Financial and Business Relationships in Naples during the First Globalization Era (1860-1913). A Network Analysis perspective

Since 1860, European business world experienced massive international capital flows moving from the core area to peripheral countries, this way progressively realizing a process of integration, historically known as “first globalization”. The case of Naples well exemplifies this process. Grown untidily and completely lacking efficient services, it became a catalyst for broad-ranging investment projects. Groups of international business and financial actors came massively to Naples over the period of the Italian political unification, pushing such a peripheral area in the first wave of globalization. We aim to show the changing chains of relations that these groups set up around the business opportunities, arising from the city modernization projects: infrastructures (railways, harbour), urban public utilities (gas enlightenment, water supply) and urban space expansion, both in the eastern area (industrial area) and in the western one (residential quarters: Chaia, Posillipo). Naples became the hub of a complex network of relations within a space beyond the geographical and economic borders, thus being embedded in the wider process of the “first globalization”. The work is based on a unique and original database covering the whole amount of enterprises and companies operating in Naples between 1808 and 1913 (source: IFESMez). We deal with a relational approach that emphasizes both institutional, political, economic, and cultural connections between international agents and the host place. The main goal is to witness how the network of such multiple and interdependent relationships shaped during the time, how it worked and whether and how it enabled actors to continue to raise finance to foster their wide-ranging business and to cope with temporary crises.