Historical ‘black legends’ are tenacious libels: they may influence perceptions of social groups, cultures or entire nations, centuries after the original misrepresentation was perpetrated. The enduring distrust of Catholics in England, still constitutionally embedded in the royal succession law and originating in the propaganda of Sir Francis Walsingham under Elizabeth I, is just one example.

There is, however, a far more potent instance of historical demonisation that, to this day, distorts the perception of a major European nation and influences the interaction of such contemporary bodies as the IMF and the World Bank with its government and economy. Italy is a unique instance of the extreme distortion of cultural heritage and economic history, due to the persistence of a black legend deployed for cynical political purposes in the mid-19th century, and still widely accepted today. Britain no longer subscribes to the self-validating Whig Interpretation of History; but Italy, at official level and in widespread public attitudes, clings to an equivalent mythology, dating from and designed to legitimise the Risorgimento.

The image of modern Italy is of a country driven economically by its prosperous northern regions – industrial, productive, modern and home to globally famous fashion houses – contrasted with the South, regarded as impoverished, agrarian and backward, despite a cultural heritage of great beauty and antiquity. It is the constant complaint of the more militant northern politicians, such as those belonging to the Lega Nord, that the South is a burden to the developed North, which has grown tired of subsidising Italy’s less enterprising regions.

This narrative is not, in the present day, false. It is borne out by the economic realities of Italy’s divided heritage. The World Bank has identified significant problems in the ‘Mezzogiorno’, as southern Italy is known, including high unemployment, low productivity, inadequate infrastructure and organised crime. The bank has highlighted regional disparities, with the North having a higher percentage of its workforce employed in industry and transportation, while the South has a greater proportion employed in agriculture, reflecting a surplus agrarian population.

The IMF, similarly, has identified the same issues in the South, as well as a more markedly declining birth rate than in the North and low female participation in the labour force (although, in social terms, if women are creating stable family and domestic environments, that need not be regarded as negative).

Overall, it is an established fact that, for generations, this disparity between North and South has bedevilled Italian society. At home and abroad there has been a general impression that this situation is simply part of the natural order of things: that the Italian peninsula has been divided immemorially between a naturally prosperous North and an intrinsically poor South.

Yet this assumption has been challenged, with increasing vigour and credibility, by a school of revisionist historians which contends that, so far from being a natural state of affairs, this disparity is a reversal of the original situation – an impoverished North and a prosperous South – which was overturned by a war of aggression and the ruthless despoliation of the South, accompanied by massacres on a scale that might credibly be termed genocide.

This school of historians, known as the Neoborbonici, asserts that the original driver of industrialisation and prosperity in the Italian peninsula was the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, until its violent overthrow by the economically backward, but militarily strong, Savoyard Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, in the name of Italian unification, at the time of the Risorgimento in 1860.

This interpretation runs counter to the entire received canon of Italian history, which glorifies the Risorgimento and demonises Bourbon rule in the South as reactionary and tyrannical. For 165 years, in Italy and abroad, a painstaking narrative has been presented of Savoyard rule supplanting the Bourbons and ‘liberating’ the peoples of Naples and Sicily, admitting them to the benefits of citizenship in a united Italy. The claims of the Neoborbonici have been strenuously resisted by the Italian establishment, which is as heavily invested in the mythology of the Risorgimento – on which it depends for its legitimacy – as is the British state in the comparable myth of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

There is, in fact, a symbiosis between those two widely separated historical events, since it was the English Whig-Liberal heirs to the Glorious Revolution who first launched the Black Legend designed to discredit the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies outside Italy, in concert with the Carbonari and other subversive organisations inside the peninsula, who sought the overthrow of the Bourbons.

Between 1850 and 1851, William Ewart Gladstone, at that time a leading light of the Peelite rump of the Conservative Party, soon to merge with the Liberals, visited Naples on a mission to improve his daughter’s eyesight. The Bourbon kingdom was then recovering from the massive upheaval of the European revolutions of 1848, which had brought down Louis-Philippe’s ‘citizen’s monarchy’ in France and which the Habsburg Empire had only barely survived. A revolt in Sicily and an uprising in Naples had similarly threatened Bourbon rule. Naples, therefore, at the time of Gladstone’s visit, was in an untypical state of confusion, its prisons crowded with 2,000 captured rebels.

Gladstone, whose associates in Naples belonged to the liberal middle and upper classes that had supported the uprising, became persuaded that the treatment of these prisoners represented an abuse of human rights. He published two Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen in April and July 1851 denouncing the Bourbon government to the British Parliament. In the first letter, with extravagant political hyperbole, he anathematised the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies as ‘the negation of God erected into a system of government’.

This rhetoric created a sensation across Europe. The Neapolitan government responded with an official statement repudiating the charges. In 1852 Gladstone attempted to answer his critics with a further pamphlet: An Examination of the Official Reply of the Neapolitan Government. He was forced to begin by admitting the falseness of some of the charges he had levied. The liberal prisoner Settembrini had not been tortured, nor put in double irons for life; 17 invalids had not been massacred in the prison of Procida; acquitted prisoners had continued to be detained – but only for two days. The ‘between four and five hundred’ prisoners about to be tried at Naples actually amounted to 46, the larger number reflecting an aggregate of all trials across the kingdom.

Gladstone acknowledged he had been attacked by critics for the lack of first-hand evidence in his account, which had been punctuated with ‘I believe’, ‘I have heard’ and ‘It was stated to me’. He continued to insist, on hearsay, that there were 20,000 political prisoners in the Two Sicilies, though the returns of prisoners he had seen only amounted to 2,000. Meanwhile, critics had hit back at Britain’s recent conduct in the Ionian islands and in Ceylon, as disqualifying its political leadership from any right to criticise abuses elsewhere.

The reality was that Britain had been spared the upheaval of 1848, which convulsed the European continent, but any such insurrection on British soil would have been just as severely punished: the retribution following the Irish rebellion of 1798 had demonstrated that. Gladstone had resigned as President of the Board of Trade in 1845, just as the Irish potato famine manifested itself. Following a brief period as Colonial Secretary from 1845 to 1846, despite not holding a seat in either house of Parliament, he lent his support to the Whig prime minister Lord John Russell, whose doctrinaire laissez-faire policies did much to aggravate the effects of the famine.

In 1851, when Gladstone entered into his controversy over the Two Sicilies, the Irish Famine was in its final stages and had resulted in one million deaths and a further million emigrations, to the scandal of Europe, where the obvious question was asked: how could millions of British subjects be reliant on a single crop – the potato – for survival? A critic observed that a million corpses lying unburied by the roadsides in Ireland did not disturb Gladstone, but what did concern him was that conditions in the political prisons of Naples ‘would make a decent man’s gorge rise’.

The charge he could not refute was that he had the opportunity in Naples to bring his concerns to the notice of Ferdinand II and his ministers but, instead, after he adopted his partisan crusade, had actually cancelled his routine application for an audience with the king. His demonisation of Bourbon rule was echoed by Italian revolutionaries, who, after his forces had bombarded rebel-held Messina, had christened the popular Ferdinand ‘King Bomba’, as a propagandist ploy.

So, the Black Legend of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, propagated by partisan liberals, gained traction. But what was the reality behind the myth? Only in the 21st century have the Neoborbonici historians supplied a comprehensive refutation, contradicting all received opinion on the Risorgimento, with a formidable array of evidence so much at odds with the previously prevailing orthodoxy as to constitute a major revolution in Italian historiography.

The alleged backwardness of the Two Sicilies, at least in terms of high culture, is easily refuted. The royal palace of Caserta, the Versailles of Italy; the Teatro San Carlo, built in just 270 days; the Archaeological Museum; the Botanical Gardens; the Astronomical Observatory; the National Library; the world’s first Seismological Observatory, at Vesuvius – all these institutions testified to the advanced state of the arts and learning in Bourbon Naples. Detractors sometimes claimed, weakly, that these were the amenities of the Ancien Régime, not reflective of the conditions of the people.

The character, however, of the Bourbons of the Two Sicilies was well described by Harold Acton in his two studies, The Bourbons of Naples and The Last Bourbons of Naples. Though preserving their royal state, they also mixed with easy informality among their subjects, speaking the same Neapolitan dialect, rather than the classical Italian of Tuscany. Apart from their distaste for bourgeois constitutions and the venality of parliamentary governance, they were thoroughly modernising rulers.

Some of the claims made on behalf of the Two Sicilies monarchy by the Neoborbonici are borne out by evidence from outside the Italian peninsula. For example, at the Exposition Universelle, in Paris, in 1855, just five years before the Piedmontese invasion, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was declared the third most industrialised country in Europe, after Britain and France. (Could anyone imagine the Mezzogiorno today gaining such a trophy?) After the conquest of the Two Sicilies, census data produced by the Piedmontese authorities showed that a total of 1,595,359 people were employed in industry in the former kingdom, compared with 1,170,859 in the whole of the rest of Italy.

The most crucial industrial infrastructure at that time was the railway system. The first railway in Italy was opened in the Two Sicilies on 3 October 1839, running from Naples to Portici. Liberal detractors sneered that it would be a toy for the king, but in his speech inaugurating the line, Ferdinand II outlined an ambitious plan for a complete railway network. By 1844 Nocera and Salerno had been linked, as well as Caserta, Capua and Sparanise.

Where the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies excelled was in its merchant marine. The Bourbon merchant fleet was the second largest in Europe, exceeded only that of Britain. By the end of the reign of Ferdinand II, the Neapolitan fleet amounted to 9,848 ships of greatly varying sizes, of which 17 were steamers. Neapolitan shipyards were scattered around the Tyrrhenian, Adriatic and Ionian seas. This was the real cause of British hostility, rather than pure ideological antipathy. Britain, during the Napoleonic Wars, had been a strong ally of Bourbon Naples; but now Neapolitan shipyards were building vessels that might otherwise have been constructed in British yards and ships flying the Bourbon flag were carrying cargoes that might otherwise have been transported in British bottoms.

Ferdinand II was aware of British jealousy and tried to appease it by giving it an effective monopoly on the sulphur trade in Sicily, necessary for the manufacture of gunpowder. That, however, proved an inadequate concession. Education was also advanced in the Bourbon kingdom, dating from the first ruler of the dynasty, later Charles III of Spain. From 1806, specialist educational institutions proliferated: an Academy of Fine Arts, the School of Arts and Crafts, the Royal Military Academy, the Polytechnic, the Naval Academy and schools for the deaf, the arts, medicine and music.

From 1810, all municipalities instituted free primary schools, funded by the local authorities. In secondary education there were 14 institutions in Naples alone. In higher education, Ferdinand II established a further 16 professorial chairs for its university. Public expenditure on education amounted to around one million ducats per year. The publicly funded education system was abolished by the Piedmontese regime after the conquest.

In medicine, the kingdom boasted 9,000 doctors for a population of nine million – the most favourable per capita ratio in the Italian peninsula, and the Two Sicilies had the lowest infant mortality rate in Italy. It is significant that the reason for Gladstone’s visit to Naples in 1850 was to secure expert medical treatment for his daughter’s eyesight.

Factory employees worked an eight-hour day for wages sufficient to sustain a family and there was even a pension system, based on two per cent levies on wages. The kingdom developed the first gas lighting system in Italy (and the first experimental electric lighting). Neoborbonici historians also claim the kingdom instituted the first municipal housing and free healthcare and had the highest number of orphanages and old people’s homes in Italy, claims that, considering the other evidence of modernity, seem credible, but would require further research to verify.

However, in the context of any comparison of the material prosperity of the Two Sicilies with the militarist state that conquered it, Piedmont-Sardinia, there is one uncontested statistic that speaks volumes. At the time of the overthrow of the Bourbon kingdom, the Two Sicilies treasury held 443.2 million gold-lire, while the Piedmontese treasury held a puny 27 million. The Two Sicilies national debt amounted to just 411 million lire, but Piedmont’s was over a billion. Those are the kind of fiscal statistics that do not lie and they clearly demonstrate which of those two states was enterprising and modern, and which was stagnant and backward. In Piedmont, the Prussia of Italy, everything was subordinated to the needs of the army.

That policy paid off in 1860-61, when the Piedmontese-Sardinian forces overran the southern kingdom. Francis II, the new young king who had just succeeded Ferdinand II, and his wife Queen Maria Sophia (sister of Empress Elisabeth of Austria), with 20,000 loyal troops, withstood a siege in the fortress of Gaeta from 5 November 1860 to 13 February 1861, when they were obliged to capitulate. The young couple’s heroism, especially Maria Sophia’s devoted nursing of the wounded, reinforced the popularity of the departing Bourbon dynasty. The last Bourbon-held fortress, Civitella del Tronto, fell on 20 March 1861.

That, however, did not end loyalist resistance: many of the population resorted to guerrilla warfare against the invaders, sustaining their resistance for at least seven years. The reprisals committed by the Piedmontese troops amounted to atrocities. Concentration camps, the invention of which is often attributed to the British during the Boer War, were established to imprison those resisting, or suspected of resisting, Piedmontese hegemony. The Savoyard king, Victor Emmanuel, with his pantomime facial hair, became, by conquest, king of a united Italy (Rome being taken in 1870).

It might be asked, why would a change of dynasty precipitate an economic revolution, with the South suddenly impoverished? Why would the progressive Savoyard government not simply preside over the most prosperous region of the Italian peninsula, to its continuing advantage? Because it had no intention of doing so, is the answer.

The 443.2 million gold-lire in the Two Sicilies treasury was confiscated and taken north. The most important of the more than 5,000 factories that had created so much wealth and employment were dismantled and similarly transported to Piedmont. Church property was appropriated to an estimated total of 600 million lire and former state property that the Bourbons had hypothecated to the benefit of the peasantry raised a similar sum. Even two huge bronze mortars, the work of Benvenuto Cellini, were moved to Turin, in an orgy of looting.

But it is the debate between the Neoborbonici historians and the defenders of the orthodox narrative over the military repression of the South that has generated most heat. The highest estimate of the number of victims that has been proposed is 900,000, a figure that seems insupportable. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the Savoyard generals behaved as war criminals. The burning of entire villages was routine, as was the massacre of their inhabitants if they failed to escape into the hills.

General Pinelli extended the death penalty ‘to those who by word or act insulted the arms of Savoy, the portrait of the king or the national flag’. Meanwhile, liberal Europe – and Britain – was celebrating the end of Bourbon ‘absolutism’. Details are well documented of the massacres at Pontelandolfo and Casalduni. The diary of a Piedmontese soldier who was present at Pontelandolfo survives, in which he recorded: ‘According to our orders women, children and the sick were to be spared. But you know how these things go once you are there.’

Foreign newspaper reports, which tended to downplay Savoyard atrocities, recorded nevertheless that between September 1860 and August 1861, 8,968 people were shot, 10,604 wounded, 918 houses burned, 12 churches ransacked and 1,428 municipalities razed. Since that was in the very early stages of the repression, which intensified as time went on, and the terror did not finally abate until 1871, that suggests a very high casualty rate.

The debate among historians regarding the repression is likely to continue for many years and is unlikely ever to achieve consensus. However, the significant fact is that this controversy has changed from downright denial on the part of those defending the Risorgimento myth, to attempts to minimise the scale of the atrocities. Since the events took place in the early photographic age, photographs have been published of a town with corpses littering the streets, adding fuel to the fires of controversy. The brutal and lawless behaviour of the Savoyard government paved the way for Fascism in the 20th century.

What is incontrovertible is that the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was the most prosperous part of Italy. Unemployment and emigration were unknown. After Italian unification, the South succumbed to chronic unemployment, mass emigration and organised crime.

Resentment against the North and the government in Rome, is endemic among the population of the former Bourbon kingdom. For the present, it may amount to no more than cultural disaffection; but if the European Union were to be overtaken by economic disaster, or even to fragment like the Soviet Union, then, on the model of the former Yugoslavia, there is no guarantee that the Italian state would survive such a seismic event. Historical fault lines run deep, and it is possible that the Italian political class, deceived by its own mythology of the Risorgimento, may be underestimating the potential for the dissolution, under extreme pressure, of an artificial polity fabricated by force and to the severe disadvantage of one half of the peninsula.