The marine insurance industry in Naples over the Italian Unification (1820-1900). A network analysis approach

The economic history of Naples belongs mostly to its port and the sea. The largest port on the Tyrrhenian coast south of Leghorn, during the centuries, it catalyzed the most of Southern Italy’s commercial fleet and import and export trade. With so much at stake in the face of such associated uncertainty and risk, Naples had developed a long tradition in marine insurance. Despite the importance of this topic, the extant literature still provides a fragmented picture deserving alternatively a special attention for the history of specific insurance companies (Assante 1979) and for socio-economic analyses about the monopolistic strategies of the 19th century Naples financial elite (Davis 1979, Ostuni 1986). In order to fill this gap relative to the literature on the specific case study and in in the context of those (international and Italian) business history studies that have become increasingly concerned with exploring and explaining how businesses operate and behave by looking beyond discrete firms and pointing to interpersonal and intercorporate structures (David and Westerhuis 2014, Colli, Rinaldi and Vasta 2016), the current research is added. This work presents the first results of a survey of marine insurance companies formed in Naples metropolitan area during the century before and after Italian Unification (1861). After classifying the sector in terms of number of companies, size of capital, average lifespan of firms, legal type, etc., the paper aims at exploring the sector network dynamics within the Naples business network over the time. The topic is addressed by analyzing the Naples business ownership structure and the corporate boards network the in the 60-year period between 1830 and 1890, from the efflorescence of chartered companies under the reign of Ferdinand II Bourbon (1830-59) to the great post-unification financial meltdown of the end of 1880s. More specifically, the work aims to analyze the relations that local (and international) actors set up around the marine insurance business focusing on the transformation of the role of marine insurance companies in terms of centrality and concentration of power within the Naples corporate network in the period under exam. It is based on IFESMez database (Imprese, Finanza, Economia e Società nel Mezzogiorno), from which it is possible to extract data on the whole amount of enterprises and companies operating in Naples between 1812 and 1913. Information, directly collected from original archival sources, are organized as to show the relationships existing among individual actors, among firms and among firms and individual actors (Schisani and Caiazzo 2016).