Feuds, Class Struggles and Labour Migration in Calabria

Abstract

The main purpose of this chapter is to analyse the formation of a wage labour force in a peripheral environment, in this case one of the poorest regions of southern Italy, Calabria.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, a system of land tenure known as the latifondo contadino (peasant latifundium) had come to predominate throughout the region. The system was not the same everywhere. Arrangements between peasants and landlords showed great variations from place to place, but all had one characteristic in common: large landed estates were partly farmed by the landowner, predominantly with wage labour, and partly subdivided into plots and farmed by peasants who paid rent in cash or kind. In the second half of the nineteenth century (roughly from the 1860s up to the First World War), the latifondo contadino tended to disappear, giving rise not to one but to three distinct social formations.

Editor’s note: This is an abridged version of a much longer article entitled ‘Capitalist Development in Hostile Environments: Feuds, Class Struggles, and Migrations in a Peripheral Region of Southern Italy’, published in Review, X, 4, Spring 1987, pp. 649–751. In the original article, the divergent patterns of labour-force formation and social conflict analysed here are related to the peripheral position of Calabria in the capitalist world economy.