Italian unity was North-over-South hegemony, not equality.

Evidence

The poverty of the Mezzogiorno was historically “inexplicable” for the popular masses in the North; they did not understand that unity had not taken place on a basis of equality, but as hegemony of the North over the Mezzogiorno in a territorial version of the town-country relationship-in other words, that the North concretely was an “octopus” which enriched itself at the expense of the South, and that its economic-industrial increment was in direct proportion to the impoverishment of the economy and the agriculture of the South. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 455

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gramsci’s core formulation: unification as hegemony — the North’s dominance over the South understood as a relation of force, not contract. Central to the toolkit this reader is assembling.
• XREF: Directly anticipates Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and the racialized north-south divide that later postcolonial and Islamophobia scholarship builds on.