From Core to Periphery: Marine Insurances in the Naples Business Network over the 19th Century (1820-900)

The paper presents a first endeavor into exploring the Naples marine insurance business history across the entire 19th century, a rather overlooked field of research in the rich literature on the troubled economic history of Southern Italy. The paper focuses on evaluating and explaining the power position that this dynamic component of the South’s economy had within the business environment of its most important metropolitan area. The analysis is based on still unexploited archival data on the universe of Neapolitan enterprises in the 19th century gathered in the IFESMez database (Imprese, Finanza, Economia e Società nel Mezzogiorno) and organized as to show the relationships existing among individual actors, among firms and among firms and individual actors. The interactions among agents and firms are analysed by using Social Network Analysis (Wasserman and Faust 1994), focusing on interlockings as one of the major techniques of power structure research. We look for the most central and powerful companies within the business structure by building interlocking networks (co-shareholding, interlocking directorates, kinship, etc.) for six sliding twenty-year periods before and after 1861. We capture the market structure by formulating and testing a core-periphery model in each time span, through blockmodeling approaches and we trace the trajectories of marine insurance companies within the local business structure.