An urban republic fell because it neglected the countryside and threatened its income sources

Evidence

The city was crushed by the countryside—organised into the gangs of Cardinal Ruffo—for a dual reason. On the one hand the Republic, both in its first aristocratic phase and in its subsequent bourgeois phase, totally neglected the countryside. On the other, by holding out the possibility of a Jacobin upheaval in which landed property, which spent its agrarian income in Naples, would be dispossessed, thus depriving the great mass of the people of their sources of income and livelihood, it left the Neapolitan populace indifferent if not hostile. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 509

Categorization

• XREF: Connects forward to how the Italian national question is geographic-economic, a model Islamophobia readings replicate for center-periphery and ‘internal colonies’ dynamics.
• ADDENDUM: The neglect-of-periphery dynamic parallels the mezzogiorno/southern question arguments that scaffold later postcolonial reads of the nation.