A southern reaction quantified the wealth extracted from Sardinia by the unitary state.
Evidence
Meanwhile, in the North there persisted the belief that the Mezzogiorno was a “ball and chain” for Italy, the conviction that the modern industrial civilisation of Northern Italy would have made greater progress without this “ball and chain”, etc. The early years of this century then saw the beginnings of a strong Southern reaction on this very subject. In the Sardinian Congress of 1911, held under the presidency of General Rugiu, a calculation was made of how many hundreds of millions had been extorted from Sardinia in the first fifty years of the unitary State, to the advantage of the mainland. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 456
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: The 1911 Sardinian Congress’s arithmetic of extraction is the same counter-hegemonic accounting one finds in later colonial and postcolonial economic critiques; ties to how subjugated regions enumerate their losses against a dominant narrative.