Turin’s wartime industrialization transformed it into Europe’s leading FIAT production center

Evidence

When Gramsci arrived in Turin, the city was the red capital of Italy-Gramsci was to call it Italy’s Petrograd - home of its most advanced industry and above all of FIAT. By the end of the war, FIAT was to be the biggest producer of tractors in Europe; its workers were to increase from 4,000 in 1913 to 20,000 in 1918; by 1915, it was exporting armoured cars and aeroplanes to the Entente countries in great quantities. Turin’s population rose from some 400,000 in 1911 (20 per cent of them industrial workers) to over 500,000 in 1918 (30 per cent of them industrial workers)-and this despite the fact that between 5 and 10 per cent of the population was in the army and therefore not included in the 1918 total. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 57

Categorization

• XREF: Provides the concrete economic substrate for Gramsci’s later concept of Fordism and Americanism in this same volume.

Related

• Italian industry profited enormously from the First World War (similarity 0.78)
• Turin’s strikes convinced Gramsci workers could ally with southern peasants (similarity 0.78)