Conforming to the British Model? ‘Official’ British Perspectives on the New Italy

Abstract

Massimo D’Azeglio’s famous declaration, ‘We have made Italy: now we must make Italians’, might perhaps have been apocryphal, but its significance was not lost on his British contemporaries. The efforts of Italian leaders to bridge the chasm that existed between the Cavourian state and the populations of the various territories which constituted the Kingdom of Italy might well have been ‘wholly inadequate’,² but they attracted considerable interest among the leaders and representatives of the country which was the first officially to recognise the new entity in 1861. Historians have written at length on British views and attitudes regarding Italy, Italians, and Italian nationalism prior to unification, but they have devoted surprisingly little attention to the critical period which followed the unified kingdom’s creation. Making use of the official and private correspondence of British political leaders, diplomats and consuls, as well as newspaper articles and the accounts of Britons resident or travelling in the new kingdom, this chapter addresses the neglected subject of ‘official’ British perceptions of Italy during its first decade and a half of unity. As such, it covers a period in which Italian leaders struggled with the formidable challenges of asserting the authority of the new state and forging a sense of national identity in an extremely fragmented country.

I would like to thank Nick Carter for many suggestions and for several pieces of information that have been enormously useful in writing this chapter.