«Red fear» and a «spontaneous land reform» in post-Great War Italy

This paper is a study of the effects on landownership distribution of the unprecedented explosion of labour militancy in the Italian countryside during the post-Great War crisis, the period known as the «Red Biennium» (1919-1920) and its aftermath up to the March on Rome. During these years land markets became suddenly liquid, generating a sort of «spontaneous land reform». The Italian case thus provides valuable insights into the effects of extreme threats to property on the operation of usually sticky land markets in a developing economy. The conventional wisdom attributes a key role in the process to «Red fear». Exploiting geographical variation in different dimensions of collective action intensity, we revisit the conventional wisdom. The frequency of agricultural strikes is indeed strongly correlated with land sales, but the scale of strike participation over the period is associated with a lower propensity to sale in Central and Northern provinces. Spatial analysis suggests a pattern of land sales compatible with contagion across locations. Thus, an increase in disruptive labour unrest may have induced some landowners to sell, as far as the threat was perceived as an individual one. Where the labour movement was able to increase the scale and scope of the threat, the entire landowning class was concerned. There, Blackshirts rather than land sales were the response to Red fear