tension in the histories of Milan and Turin: 1898 and 1917. It examines the reasons for different shapes of protest during the ‘ Fatti di Maggio ‘ in 1898 and the events in the summer of 1917. Both cities are the hubs of Italian industrialization and modernization but in 1898, 1917 and later in 1919-20, ‘pre-modern’ protests about the price of bread were melded together with modern political mobilization. This article also examines the growth of working-class suburbs in each city and their relationship to the ‘historic city centres’ on the one hand and the rural hinterland on the other. The uniqueness of protest in each city is related to the political economy and politics of Milan and Turin and the specific relationships between city centre, suburbs and hinterlands in each. The importance of municipal history for the national historical narrative of modern Italy is thus emphasized in this article.
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11

Segnana, Michela, Klaus Oeggl, Luisa Poto, Jacopo Gabrieli, Daniela Festi, Werner Kofler, Piergiorgio Cesco Frare, Claudio Zaccone, and Carlo Barbante. "Holocene vegetation history and human impact in the eastern Italian Alps: a multi-proxy study on the Coltrondo peat bog, Comelico Superiore, Italy." Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 29, no. 4 (October 1, 2019): 407–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00334-019-00749-y.

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Abstract The present study aims to reconstruct vegetation development, climate changes and human impact using an ombrotrophic peat core from the Coltrondo bog in the eastern Italian Alps. Evidence from pollen, micro-charcoal, major and trace elements, and lead isotopes from this 7,900 years old peat deposit has been combined, and several climatic oscillations and phases of human impact detected. In particular, human presence was recorded in this area of the Alps from about 650 cal bc, with periods of increased activity at the end of the Middle Ages and also at the end of the 19th century, as evidenced by both human-related pollen and the increase in micro-charcoal particles. The enrichment factor of lead (EFPb) increased since the Roman period and the Middle Ages, suggesting mainly mining activities, whereas the advent of industrialization in the 20th century is marked by the highest EFPb values in the whole core. The EFPb data are strongly supported by the 206Pb/207Pb values and these are in general agreement with the historical information available. Therefore, the multi-proxy approach used here has allowed detection of climatic events and human impact patterns in the Comelico area starting from the Iron Age, giving new insights into the palaeoecology as well as the course of the interaction among humans, climate and ecosystems in this part of the eastern Italian Alps.
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Liverani, Luca, and David Gallar Hernández. "Recampesinizando los usi civici: Estrategias socioecológicas tradicionales de manejo del territorio entre pastores en Baunei (Cerdeña)." Historia Agraria Revista de agricultura e historia rural, no. 85 (September 29, 2021): 213–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.26882/histagrar.085e01g.

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Agrarian industrialization and new food regimes have radically changed socioecologies of local and global agrarian structures displacing traditional socioecological strategies of land use and management. This paper analyses this transformation from an agroecological perspective by raising the question of how the agrarian activities and the uses of commons have changed in the municipality of Baunei (Sardinia, Italy) with a special focus on livestock farming. Ethnographic research –through participant observation methods and open and semi-structured in-depth interviews– has enabled to reconstruct the traditional use of land and the strategies of its socioecological management as well as the changes produced by agricultural modernization and modernity at large, and finally, to unveil new perspectives of re-peasantization among Baunei’s shepherds to obtain more feasible and sustainable farms. This study highlights tendencies of re-peasantization in land management strategies and the seek for cooperative answers, including an internal reflection on the socioecological meaning of traditional strategies for managing the commons (in usi cicivi) and provides insights to the new potentials of such management and social cooperation practices together with new agricultural techniques and organizational structures in building more sustainable and just food and agricultural systems.
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13

Rakonjac, Aleksandar. "IZMEĐU TRANSFERA TEHNOLOGIJA I DOMAĆIH REŠENJA: IZGRADNJA MOTORNE INDUSTRIJE U JUGOSLAVIJI 1945−1952." Istorija 20. veka 40, no. 2/2022 (August 1, 2022): 405–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.29362/ist20veka.2022.2.rak.405-422.

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This article aims to shed light on how the Yugoslav motor industry in the first post-war years sought to overcome the difficulties of mastering the technology of motor vehicle production on a modern industrial basis. During this period, gigantic efforts were made to get the country out of economic backwardness in the shortest possible time. The motor industry had one of the key roles on the path of modernization of the economy, and the state accordingly paid special attention to the construction of factories in this branch of industry. Reliance on pre-war pioneering moves of truck fabrication based on a license purchased in Czechoslovakia was the main capital with which began the process of emancipation of the domestic motor industry. Due to the impossibility to independently solve the issue of construction of all types of motor vehicles, help was sought abroad. Negotiations with the USSR and Hungary were started first, but even before the severance of all relations caused by the conflict between the Yugoslav and Soviet leadership, this attempt to establish cooperation failed. In the following years, after the failure in the East, the state concentrated all its efforts on establishing strong economic ties with the West. Thanks to favorable foreign policy circumstances, the reorientation of state policy had achieved great economic benefits for the further construction of the motor industry. Licenses for the fabrication of the “Ansaldo TCA/60” tractor were purchased, thus resolving the production of all heavy types of vehicles, as well as the production of oil-powered engines. By the early 1950s, cooperation had been established with several renowned companies from Germany, Italy and Switzerland, which provided opportunities for the Yugoslav engine industry to keep pace with the latest technological solutions. However, despite the transfer of technology that played a dominant role in raising the national car and tractor industry, domestic forces played a significant role in the production of the first air-cooled engine, a light wheeled tractor with a gasoline engine and the “Prvenac” truck. The Yugoslav example has shown that reliance on one’s own strength and international cooperation are two inextricably important factors in overcoming all the difficulties that come with the forced industrialization.
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14

Iona, Alfonsina, Leone Leonida, and Giuseppe Sobbrio. "‘O convergence, where art thou?’ Regional growth and industrialization in Italy1." Journal of Modern Italian Studies 13, no. 3 (September 2008): 366–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13545710802218585.

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15

Blikharskyi, Roman. "«The truth and her shadow»: anti-modern rhetoric on the pages of the Galiсian religious journals of the second half of the XIX — early XX century." Proceedings of Research and Scientific Institute for Periodicals, no. 10(28) (January 2020): 63–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.37222/2524-0331-2020-10(28)-6.

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In the XIX century and the first half of XX century, scientists A. Comte, M. Weber, H. Spencer, E. Durkheim, G. Simmel, and Ch. Cooley developed a theory explaining the social reality in which a person exists. The result of their work was a theory of modernization that describes a transition from the traditional to the modern society. Further on, due to various historical vicissitudes, the theory of modernization has undergone significant changes. In the first half of the XX century universal theory of modernization has been criticized. By shaping a new approach to the study of global transformations in society, scientists began considering cases of nonlinear progress or regression, since the model of the Western society’s functioning does not always adequately apply to the description of the functioning of other societies. Among the presumable counterpoints in the history of civilization, which scientists define as the beginning of modernity, are The Age of Discovery, The Industrial Revolution, and The French Revolution. Specifically, the French Revolution has significantly influenced the process of secularization of the European society, and contributed to the diminished presence of the Catholic Church on the international political scene, as well 86 as a gradual removal of religion from the life of modern human. The media played a significant role in reforming the socio-political, cultural and economic dimensions of the Western society, as the press was an important means of promoting modernization ideas. At the same time, the religious press was a key platform of criticism of modernization. At the end of the XIX — early XX centuries, a number of articles there were published on the topic of modernization in the secular and religious spheres, on the pages of the Lviv religious journals: «Ruskii Sion», «Dushpastyr», «Nyva». The authors of the «Nyva» journal in their publications rested upon the concept of modernism put forward by the Vatican. The latter concept concerned the young generation of Catholic theologians in Italy, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany. They were united by their shared views concerning the Christian Church’s status in a changing world. Catholic reformers sought to revise the Catholic Church doctrine, taking into account the relevant trends of subjectivism and criticism of that time. The authorship of the «Ruskii Sion» and «Dushpastyr» criticized the ideas of reducing the influence of religion in science, culture and politics. The authors of these journals argued that the enemy of modern society is not the Church, but speculative modernism, which is a source of false values. On the contrary, the church is a deterrent for the modern political and economic system absorbing human. We conclude that it is incorrect to presume that modern Ukraine (with the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church as one of the major denominations) was molded under the influence of religion, gi ven that the key processes of modernization (urbanization, industrialization, and so on) were accomplished accordingly to the model diverging with the Catholic, Christian, ideals. Therefore, the question of the peculiarities of the scenario of the modernization of the Ukrainian society and the role played by religion and the religious press in this process remains open. Keywords: religious press, modernization, civilization, secularization, Christianity, Catholicism, Church document, religious modernism.
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16

Licio, Vania. "The Italian coal shortage: the price of import and distribution, 1861–1911." Cliometrica, October 9, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11698-022-00256-7.

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AbstractThis paper estimates a measure of coal price for all NUTS3 Italian provinces between 1861 and 1911. Italy was a latecomer country and its late industrialization was characterized by the absence of coal in a time when the steam engine powered factory work. The new variable accounts for the main input factor of manufacturing production during that period in which the Italian economy registered a long-term growth of GDP and an increase in its industrial activity. The measure allows to speculate on the importance of coal for Italian industrialization and on the origins of the North–South divide.
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Federico, Giovanni, Alessandro Nuvolari, Leonardo Ridolfi, and Michelangelo Vasta. "The race between the snail and the tortoise: skill premium and early industrialization in Italy (1861–1913)." Cliometrica, December 23, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11698-019-00200-2.

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18

Johnston, Kate Sarah. "“Dal Sulcis a Sushi”: Tradition and Transformation in a Southern Italian Tuna Fishing Community." M/C Journal 17, no. 1 (March 18, 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.764.

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I miss the ferry to San Pietro, so after a long bus trip winding through the southern Sardinian rocky terrain past gum trees, shrubs, caper plants, and sheep, I take refuge from the rain in a bar at the port. While I order a beer and panini, the owner, a man in his early sixties, begins to chat asking me why I’m heading to the island. For the tuna, I say, to research cultural practices and changes surrounding the ancient tuna trap la tonnara, and for the Girotonno international tuna festival, which coincides with the migration of the Northern Bluefin Tuna and the harvest season. This year the slogan of the festival reads Dal Sulcis a Sushi ("From Sulcis to Sushi"), a sign of the diverse tastes to come. Tuna here is the best in the world, he exclaims, a sentiment I hear many times over whilst doing fieldwork in southern Italy. He excitedly gestures for me to follow. We walk into the kitchen and on a long steel bench sits a basin covered with cloth. He uncovers it, and proudly poised, waits for my reaction. A large pinkish-brown loin of cooked tuna sits in brine. I have never tasted tuna in this way, so to share in his enthusiasm I conjure my interest in the rich tuna gastronomy found in this area of Sardinia called Sulcis. I’m more familiar with the clean taste of sashimi or lightly seared tuna. As I later experience, traditional tuna preparations in San Pietro are far from this. The most notable characteristic is that the tuna is thoroughly cooked or the flesh or organs are preserved with salt by brining or drying. A tuna steak cooked in the oven is robust and more like meat from the land than the sea in its flavours, colour, and texture. This article is about taste: the taste of, and tastes for, tuna in a traditional fishing community. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork and is part of a wider inquiry into the place of tradition and culture in seafood sustainability discourses and practices. In this article I use the notion of a taste network to explore the relationship between macro forces—international markets, stock decline and marine regulations—and transformations within local cultures of tuna production and consumption. Taste networks frame the connections between taste in a gustatory sense, tastes as an aesthetic preference and tasting as a way of learning about and attuning to modes and meanings surrounding tuna. As Antoine Hennion asserts, taste is more than a connoisseurship of an object, taste represents a cultural activity that concerns a wide range of practices, exchanges and attachments. Elspeth Probyn suggests that taste “acts as a connector between history, place, things, and people” (65) and “can also come to form communities: local places that are entangled in the global” (62). Within this framework, taste moves away from Bourdieu’s notion of taste as a social distinction towards an understanding of taste as created through a network of entities—social, biological, technological, and so forth. It turns attention to the mundane activities and objects of tuna production and consumption, the components of a taste network, and the everyday spaces where tradition and transformation are negotiated. For taste to change requires a transformation of the network (or components of that network) that bring such tastes into existence. These networks and their elements form the very meaning, matter, and moments of tradition and culture. As Hennion reminds us through his idea of “reservoir(s) of difference” (100), there are a range of diverse tastes that can materialise from the interactions of humans with objects, in this case tuna. Yet, taste networks can also be rendered obsolete. When a highly valued and endangered species like Bluefin is at the centre of such networks, there are material, ethical, and even political limitations to some tastes. In a study that follows three scientists as they attempt to address scallop decline in Brest and St Brieuc Bay, Michael Callon advocates for “the abandonment of all prior distinction between the natural and the social” (1). He draws attention to networks of actors and significant moments, rather than pre-existing categories, to figure the contours of power. This approach is particularly useful for social research that involves science, technology and the “natural” world. In my own research in San Pietro, the list of human and non-human actors is long and spans the local to the global: Bluefin (in its various meanings and as an entity with its own agency), tonnara owners, fishermen, technologies, fish shops and restaurants, scientific observers, policy (local, regional, national, European and international), university researchers, the sea, weather, community members, Japanese and Spanish buyers, and markets. Local discourses surrounding tuna and taste articulate human and non-human entanglements in quite particular ways. In San Pietro, as with much of Italy, notions of place, environment, identity, quality, and authenticity are central to the culture of tuna production and consumption. Food products are connected to place through ecological, cultural and technological dimensions. In Morgan, Marsden, and Murdoch’s terms this frames food and tastes in relation to a spatial dimension (its place of origin), a social dimension (its methods of production and distribution), and a cultural dimension (its perceived qualities and reputation). The place name labelling of canned tuna from San Pietro is an example of a product that represents the notion of provenance. The practice of protecting traditional products is well established in Italy through appellation programs, much like the practice of protecting terroir products in France. It is no wonder that the eco-gastronomic movement Slow Food developed in Italy as a movement to protect traditional foods, production methods, and biodiversity. Such discourses and movements like Slow Food create local/global frameworks and develop in relation to the phenomenon and ideas like globalisation, industrialization, and homogenisation. This study is based on ethnographic fieldwork in San Pietro over the 2013 tuna season. This included interviews with some thirty participants (fishers, shop keepers, locals, restaurateurs, and tonnara owners), secondary research into international markets, marine regulations, and environmental movements, and—of course—a gustatory experience of tuna. Walking down the main street the traditions of the tonnara and tuna are palpable. On a first impression there’s something about the streets and piazzas that is akin to Zukin’s notion of “vernacular spaces”, “sources of identity and belonging, affective qualities that the idea of intangible culture expresses, refines and sustains” (282). At the centre is the tonnara, which refers to the trap (a labyrinth of underwater nets) as well as the technique of tuna fishing and land based processing activities. For centuries, tuna and the tonnara have been at the centre of community life, providing employment, food security, and trade opportunities, and generating a wealth of ecological knowledge, a rich gastronomy based on preserved tuna, and cultural traditions like the famous harvest ritual la mattanza (the massacre). Just about every organ is preserved by salting and drying. The most common is the female ovary sac, which becomes bottarga. Grated onto pasta it has a strong metallic offal flavour combined with the salty tang of the sea. There is also the male equivalent lusciami, a softer consistency and flavour, as well as dried heart and lungs. There is canned tuna, a continuation of the tradition of brining and barrelling, but these are no ordinary cans. Each part of the tuna is divided into parts corresponding loosely to anatomy but more closely to quality based on textures, colour, and taste. There is the ventresca from the belly, the most prized cut because of its high fat content. Canned in olive oil or brine, a single can of this cut sells for around 30 Euros. Both the canned variety or freshly grilled ventresca is a sumptuous experience, soft and rich. Change is not new to San Pietro. In the long history of the tonnara there have been numerous transformations resulting from trade, occupation, and dominant economic systems. As Stefano Longo describes, with the development of capitalism and industrialization, the socio-economic structure of the tonnara changed and there was a dramatic decline in tonnare (plural) throughout the 1800s. The tonnare also went through different phases of ownership. In 1587 King Philip II formally established the Sardinian tonnare (Emery). Phillip IV then sold a tonnara to a Genovese man in 1654 and, from the late 18th century until today, the tonnara has remained in the Greco family from Genova. There were also changes to fishing and preservation technologies, such as the replacement of barrels after the invention of the can in the early 1800s, and innovations to recipes, as for example in the addition of olive oil. Yet, compared to recent changes, the process of harvesting, breaking down and sorting flesh and organs, and preserving tuna, has remained relatively stable. The locus of change in recent years concerns the harvest, the mattanza. For locals this process seems to be framed with concepts of before, and after, the Japanese arrived on the island. Owner Giuliano Greco, a man in his early fifties who took over the management of the tonnara from his father when it reopened in the late 1990s, describes these changes: We have two ages—before the Japanese and after. Before the Japanese, yes, the tuna was damaged. It was very violent in the mattanza. In the age before the pollution, there was a crew of 120 people divided in a little team named the stellati. The more expert and more important at the centre of the boat, the others at the side because at the centre there was more tuna. When there was mattanza it was like a race, a game, because if they caught more tuna they had more entrails, which was good money for them, because before, part of the wage was in nature, part of the tuna, and for this game the tuna was damaged because they opened it with a knife, the heart, the eggs etc. And for this method it was very violent because they wanted to get the tuna entrails first. The tuna remained on the boat without ice, with blood everywhere. The tonnara operated within clear social hierarchies made up of tonnarotti (tuna fishermen) under the guidance of the Rais (captain of tonnara) whose skills, charisma and knowledge set him apart. The Rais liaised with the tonnarotti, the owners, and the local community, recruiting men and women to augment the workforce in the mattanza period. Goliardo Rivano, a tonnarotto (singular) since 1999 recalls “all the town would be called on for the mattanza. Not only men but women too would work in the cannery, cutting, cleaning, and canning the tuna.” The mattanza was the starting point of supply and consumption networks. From the mattanza the tuna was broken down, the flesh boiled and brined for local and foreign markets, and the organs salted and dried for the (mainly) local market. Part of the land-based activities of tonnarotti involved cleaning, salting, pressing and drying the organs, which supplemented their wage. As Giuliano described, the mattanza was a bloody affair because of the practice of retrieving the organs; but since the tuna was boiled and then preserved in brine, it was not important whether the flesh was damaged. At the end of the 1970s the tonnara closed. According to locals and reportage, pollution from a nearby factory had caused a drastic drop in tuna. It remained closed until the mid 1990s when Japanese buyers came to inquire about tuna from the trap. Global tastes for tuna had changed during the time the tonnara was closed. An increase in western appetites for sushi had been growing since the early 1970s (Bestore). As Theadore Bestore describes in detail, this coincided with a significant transformation of the Japanese fishing industry’s international role. In the 1980s, the Japanese government began to restructure its fleets in response to restricted access to overseas fishing grounds, which the declaration of Excusive Economic Zones enforced (Barclay and Koh). At this time, Japan turned to foreign suppliers for tuna (Bestore). Kate Barclay and Sun-Hui Koh describe how quantity was no longer a national food security issue like it had been in post war Japan and “consumers started to demand high-quality high-value products” (145). In the late 1990s, the Greco family reopened the tonnara and the majority of the tuna went to Japan leaving a smaller portion for the business of canning. The way mattanza was practiced underwent profound changes and particular notions of quality emerged. This was also the beginning of new relationships and a widening of the taste network to include international stakeholders: Japanese buyers and markets became part of the network. Giuliano refers to the period as the “Japanese Age”. A temporal framing that is iterated by restaurant and fish shop owners who talk about a time when Japanese began to come to the island and have the first pick of the tuna. Giuliano recalls “there was still blood but there was not the system of opening tuna, in total, like before. Now the tuna is opened on the land. The only operation we do on the boat is blooding and chilling.” Here he references the Japanese technique of ikejime. Over several years the technicians taught Giuliano and some of the crew about killing the tuna faster and bleeding it to maintain colour and freshness. New notions of quality and taste for raw or lightly cooked tuna entered San Pietro. According to Rais Luigi “the tuna is of higher quality, because we treat it in a particular way, with ice.” Giuliano describes the importance of quality. “Before they used the stellati and it took five people, each one with a harpoon to haul the tuna. Now they only use one hook, in the mouth and use a chain, by hand. On board there is bleeding, and there is blood, but now we must keep the quality of the meat at its best.” In addition to the influence of Japanese tastes, the international Girotonno tuna festival had its inauguration in 2003, and, along with growing tourism, brought cosmopolitan and international tastes to San Pietro. The impact of a global taste for tuna has had devastating effects on their biomass. The international response to the sharp decline was the expansion of the role of inter-governmental monitoring bodies like International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), the introduction of quotas, and an increase in the presence of marine authorities on fleets, scientific research and environmental campaigns. In San Pietro, international relationships further widened and so did the configuration of taste networks, this time to include marine regulators, a quota on Bluefin, a Spanish company, and tuna ranches in Malta. The mattanza again was at the centre of change and became a point of contention within the community. This time because as a practice it is endangered, occurring only once or twice a year, “for the sake of tradition, culture” as Giuliano stated. The harvest now takes place in ranches in Malta because for the last three years the Greco family have supplied the tonnara’s entire quota (excluding tuna from mattanza or those that die in the net) to a major Spanish seafood company Riccardo Fuentes e Hijos, which transports them live to Malta where they are fattened and slaughtered, predominantly for a Japanese market. The majority of tuna now leave the island whole, which has profoundly transformed the distribution networks and local taste culture, and mainly the production and trade in tuna organs and canned tuna. In 2012, ICCAT and the European Union further tightened the quotas, which along with competition with industrial fisheries for both quota and markets, has placed enormous pressure on the tonnara. In 2013, it was allocated a quota that was well under what is financially sustainable. Add to the mix the additional expense of financing the obligatory scientific observers, and the tonnara has had to modify its operations. In the last few years there has been a growing antagonism between marine regulations, global markets, and traditional practices. This is exemplified in the limitations to the tuna organ tradition. It is now more common to find dried tuna organs in vacuum packs from Sicily rather than local products. As the restaurateur Secondo Borghero of Tonno della Corsa says “the tonnara made a choice to sell the live tuna to the Spanish. It’s a big problem. The tuna is not just the flesh but also the interior—the stomach, the heart, the eggs—and now we don’t have the quantity of these and the quality around is also not great.” In addition, even though preserved organs are available for consumption, local preserving activities have almost ceased along with supplementary income. The social structures and the types of actors that are a part of the tonnara have also changed. New kinds of relationships, bodies, and knowledge are situated side by side because of the mandate that there be scientific observers present at certain moments in the season. In addition, there are coast guards and, at various stages of the season, university staff contracted by ICCAT take samples and tag the tuna to generate data. The changes have also introduced new types of knowledge, activities, and institutional affiliations based on scientific ideas and discourses of marine biology, conservation, and sustainability. These are applied through marine management activities and regimes like quotas and administered through state and global institutions. This is not to say that the knowledge informing the Rais’s decisions has been done away with but as Gisli Palsson has previously argued, there is a new knowledge hierarchy, which places a significant focus on the notion of expert knowledge. This has the potential to create unequal power dynamics between the marine scientists and the fishers. Today in San Pietro tuna tastes are diverse. Tuna is delicate, smooth, and rich ventresca, raw tartare clean on the palate, novel at the Girotono, hearty tuna al forno, and salty dry bottarga. Tasting tuna in San Pietro offers a material and affective starting point to follow the socio-cultural, political, and ecological contours and contentions that are part of tuna traditions and their transformations. By thinking of gustatory and aesthetic tastes as part of wider taste networks, which involve human and non-human entities, we can begin to unpack and detail better what these changes encompass and figure forms and moments of power and agency. At the centre of tastes and transformation in San Pietro are the tonnara and the mattanza. Although in its long existence the tonnara has endured many changes, those in the past 15 years are unprecedented. Several major global events have provided conditions for change and widened the network from its once mainly local setting to its current global span. First, Japanese and global tastes set a demand for tuna and introduced different tuna production and preparation techniques and new styles of serving tuna raw or lightly cooked tuna. Later, the decline of Bluefin stocks and the increasing involvement of European and international monitoring bodies introduced catch limitations along with new processes and types of knowledge and authorities. Coinciding with this was the development of relationships with middle companies, which again introduced new techniques and technologies, namely the gabbie (cage) and ranches, to the taste network. In the cultural setting of Italy where the conservation of tradition is of particular importance, as I have explained earlier through the notion of provenance, the management of a highly regulated endangered marine species is a complex project that causes much conflict. Because of the dire state of the stocks and continual rise in global demand, solutions are complex. Yet it would seem useful to recognise that tuna tastes are situated within a network of knowledge, know-how, technology, and practices that are not simple modes of production and consumption but also ways of stewarding the sea and its species. Ethics Approval Original names have been used when participants gave consent on the official consent form to being identified in publications relating to the study. This is in accordance with ethics approval granted through the University of Sydney on 21 March 2013. Project number 2012/2825. References Barclay, Kate, and Koh Sun-Hui “Neo-liberal Reforms in Japan’s Tuna Fisheries? A History of Government-business Relations in a Food-producing Sector.” Japan Forum 20.2 (2008): 139–170. Bestor, Theadore “Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World.” Foreign Policy 121 (2000): 54–63. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Harvard UP, 1984. Callon, Michael “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay” Power, Action, Belief: a New Sociology of Knowledge? Ed. John Law. London: Routledge, 1986. 196–223. Emery, Katherine “Tonnare in Italy: Science, History and Culture of Sardinian Tuna Fishing.” Californian Italian Studies 1 (2010): 1–40. Hennion, Antoine “Those Things That Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology” Cultural Sociology 1 (2007): 97–114. Longo, Stefano “Global Sushi: A Socio-Ecological Analysis of The Sicilian Bluefin Tuna Fishery.” Dissertation. Oregon: University of Oregon, 2009. Morgan, Kevin, Marsden, Terry, and Johathan Murdoch. Worlds of Food: Place, Power, and provenance in the Food Chain. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Palsson, Gisli. Coastal Economies, Cultural Accounts: Human Ecology and Icelandic Discourse. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991. Probyn, Elspeth “In the Interests of Taste & Place: Economies of Attachment.” The Global Intimate. Eds. G. Pratt and V. Rosner. New York: Columbia UP (2012). Zukin, Sharon “The Social Production of Urban Cultural Heritage: Identity and Ecosystem on an Amsterdam Shopping Street.” City, Culture and Society 3 (2012): 281–291.
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