The politics of real property in the Kingdom of Sardinia, 1720?1848
| Autor | Charles Bartlett |
| Páginas | 203-226 |
THE POLITICS OF REAL PROPERTY IN
THE KINGDOM OF SARDINIA, 1720–1848
Charles Bartlett
This chapter is interested in the politics attached to real property regimes
in 18th- and 19th-century Europe, and it takes as its focus the Kingdom of Sar-
dinia from the end of the War of the Quadruple Alliance to the Statuto Alber-
tino. During this period, the Kingdom of Sardinia underwent drastic territo-
rial and administrative change, much of it inseparable from a broader context
of political and social development across Europe. The consequences of such
change for the institutions of real property offer a fascinating glimpse into
how such institutions relate to structures of political power and collective en-
terprise, how that relation can lead to their politicization, and how amenable
these institutions are to alteration. Although this chapter, like others in this
volume, is therefore not solely interested in using political timelines to dene
the characteristics and developments of land law, it is interested in the effects
of each upon the other, and chooses dates of political signicance to bound
the investigation because these come more easily to hand. That being said,
the processes of interest to us are complex, and reference will be made to
phenomena that fall outside these years.
The French Revolution and the First French Empire dominate events at
the middle of our timeline and had profound effects on the Kingdom of Sar-
dinia, both in terms of political ideology and administration. It will come as
no surprise that much of what we will discuss is framed through the issues
that actors at the time and scholars subsequently have identied as central,
above all the concentration of land-owning and bureaucratic centralization.
Although developments in the Kingdom of Sardinia were tied to broader phe-
nomena across the continent, there were nevertheless particularities in the
Kingdom of Sardinia that we will discuss in detail. These particularities were
due in no small part to variations in land law within the Kingdom of Sardinia
at the end of the 18th century, which were owing to the perpetuation of region-
al differences within the recently expanded polity, and, relatedly, growing
pressure for Italian unication.
In characterizing the relationship between political regimes and land law,
this chapter relies heavily on the notion of the corporation. In 21st-century
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204
common parlance, the word “corporation” is used to denote a small subset
of the organizations and activities to which the word could be applied, and
indeed historical consideration only reveals more pluralism. Further, it will
come as no surprise that the dominant impression of what a corporation is,
among the array of collective ventures that could be so labeled in any one
moment, has itself changed over time. In using the lens of the corporation
to examine the politics of real property regimes in the Kingdom of Sardinia
in the 18th and 19th centuries, this chapter is also interested in a likely shift
away from one of the previously instrumental conceptions of the corporation.
As we would expect, given the expansive nature of many political and social
events of these years, this shift was informed by happenings elsewhere in Eu-
rope, and indeed must also be seen within an extra-European context, as will
be discussed. Nevertheless, developments in the Kingdom of Sardinia offer
a unique example of the shift away from one form of corporate organization
through the politics that came to be attached to it.
This chapter proceeds in four parts. It rst recalls in broad strokes the
political history of the Kingdom of Sardinia during these years. In providing a
grounding upon which to examine the changes that interest us, this historical
recapitulation will prime us to consider the varied experiences of different
regions within the Kingdom of Sardinia in terms of political and real prop-
erty administration, as well as the afnities between some of those regions
and other polities. Next, it will present the salient points of the history of the
corporation over the longue durée. This sketch will not only demonstrate the
varied nature of corporate undertaking over time, but will speak to the dom-
inant conception of the form of the corporation in several periods, as well as
how that dominant conception has changed.
We will then delve into the politics of the administration of real property
in the Kingdom of Sardinia in our period, especially in the decades on either
side of the turn of the 19th century. Having considered the history of the King-
dom of Sardinia and neighboring polities over these years as well as the histo-
ry of the corporation, we will be in good stead to appreciate how a particular
sort of corporation was central to the politicization of real property, and how
the movement away from this type of corporation inuenced the dominant
conception of corporate activity. This is the corporation of peasant laborers
that owned and administered collective property under the feudal system of
land tenure. More details will follow in due course, but it is a principle aim of
this chapter to oat the idea that this sort of organization is best understood
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