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Italy was a latecomer country characterized by the absence of coal in the era when steam engine-driven factories worked.
The new variables illustrate the main input factors for manufacturing production during the period when the Italian economy achieves long-term GDP growth and increased industrial activity. This indicator allows one to speculate about the importance of coal to Italy's industrialization and the origin of the North-South gap. Recently, fossil coal and the demand for fuel have become the focus of political and social attention. The development of low-carbon technologies to facilitate the transition to clean energy has become high on today's global agenda. However, less than 300 years ago, coal appeared in history as one of the major actors in the major economic and social transformation of the modern economy (the Industrial Revolution).
At the time, no one would have thought that burning fossil fuels would affect the climate and global warming. In fact, in the second half of the 18th century, the use of domestic coal brought changes, and the abundance of coal provided a stable source of energy for the new machine. This paper examines the price of fossil coal and its distribution in the Italian peninsula. Italy's lack of domestic coal resources, according to economic historians, is one of the main reasons for its backward industrial structure. Italy is a latecomer country that experienced the Industrial Revolution more than a hundred years later than Britain.
If Italian manufacturing dominated European production for three centuries (about 1300 to 1600), at the time of unification (1861) Italy was a relatively underdeveloped region that did not begin to grow slowly until the 80s of the 19th century. Until 1896, the average annual growth rate of GDP and manufacturing was relatively low; It was only in this year that Italy's economic growth accelerated, however, the timing and reasons for Italy's lag in industrialization are still debated. According to Bonelli, Italy was industrialized before unification. Romeo dates back to the period of accelerated industrial development in Italy after the construction of the main railway network in the 80s of the 19th century. Linking the Industrial Revolution in Italy with the creation of the universal bank in the 90s of the 19th century. In line with the Kuznets cycle, for Fenoaltea from the 80s of the 19th century, the inflow of foreign capital promoted the construction industry and thus the performance of the entire economy.
Despite these positive figures in industrial production, Italian manufacturing is still far from reaching the benchmark level achieved by the second industrialized country. The most advanced technological sector did not exist, and without the intervention of the state, many works could not survive, according to Baldini, the main reason for this backwardness and slow catch-up was that there was no fossil coal in a period when the steam engine was the main technology of the time.
The first British Industrial Revolution in the second half of the eighteenth century was made possible by the low cost of energy (coal) and the high cost of labor: the need to use the most profitable combination of these two input elements was the impetus to invent coal-powered machines, which led to the technological change of the Industrial Revolution. However, because fossil coal can be imported or replaced, some economic historians deny the importance of domestic coal and its key role in the development of advanced industrial production structures. Footnote 2: If the single-cause explanation is far from reasonable, the role of coal as a driver, prerequisite or collateral is controversial. For authors like Ashton, the British Industrial Revolution was essentially a matter of energy. The shift to a traditional vegetable economy turned into fossil fuels, allowing companies to access cheap and large energy reserves to power new machines.
Industrial mechanization increased the efficiency of production processes, brought industrialization and economic growth, and in turn recognized a small contribution to coal. Technological change was a major factor in the Industrial Revolution, and the energy efficiency brought about by coal use was the driving force behind the transformation process. Common ground was found in the debate, arguing that the geological advantages of coal resources required the skills to be exploited. Recently, the role of coal has been empirically tested. Kander and Stern show that in a country like Sweden, which relies heavily on coal imports, the transition from traditional energy sources to modern energy sources such as coal is a necessary but not sufficient condition for industrialization and economic growth. Linking long-term negative impacts to coal: Coal production had a positive impact on U.S. population growth and manufacturing activity only in the short term, and Feniekhoff and O'Rourke demonstrated that urbanization in Europe during the Industrial Revolution was driven by proximity to coal fields.
Using a smaller lens, Kraft and Mulatu and Gutburlet studied the impact of coal endowments on manufacturing location selection in the UK and Germany, respectively. Crafts and Wolf found that the proximity of coal did not determine the spatial distribution of cotton mills in the UK, but coal prices affected the size of the cotton textile industry. This paper contributes to this debate by measuring coal prices in Italy at the NUTS3 level. This represents a novelty in the literature of economic history: Cianci and Vazza, among others, provided prices for Genoa imported coal from 1870 to 1929 and from 1845 to 1905, respectively; More recently, Federico et al. provided more detailed data between 1862 and 1921. This paper goes a step further and calculates the price of coal in all Italian provinces over the 51-year period from 1861 to 1911.
As Farnie points out and Crafts and Wolf, coal price indicators at the local level reflect the distance between coal reserves and transportation infrastructure development. In these respects, it reflects a purely geographical factor – natural endowments – and an institutional factor – the general cost of transportation – that suggests how changes in coal prices stem from two main factors. Both the first and second physical geographical features allow to assess the local strengths of an area and the agglomeration economy of industries. In addition, the measurement of coal prices can be used to empirically test the importance of coal for domestic economic growth and industrial development, recognizing its decisive, accompaniment or insignificant role in the local area.
However, the analysis presented here involves important information that allows for a purely economic measure that can be used for empirical analysis and historical investigation. The role of coal – and energy in general – in Italy's industrialization, and the origin of the North-South divide, are key issues in the contentious debate over Italy's economic growth. Energy shortages have been a problem affecting Italy since the unification of Italy. As Tony Neelli puts it, modern advanced economies stand out for their lower energy intensity: energy use per unit of GDP decreases with income; Conversely, in low-income countries, it will increase. In Italy, the lack of major energy carriers may have limited the innovation frontier: Bardini highlights how the lack of coal in the last decades of the 19th century forced Italy to embark on an innovative path to conserve coal.
Tony Nelli, instead, found out how Italy's dependence on foreign fuels and oil was linked to state intervention, especially after the 1973 oil crisis. According to Cafagna and Toninelli, the Italian industrial organization, currently made up of many small and medium-sized enterprises, stemmed from, among other things, the need to conserve coal. This has led to an alternative industrial system characterized by small-scale production of technically less complex products, requiring lower amounts of electricity, and leading to the efficient use of available energy sources such as water. Water mills, iron and coal supported the first wave of economic growth in Italy, as well as different trends in transport development and northern and southern Italy, which has excellent transport conditions and links with foreign trading partners. Moreover, as Ahern and Venenupurs observed, proximity to rivers and waterways gives northern Italy an additional advantage: the use of water resources to produce mechanical energy and hydroelectric power.
Historical differences between North and South in terms of energy alternatives and transport infrastructure endowments still exist today. Ciccarelli and Fenoaltea argue that the development of railways before and after the unification of Italy failed to create a homogeneous internal economy. In addition, the production and use of energy is also uneven throughout the country: today, the production and adoption of renewable energy is basically a matter of northern Italy. Different indices within a country may help reveal these geographical imbalances. The final part of this article examines these questions and provides two simple exercises. It employs coal prices calculated at the NUTS3 level to explore the role of transportation infrastructure in lowering coal prices, and the role of proximity to waterways in reducing dependence on coal. The results confirmed the advantages of the northern regions: more complex rail systems gave them a second nature advantage, while greater access to water energy represented an innate advantage.
Thanks to the developed transport infrastructure, coal is available to small urban centers in the north, which is less common in the south. In addition, coal price pressure in the northern provinces is less due to the increase in hydroelectric power generation, as water can be used instead of coal. Next are four sections. The special situation faced by Italy in the nineteenth century is discussed: the demand for coal in regions where domestic coal resources are scarce. A new coal price measurement method at the NUTS3 level is proposed. Two issues related to the price of imported factors were analyzed: the existence of extended transport infrastructure and the existence of coal alternatives. For a long time, vegetables were Italy's main energy carrier.
Firewood and food for human and animal work were the main power fuels, and in 1861 the country was still largely dependent on traditional energy sources: coal—a modern energy carrier—accounted for only 7 percent of total consumption. From the 80s of the 19th century, coal consumption accelerated; On the eve of the First World War, it accounted for 40% of total use, and in 1911, steam power accounted for 29% of total industrial consumption, and the growth of coal consumption was combined with the reduction of traditional energy sources. As Adami says, during the 19th century, plant fuels became scarce and expensive, and they were not enough to meet the entire energy needs from the metallurgical industry, mines, companies, nor to drive railways, trams, ships and the production of gas lamps. In addition, although the Carboniferous period also dominated Italian territory from a geological point of view only, the abundant coal reserves typical of other European countries such as the United Kingdom, Belgium and France are few in Italy and anthracite and lignite outcrops are rare.
There are no major coal fields, and the Carboniferous rock formations are mainly concentrated in Sardinia and Calabria. However, the amount of coal mined from Sardinian coal mines is small and of poor quality. At that time, the demand for imported coal was clearly the result of insufficient domestic resources. For Italy, the shortage of coal is not a neutral condition. Highlighting the high weight of coal as a commodity, which makes coal imports particularly expensive, and high transportation costs put pressure on final prices. Compared to the UK, its main coal trading partner, the price of fossil coal in Italy is 4-5 times higher and 3-4 times higher than in other Western European economies such as Germany, France or the United States. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, import flows increased.
As Maranima said, the reduction in sea freight costs has increased coal shipments, especially to Genoa. Genoa is a major port for importing coal and other goods from abroad. In 1882, 346 of the 430 domestic ships docked in the port of Genoa, with a total deadweight of 203,707 tons and a total deadweight of 250,615 tons. Fossil coal represented the bulk of the traded goods: in 1882, 291,968 tons of the 677,191 tons of coal continued to dominate in the port of Genoa, and in the following years, a third of the total coal imported by Italy was sold to Genoa.