Il debito pubblico in ambito municipale. Stato, comunità e creditori nel Regno di Napoli tra Sei e Settecento

Alessandra Bulgarelli (Il debito pubblico in ambito municipale. Stato, comunità e creditori nel regno di Napoli tra ‘600 e ‘700) addressed the same topic under a different perspective, focussing on the plurality of institutional subjects—State, investors and communities—involved in the management of Neapolitan public debt between the 16th and the 18th centuries. The communities of the kingdom of Naples debt included the debt subscribed on a strictly local basis by municipal authorities, and the debt resulting from the farming out, on the part of the State, of taxes paid by communities in the ratio of the number of fuochi, that is the economically productive familial nuclei present in each community. Community debt in the kingdom of Naples—considered in its double origin—was widespread in the early modern age: 70% of the 1311 communities examined for the years 1726-29 presented, among the itemized expenses, sums due to creditors, which accounted in the budget for approximately 35% of the total expenses. Local community debt fed a dynamic securities market, correlated to the economic conjuncture. The two parties—creditors and communities—were driven by different motivations, though producing analogous positive effects in the field of credit—an increase in the issue of bonds and in the frequency of transactions. As far as the other aspect is concerned¬—that relative to the State and to its creditors —scholarship has surveyed the possessors of bonds, as well as forms and times of the investment and the distribution of the revenue among various social groups. Data already available in the literature on the field can be integrated by studying the bargaining power that the investors could exert vis-à-vis the government, and the latter’s choices in the domain of local finance. The power of money was the first factor in explaining the investors’ weight in the process of negotiation with the state; however it was not the only one. Other factors were at play: the degree of information about the territory and communities; the fact that creditors were also taxpayers; personal prestige at court and in society; the esprit de corps that led to the cultural construction of a social rank. All these factors reinforced the power of negotiation of the creditors versus the government and produced concrete results in orienting the action of the State both in promoting actions to safeguard the creditors’ interests towards the communities and in changing or suppressing the most important reforms touching the public debt or, more generally, the public finance of the kingdom of Naples.