History of the Kingdom of Naples

This edition includes:• New English translation• Critical introduction• 33 editor's notes• 10 illustrationsWhat if a kingdom could endure for seven centuries without ever becoming a nation? Benedetto Croce's History of the Kingdom of Naples takes up one of the most discouraging subjects in European history — the long life of the Kingdom, from the Norman-Swabian monarchy to the fall of the Bourbon dynasty in 1860 — and turns it into a question that still cuts: why did a state with a formidable administration, a sophisticated legal tradition and a brilliant intellectual class never produce the one thing that makes a history worth narrating, a nation?Croce writes the history of laws, institutions and ideas, and of the men who embodied them: Pietro Giannone, whose civil history of the realm was read across Europe; Antonio Genovesi, who taught political economy at Naples; the reformers and the Jacobins of 1799; the exiles who laboured for a wider national life. He is severe with the baronage that dominated the country without ever governing it, tender toward peasants and shepherds, and impatient with legends that flatter the South as a paradise or dismiss it as a land incapable of civilisation. His answer — that history is a moral phenomenon, the work of minorities who think and will, not of climate or race — has kept historians arguing for generations, accepting his questions while disputing his conclusions. Croce wrote it while moving into open opposition to Fascism, and its pages on liberty, legitimacy and nationhood read with undiminished force.This edition gives you Croce's text in a literary English translation made to be read today: natural and alive in the language of its readers, faithful to the substance, the voice, the tone and the images of the author. A critical introduction opens the volume, before the author's text, guiding you into the book's argument and into Croce's work.A bracing, endlessly rewarding book: add it to your library and read the Italian South as it has rarely been read.