The exploited South generated its own reaction against northern extraction

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, 457

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘ball and chain’ belief resembles how colonizing powers frame peripheral regions as burdens — a framing the Islamophobia field will encounter applied to immigrant and Muslim populations. — connects to: OPEC’s oil price coup briefly empowered the South until the oil divide broke solidarity — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1748