Between Local Communities and Interstate Police Cooperation: The Intendenti on the Border of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies

This chapter focuses on the Intendants in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, administrative officials as well as the highest police authorities in the provinces. It shows how intendants acted as mediators in the border provinces, making possible the sedimentation of a new administrative grammar suited to a modern state. The intendants also played another crucial role in the modernisation of the kingdom in terms of control. They represented, in the junctures of 1820 and post-1848, essential nodes in the system of control for exiles set up by the Bourbon police, but also in the activation of interstate cooperation practices in the two years 1859 and 1860. The chapter thus highlights the crucial role of peripheral scenarios and authorities in the development of new administrative practices.