Italy
Mediterranean peninsular state; setting of Quigley's doctoral thesis
Also known as: Italy, Italian, Italians, Italy's
The Mediterranean peninsular state — and the specific setting of Quigley's 1938 doctoral thesis on the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy. A standard inter-war and wartime actor in T&H (T&H 20).
Quigley's Framing
Italy enters Quigley's work along two channels: as the geographic core of the late-classical and medieval Mediterranean world he treats in The Evolution of Civilizations, and as the specific administrative case of his doctoral thesis on the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy. The thesis gave him an unusually detailed grasp of how Napoleonic France remade a peninsular polity by imposing the prefectoral system, the codes, and a new fiscal apparatus — a case study in the export of state-building technology that informs his later comparative chapters.
Strategic Role
In the twentieth-century narrative Italy is a second-tier great power: ambitious under Mussolini's Fascist regime, structurally over-extended, and ultimately a junior partner first to Germany and then, after 1945, to the Anglo-American Atlantic system. T&H's Italian chapters give particular attention to the Ethiopian war, the Mediterranean campaigns of the Second World War, and the post-war Christian-Democratic stabilization. Rome is treated as the still-functional capital of an enduring Mediterranean cultural zone, even as the political center of gravity moved north.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 20 Quigley
Italy, the Mediterranean peninsular state, played a second-tier great-power role in the inter-war system.
- napoleonic-italy Quigley
The Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy is the textbook case of administrative state-building exported from one polity to another.