What if... Garibaldi had failed?

On 21st May 1860, Times readers opened their papers to grim news: Giuseppe Garibaldi’s madcap expedition to conquer Sicily with barely 1,000 men had ended in tragedy. A Reuters dispatch from Naples, the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies which also encompassed the southern mainland, said the Mille (Thousand), as they came to be known, “had been attacked at the point of a bayonet by the Royal troops near Calatafimi, and totally routed.”

The report echoed an official account and, as so often, the official account was wrong. It was the kingdom’s soldiers who had been put to deadly flight by an audacious uphill charge.

But what if the dispatch had been right (as it easily could have been, since Garibaldi’s irregulars were outnumbered and poorly armed)? That other hero of Italian unification, Camillo Benso, the Count of Cavour, never planned to include the south. He would have been happy with what he already had: most of northern and central Italy, excluding only Venice and its hinterland and a reduced papal domain coinciding roughly with modern-day Lazio, the region around Rome. Venetia, as it was then called, might well have been seized from the Austrians (as it was) six years later, taking advantage of Austria’s war with Prussia. Whether a “half-Italy” would have been able quite so easily to take Rome and end the popes’ temporal power is open to debate.

Many a northerner has muttered since that an Italy without the Mezzogiorno, the south of the country, would have been a far more successful enterprise. In 2012, the territories covered by our hypothetical state of the north and centre (they include Sardinia, which was part of the Kingdom of Italy from the outset) had a Gross Domestic Product per head of just over €30,000, making it richer than Britain. As for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, if it had survived until 2012, it would have had a GDP per head lower than that of Greece—after the crash.

Or would it? In recent years, southern Italian historians have amassed a considerable body of evidence in support of the view that southern Italy was not doomed to poverty; that it would have done much better had that engaging meddler Garibaldi been bested outside Calatafimi, as the town is now called, or later in the equally close-run battle for Palermo.

No one disputes that the south in 1860 was poor. But the figures we have suggest it was richer than Sardinia and not much poorer than the Papal State or Tuscany. The capital, Naples, was prosperous (albeit with huge inequalities between rich and poor). It was the most industrialised city in Italy. Neapolitan construction workers earned more than their counterparts in Milan.

When the new state—run largely at the outset by northerners—took control of the south, they imposed higher taxes than its previous rulers, helping to spark an insurgency, which the northerners branded “brigandage” in which military tribunals sentenced almost 10,000 people to death. Yet more damagingly for the economic prospects of southern Italy, the new kingdom scrapped the protectionist trade policies that had sheltered the infant steel and railway-making industries of Naples (protectionism only came back into favour to defend the emerging heavy industries of Milan, Turin and Genoa later in the century). Subsequent governments of the Kingdom of Italy, several of which—let it be said—were led by southerners, also kept out foreign capital, which was keenly needed in the Mezzogiorno but less so elsewhere.

There are other reasons for believing unification was a disaster for the south, and they have a disquieting relevance for today’s Italy. Unification also involved currency union: the southerners gave up their ducat, the Romans their scudo, and so on. In a paper written in 2005, a British academic, James Foreman-Peck, looked at the effects. He found that after unification the south became even more agricultural, and the north increasingly industrial, accentuating the need for separate monetary policies. When agricultural exports suffered from a tariff war with France and then from competition from cheap new world imports, the south ought to have devalued, as Spain did. Instead, between 1873 and 1885, the lira appreciated by almost a third.

The devastating results can be read in the exodus of millions of half-starved southern Italian farmworkers who began to leave for the Americas in the 1880s. They can also be read in the figures for average southern income as a proportion of northern. At the time of unification, best estimates suggest it was between 75 per cent and 85 per cent. By 1945, it was 50 per cent.

Can southern Italy’s experience of currency union be applied to southern Europe? If it can, then the lesson for today’s Italy is the one drawn by Beppe Grillo, the founder of the Five Star Movement, and—ironically—Matteo Salvini, the eurosceptic leader of the Northern League: get out fast! John Hooper is Italy correspondent of the Economist and Southern Europe Editor of the Guardian and Observer. His new book, “The Italians,” is published by Penguin