Italian Financial Expansion and State-Building

This edited volume presents new research on the expansion and internationalisation of Italian banking during the first century after unification. It argues that, unlike the profit-driven overseas expansion of banks in other major European powers, Italy’s international banking strategy was closely linked to state-backed political and diplomatic ambitions.

Bringing together leading scholars of Italian banking history, the volume examines how Italian banks pursued foreign markets despite operating in a capital-scarce economy. It explores strategies such as interbank cooperation, remittance management, foreign investment, and foreign exchange operations, while highlighting the roles of Catholic finance and the Bank of Italy. The contributors also reveal how financial expansion intersected with Italy’s imperial ambitions, both in its colonies and beyond. Offering fresh perspectives on the relationship between finance, state power, and international expansion, the volume will appeal to historians of banking, finance, and modern economic history.

Giampaolo Conte  is Associate Professor of Economic History at Roma Tre University, Italy, and Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of European Economic History . He has been a Visiting Scholar and Fellow at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics, and has twice been Visiting Lecturer at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, the Netherlands. His research has been published in leading international scholarly journals. He is the author of two monographs published by Routledge:  A History of Capitalist Transformation: A Critique of Liberal-Capitalist Reforms  (2024) and  Debt and Imperialism in the Mediterranean: Politics of Default and Diplomacy in the 19th Century (2026).

Luciano Maffi is an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics and Management of the University of Parma. Previously, he was Lecturer at the same department and Lecturer at the University of Salento in Lecce. He studies the primary sector and food production in Early Modern and Modern history. He focuses on economic, financial, and social history, with particular attention to private bankers from medieval period to the nineteenth century. He recently published: Private bankers in the Italian 19th century. The Parodi of Genoa in the national and international context: credit, financial and political relations , Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.