“Red Fear” and a “Spontaneous Land Reform” in Post-Great War Italy

Pablo Martinelli Lasheras, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Jordi Domènech Feliu, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

This paper is a study of the effects on landownership distribution of the unprecedented explosion of labour militancy in the Italian countryside during the post-Great War crisis, the period known as the “Red Biennium” (1919-1920) and its aftermath up to the March on Rome. During these years land markets became suddenly liquid and many non-working landowners sold their properties to owner operators, generating a sort of “spontaneous land reform”. The episode is said to have played a key role in Italian political history as the new peasant proprietors are thought to have become the backbone of the Fascist movement in the countryside. The Italian case thus provides valuable insights into the effects of extreme threats to property on the operation of usually sticky land markets in a developing economy. The conventional wisdom, received from the 1930s, attributes a key role in the process to “Red fear”. Exploiting geographical variation in different dimensions of collective action intensity, we revisit the conventional wisdom. Provisional results point out to a much more nuanced story. While the frequency of agricultural strikes seems to have played a role, its effect was actually decreasing in strike size. Variables capturing political and institutional strength of the Socialist Party have no explanatory value at all. Thus, an increase in disruptive labor unrest may have induced some landowners to sell, as far as the threat was perceived as an individual one. Where the labour movement was able to increase the scale and scope of the threat, the whole of the landowning class was concerned. There, black shirts rather than land sales were the response to read fear.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 200. Land, Climate, Conflict and Mobility