Austrian Exploitation of Lombardy and Venetia

Written by Livio Marchetti

(Extracted from the book "The Economic Revival of Italy" by Livio Marchetti.)

Some among the more superficial writers on the economic vicissitudes of our country have seen fit to attribute the present prosperity of Lombardy and of Italy to the past measures of the Austrian dominion. All objective researches, however, based on documentary evidence regarding the essence and the effects of the economic policy that the Hapsburg dominion exercised in Lombardy and Venetia, point precisely to the contrary. Austria compressed and demoralised and neither encouraged nor revived the spontaneous economic, energies of her Italian possessions. Pressed by the doubt that the plain of the Po, a region marked out for prosperity by nature itself, might successfully rival German districts, and return to the old commercial predominance in central Europe, she raised innumerable customs barriers between the State of Milan and the Tyrol, thus favouring German penetration into Italy and opposing on the other hand the free passage of Italian manufactured articles to transalpine markets. Austria multiplied taxes, internal excise duties, vexations of all kinds, and when it happened, as in the reign of the Emperor Joseph II, who was a thoughtless dispenser of highly superficial reforms, that she appeared to grant singular facilities to some of the great industries, these were simply transformed into privileges granted to a few individuals who enjoyed their sovereign's favour. The great privileged industries created an illusory and ruinous situation, because they found themselves, like the small industries of one time, in the impossibility of disposing of their products beyond the Alps. It was only a ray of light that dazzled the unexperienced, followed by even greater darkness.

Sufficient be it to remind all who dare maintain that Austrian dominion ever benefited the economic development of Lombardy, how at the end of the nineteenth century, the population of Milan amounted to about 128.000 souls, whereas it numbered 350.000 at the end of the sixteenth.

Except for a slight stirring of hope towards 1770, the picture of Lombard economy under Austria was of the most depressing. Scarce labour, meagre industrial budgets, unemployed workmen, growing poverty, all added to a deep regret for the free and prosperous past.

It is not to be wondered at if that population, morally and economically dejected, should have turned their exasperated souls towards a radical change of regime and opened their hearts wider to the ideals of freedom and national unity.

But the most convincing proof that Austrian domination, even after 1815, expressed itself in an odious and avaricious economic exploitation of its subject populations is exposed by the figures given in the budget of the Kingdom of Lombardy and Venetia.

It transpires, for instance, from the estimates for the year 1820 that while Austria was extracting from Lombardy, in taxes and other sources of revenue, a sum of 43.000.000 lire, and 36.000.000 from Venetia, she was only spending 22.000.000 in Lombardy and 17.000.000 in Venetia, thus robbing these two provinces of 40.000.000 lire, or rather more than 50 per cent of the entries collected!

Such was the financial treatment inflicted by a restored Austria on the richest and most industrious Italian provinces. Nor was the economic treatment any better. The policy of Metternich imposed on Lombardy and Venetia as on other Italian States, directly or indirectly subject to Hapsburg rule, the so called prohibitive system, which consisted in a forest of internal and external customs barriers obstructing entry, exit and transit; in a complex mass of extremely high duties and absurd prohibitions which depressed all industries, intimidated trade and discouraged any beneficial initiative.

As a matter of fact, the cracked-up Austrian bureaucracy even after the defeats of 1859 and 1866, even after its exclusion from the plain of the Po, continued to inflict damage on the unredeemed provinces.

Without speaking of Trieste, which owes the flourishing condition it had reached in 1914 solely to its magnificent maritime position and to the extraordinary activity of its inhabitants, so that its economic development enabled it to make giant strides notwithstanding the suspicion and envy of its masters, it is not difficult to enumerate the economic damage for which the Hapsburg domination is responsible. in the Trentino. After 1866, the glass factories were closed in this region, the principal iron works failed, the silk industry found itself condemned to slow but sure ruin. The bacinelle employed in silk spinning were reduced in the space of thirty years from 5000 to about 1500; the factories working to capacity, from over a hundred to eleven. Silk twining, which in the Trentino still occupied 1400 workmen in 1870, had disappeared twenty years later. These are the benefits with which Austria repaid the moral and political humiliation of a province that remained under her rule!

All this goes to demonstrate, were such demonstration needed, that Italy owes to none other than herself the notable economic progress which she has attained. As in the latter end of the Middle Ages, she has seen her production increase, and her economic welfare expand through independence and liberty. Nothing but hatred is due to the oppressor for the old and recent harin done to us. We must needs recognise in the history of our past the traces of a selfish and savage exploitation of which we have been the victims and which is not yet wholly avenged.

The childish legend by which certain economic advantages have compensated the political and moral oppression of our country can only appear to us in the light of a pitiless sarcasm.