Spatiality and the Mobility of Labour in Pre-Unification Italy (Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries)

The essay is the product of an experiment consisting in bringing together in a single analysis two different case-studies on mobility of labour in pre-unification Italy, on the basis of the following questions: is it possible to find a common interpretative category in the creation of alternative spatialities against the political-institutional ones by moving labourers? And could it be worthwhile to combine two kinds of methodologies – one more focused on social actors and the other mainly based on institutional sources - traditionally kept apart? The first case, focusing on social actors, concerns entrepreneurs and labourers at construction sites in Turin and Piemont during the 18th century, originally from Lugano, Milan and Biella. The second case-study, carried out mainly through an institutional perspective, deals with seasonal peasants and shepherds regularly moving in the rural area stretching out along the border between the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Papal State in 19th century. The essay aims at highlighting how, in both cases, the mobility of labourers produced specific trans-local and trans-state spaces, that are analyzed in a twofold analytical perspective. The first part of the essay is devoted to the specific spaces of a trans-local and trans-state nature specifically due to work-related mobility. Indeed, both the entrepreneurs and labourers at construction sites in Turin, as well as the seasonal shepherds and day labourers working amid the Neapolitan mountains and Roman Campagna moved through places of transition, of seasonal mobility lived as a spatial continuum, of convergence of long-term migration and flows of workers that maintained solid relations with their communities of origin. In this way, through their cross-border mobility, their needs, their migratory chains, they helped shape special spaces developing beyond the state framework. The second part of the essay shows how these trans-local and trans-state spaces were also produced by the ways in which the workers in question accessed local resources within their respective environments. These spaces could be marked out on the basis of strong roots set down within the territory – as in the case of entrepreneurs and master builders for the awarding of public and private contracts in Turin, and in the case of Neapolitan and Papal State shepherds and agricultural workers for co-grazing rights and communal use of woodland and cultivated fields. The juxtaposition of the two cases allows to answer the starting questions and, at the same time, lets interesting results emerge. In both cases trans-state spaces – both figurative or real – made by the mobility of labourers and their ways of access to local resources, were extremely dynamic spaces, not only because they paid witness to migratory flows and were connected to a broader geographical horizon through social networks, but also because they were regulated in accordance with legislation and social practices that were constantly redefined through negotiations among social actors, and between social actors and institutions. Just the intertwine of two viewpoints for analysis normally kept apart - the viewpoint concerned with the actors’ activities and the one focusing on institutional action -, inserted within the methodological approach found in this volume, makes it possible to interpret the trans-local and trans-state spaces as a product of negotiations and discussion between actors and institutions, equally involved and active in the creation of spaces for worker mobility and in their organization and regulation.