Shipbuilding in Italy, 1861-1913: The Burden of the Evidence

Abstract

Ship-building in post-Unification Italy is here documented by new national and re-gional time series. Where the extant national series point to secular decline, the new estimates reveal a major increase in output tied primarily to the growth of repair work on the one hand and of naval construction on the other. The re-gional estimates, which have no precedent in the literature, point to consider-able concentration: Liguria accounted for more than half the product, and Campania for almost another quarter. Again, while in most regions shipbuild-ing was barely significant, in Liguria it represented up to a quarter of total in-dustrial production. The further disaggregation of naval construction points to significant exports, from the 1890s, by the private yards in Tuscany and Lig-uria; the consensus view that Italy’s engineering industry was then too back-ward to export at all is clearly unfounded.