The “Proclamation to the Venetians”, a work by a committee of patriots (Venice, June 20, 1863) stated:
“The Austrian government with its indulgent taxes has destroyed agriculture, industry and commerce, which are always bound together, and have caused the impoverishment of every class of citizens, who are so poor that they barely have the shirts on their backs.”
The Agricultural Crisis
Agriculture, after small, modest progress in previous years, entered a crisis thanks to the sale of uncultivated communal land and the spread of silkworm diseases (pebrine and phylloxera) which affected the lives of the people and struck a blow to the most dynamic sectors. At the same time, the production of cereals also suffered a decline compared to the past. Naturally, the agricultural crisis had repercussions on industry and trade, slowing down investment and causing the disappearance of entire sectors related to the most affected agricultural products. This already difficult situation was made worse by the serious agrarian crisis of 1846-47.
The condition of the rural Venetian world Habsburg rule can be summarized by recalling the incidence of pellagra, and therefore malnutrition, among its inhabitants. One in five Venetians suffered from pellagra because they were forced to live almost exclusively on polenta. The Viennese government remained motionless in the face of this phenomenon, which was the object of study and intervention only on the part of the new Italian state after 1866, when Venetia was finally liberated during the Third Italian War of Independence. Indeed, the spread of pellagra in the period of 1815-1866 was in fact favored by the Habsburg agricultural policy, which was directly intended to encourage a monoculture of corn. The imposition or incentivization of agricultural monoculture is a characteristic instrument of colonial policies of economic exploitation, which at the same time seeks to turn a territory into a consumer basin for the products of the dominant State and export area of raw materials (thus usually of low value) and produced with little diversification (i.e. monoculture), so as to obstruct a favorable negotiation.
The sanitary conditions of Habsburg Veneto were fully comparable to those of most of Italy. The last plague epidemic that struck Italian territory was precisely in colonial Austrian Veneto. There were also different and prolonged typhus and cholera epidemics. Infant mortality was very high: in the decade of 1845-1854 one in every two infants born in the winter died within the first year of life.
The Industrial Development Failure: the Habsburg Government Favored Transalpine Industries to the Detriment of Italian Industry
The Austrian administration conducted a policy of estrangement and abandonment against Venetian manufactories, to the advantage of its northern (non-Italian) possessions, favoring the disappearance of the Venetian industries or transferring them to Austria or to Bohemia. Since 1815 Veneto was subjected to imperial policies that facilitated the influx of manufactured goods from the northern regions of the Habsburg Empire. Lombardy-Venetia was in fact considered a market for Moravian and Bohemian manufactories which, with their competitive prices favored by lower taxes than those to which the Italian provinces were subject to, caused a crisis among the manufactories of Lombardy-Venetia. [cfr. G. ZALIN, Aspetti e problemi dell’economia veneta dalla caduta della Repubblica all’annessione, Vicenza, Comune di Vicenza, 1969]
An indirect confirmation comes from the latest study by two scholars of the Bank of Italy, Carlo Ciccarelli and Stefano Fenoaltea. The text of Fenoaltea and Ciccarelli, Through the Magnifying Glass: Provincial Aspects of Industrial Growth in Post-Unification Italy, Rome 2010, is one of several academic studies on the subject.
It contains among other things estimates of added value (industrial), referring to the year 1871 (Through the Magnifying Glass: Provincial Aspects of Industrial Growth in Post-Unification Italy, pp. 41-49, in Appendix: The provincial production estimates). According to calculations by Fenoaltea and Ciccarelli, Veneto was the northern region with the lowest industrial development index, which was below the national average.
The Contraction of Trade and the Austrian Administration's Neglect of the Lines of Communication
Venetian commerce also languished under Habsburg rule, reduced primarily to exporting sunny agricultural commodities (cereals, wine, raw silk), without any significant exportation of artisan or industrial products. What contributed to this was the very high taxation imposed by the Austrian authorities and, secondly, the imposition of internal customs authorities, which among other things separated Veneto from Lombardy, Trentino, and above all from Istria and Dalmatia: the very ancient, almost millennial trade relations between Veneto and Dalmatia were thus obstructed by internal tariffs and salt tax (gabelle).
The few modest provisions of the Habsburg administration had very little success, such as the mediocre growth of the road network, which was insufficient and unable to meet needs. Even the railway network of Lombardy-Venetia was insufficient, so that the new unitary Italian state had to provide for its expansion. In 1859 the railway network in Piedmont and Liguria was 914 km, compared to just 607 km in Lombardy-Venetia, despite the fact that the spatial extent of the Liguria and Piedmont was roughly half that of Lombardy and Veneto. The very slow construction of the Milan-Venice railway line, started in 1838 and completed only in 1857, was witness to the Austrian disregard for the economic development of Lombardy-Venetia, which was treated by the government as a mere colony.
Venice as a city and port later experienced a drastic decline, so that in the half-century of Habsburg rule the volume of port traffic reached the lowest point in its history. Suffice it to recall that in the 1840's Venice had a population double that of Trieste, but amounted to only ¼ of its total trade value. Ippolito Nievo in his Confessions describes the lagoon city under Habsburg colonialism: No commerce, no landed wealth, no arts, no sciences, no glory, no activities of any kind; it appeared dead, and and certainly was suspended of life. [I. Nievo, Le confessioni di un italiano, a cura di S. Romagnoli, Venezia, Marsilio, 1998, pp. 811-12.]
Exasperated Taxation and Habsburg Colonialism
Habsburg colonialism imposed an exasperated taxation. In the 1840's the land tax alone in Veneto came to absorb 38% of the net income of the agricultural fund. To evaluate the burden of such a percentage, you have to keep in mind the average economic level of the time and the fact that much of the European population during that period was undernourished. Moreover, all the inhabitants of the rural areas of Veneto were burdened by a personal tax, which affected all inhabitants aged between 14 and 60 years old. In addition to direct taxes, already heavy, there were also different forms of indirect taxes, which were even more demanding: tariffs (the Habsburg Empire at the time imposed tariffs even within its own territories, according to an entirely backwards economic logic), a monopoly on salt and tobacco, tax on stamps, heavy tariffs on expenditure, the lottery.
After the riots of 1848 and the war against Austria, the Veneto region witnessed a worsening of the already precarious economic situation. In fact, the Imperial government also assumed a punitive attitude by operating a further increase in the already very high tax burden prior to 1848: the customs tariffs were raised in 1850, the gross was raised in 1850-1852, not to mention new taxes were introduced, such as a tax on capital income, on censuses, on industries and a tax on property transitions.
The economist Andrea Meneghini wrote an essay in 1863 entitled Le imposte nella Venezia e nella Lombardia (Taxes in Venice and Lombardy), published at Turin in 1863. The author compared the taxation in force in Lombardy, which formed part of the newborn Kingdom of Italy, and the Veneto, which was still within the Habsburg Empire. The result demonstrated the enormous difference in the tax burden, and the much greater taxation greediness — direct and indirect — of Austria. Meneghini concluded that, according to the order of taxation in Lombardy (a region much richer than Veneto at the time), Lombardy saw a decrease in their annual fees by 20 million lire, whereas if Lombardy had returned under Habsburg dominion its tax burden would have increased by 25 million a year.
In some years the taxation reached nearly 30 million florins, an absolutely enormous sum at the time, to which should be added the confiscations ordered by Radetzky. In this way Lombardy-Venetia, which represented 1/8 of the empire's population, bore ¼ of the entire tax burden and with its tax revenue covered the deficit of other imperial regions, playing the role of "milk cow" within the imperial system. The imperial government used the tax revenues of Lombardy-Venetia to financ the industrialization of the German-speaking territories north of the Alps.
Conclusions
Veneto was massacred and impoverished to the max due to the tragic experience of Austrian and Habsburg colonialism. In 1866 it was the poorest region in the whole of northern Italy, with one person in five unemployed, high percentages of pellagra (malnutrition) and widespread illiteracy.
There is little doubt that the GDP per capita of Veneto, Trentino-Alto Adige, Friuli and Venezia Giulia (despite the presence of Trieste in the latter region) in 1861 was the lowest in all of northern Italy (including also Emilia, Romagna, Tuscany) and even lower than some other regions such as Lazio and Campania.
[CARRERAS A., «Un ritratto quantitativo dell’industria italiana», in AMATORI F. – BIGAZZI D. - RIANNETTI R. - SEGRETO L. (a cura di), Storia d’Italia. Annali 15, L’industria, Torino, Einaudi, 1999, pp. 179-272; FENOALTEA S., «The Growth of the Italian Economy, 1861-1913: Preliminary Second-Generation Estimates», European Review of Economic History, n. 9, 2005b, pp.273-312; MADDISON A., «A Revised Estimate of Italian Economic Growth, 1861-1989», in Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Quaterly Review, 1991, pp. 225-241; SVIMEZ, Cento anni di statistiche sulle regioni d’Italia, Roma, 1961.]
Note however that the policy of the Austrian administration to intentionally wreck the economy of their own colony and to exploit it to the max for the benefit of the German-speaking territories, was not applied only to Veneto and not only in the period of 1815-1866. Trentino also had to undergo a very similar treatment, with a tax burden that benefited only the German-speaking Tyroleans and Vienna, and limitations placed on economic activity in order to make this region a market for Austrian products and prevent the emergence of commercial and financial relations with the neighboring Italian regions: economic exploitation and the erection of an “iron curtain” ahead of its time were two of the aims pursued by the “good Austrian administration” in Trentino. The result was that this region was led towards increasing poverty: in 1914 the per capita income of an inhabitant of Trentino was equal to 1/5 that of a resident in another Habsburg region, Bohemia, which at the time was heavily Germanized.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CARRERAS A., «Un ritratto quantitativo dell’industria italiana», in AMATORI F. – BIGAZZI D. - RIANNETTI R. - SEGRETO L. (a cura di), Storia d’Italia. Annali 15, L’industria, Torino, Einaudi, 1999, pp. 179-272;
R. CESSI, Il problema veneto dopo Villafranca (1859-60), in Studi sul Risorgimento nel Veneto, Padova, Liviana, 1965, p. 265-361;
R. CESSI, Il Veneto nel Risorgimento, in Studi sul Risorgimento nel Veneto, Padova, Liviana, 1965, p. 17-47;
FENOALTEA S., «The Growth of the Italian Economy, 1861-1913: Preliminary Second-Generation Estimates», European Review of Economic History, n. 9, 2005b, pp.273-312; MADDISON A., «A Revised Estimate of Italian Economic Growth, 1861-1989», in Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Quaterly Review, 1991, pp. 225-241;
A. MENEGHINI, Le imposte nella Venezia e nella Lombardia, Torino, Stamperia dell’Unione Tipografico-Editrice (casa Pomba), 1863 (pp. 21 sgg.);
M. MERIGGI, Il Regno Lombardo-Veneto, Torino, Utet, 1987;
SVIMEZ, Cento anni di statistiche sulle regioni d’Italia, Roma, 1961;
G. ZALIN, Aspetti e problemi dell’economia veneta dalla caduta della Repubblica all’annessione, Vicenza, Comune di Vicenza, 1969.
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