Protectionist policy created the Italian North-South divide that became the Southern Question.

Evidence

In 1906 mainland troops were called in to repress the Sardinian peasantry. Later on, however, Gramsci was to discover the opposite side of the coin-Sardinian troops being used to hold down the workers of Turin. In general, the conflicts between industrial “North” and rural “South” tended to obscure more basic class questions. Since 1887, the growing industry of the North had been favoured by protectionist policies which kept out foreign capital, and secured its dominance of the domestic market. This protectionism provided the basis of an effective community of interests between big industrial capital and the reformist working-class organisations-a community of interests which was fostered by the policies of Giovanni Giolitti, the dominant bourgeois politician of the years preceding the First World War. But its impact on agricultural Italy was, with the exception of the cereal-producers in the Centre and North, calamitous: the peasants were no longer able to export their produce, and at the same time were forced to buy the products of Italian industry rather than the far cheaper goods made in the more advanced industrial countries. This was the main basis of what became the “Southern Question”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 41

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names and explains what the ‘Southern Question’ was and its economic origins.
• XREF: A concrete early template of how an internal ‘South’ is constructed and subordinated — directly parallel to how later Islamophobia readings treat the internal construction of a racialized/subaltern Other.
• QUESTION: The region-versus-class dialectic Gramsci never lost — worth tracing how colonial-style internal domination maps onto the external colonial patterns he denounced.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the ‘Grafting & Growth’ article? No. Relates more to ‘Complaints About Immodesty’? No. Actually relates most to how economic policy manufactures a subordinate region — tangent to all three, skip.