Evolving gaps: Occupational structure in southern and northern Italy, 1400–1861

During the Risorgimento (1800–61), southern Italy was less industrial than central-northern Italy and initially agricultural provinces in the north saw rapid structural transformation. During the Renaissance (1400–1600), structural transformation in the south led to a near halving of the initial difference in agricultural employment share between the centre-north and the south, but convergence came to a halt with the ‘seventeenth-century crisis’. These trends suggest that regional inequality was evolving rather than persistent.