Violence and the Great Estates: Apulia, 1900-1922 - Softcover

Snowden, Frank M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521527104 ISBN 13: 9780521527101

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2008

Synopsis

Until Italian unification, vast areas of Apulia were an uninhabited sheep walk. In the late nineteenth century this frontier area was settled and agro-business established. In the quasi-colonial context of the South of Italy, the relations between landowners and farm workers were characterized by extreme forms of oppression and brutality. This book is a study of the world the landlords made and of the harsh structures of profit, tenure, and climate they faced. It is also a powerful investigation of the appallingly grim conditions in the teeming agricultural centres of the region and a vivid history of the struggle by the farm workers to win the ordinary decencies of life - clothes, clean water, and bread. In the process, the labourers formed a potent anarcho-syndicalist movement whose history the book relates from the first general strikes in 1901 to the restoration of the landlords' power by fascist terror in 1922.

About this title

Review:

'Frank Snowden has produced a devastating account of the horrors inflected by the new agro-capitalists but he has also done a moving job in charting the marvellous story of resistance that developed among Puglia's agricultural workers ...'. Socialist Review

Book Description:

Violence and the Great Estates in the South of Italy is a powerful investigation of the appallingly grim conditions in the teeming agricultural centres of the region and a vivid history of the struggle by the farm workers to win the ordinary decencies of life - clothes, clean water, and bread.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0521527104
• ISBN 13: 9780521527101
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256