Italy's Many Diasporas

Donna R. Gabaccia has achieved a masterly synthesis of the extensive literature on migration from and to the Italian peninsula over the last eig ht hundred years. Exploiting scholarship from five continents and many countries, she successfully gives an account of the italiani nel mondo. “Italians Everywhere,” the title of a project that laid the foundation for this book, well describes its scope. In addition to her thorough mining of secondary literature, Gabaccia contributes new research throughout the book. Her use of the Jacini Commission records to examine the consequences on their home villages of emigration and repatriation of plebeian migrants is an example. She briefly reviews the migrations of merchants, artists, clerics, and adventurers, starting in the Middle Ages, to establish part of the conceptual foundation for the heart of her story of the global migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gabaccia presents basic statistics for various types of migration, workers, political and intellectual elites, etc., for different historical periods. Then she compares the consequences of migrations of different groups to different destinations for the migrants and the societies of emigration and immigration, thus finding diversity and complexity everywhere. Migration both contributed to a consciousness of nationality and undermined the Risorgimento goals of promoting a unified Italian national identity among Italians abroad as well as at home. Depending in part on the time of migration and the destination, emigration either promoted or retarded solidarity, political action, and an internationalist perspective among workers

Economic history · Emigration · Ethnology · Genealogy · Immigration · Political science · Politics · Repatriation · Scholarship · Solidarity · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law