From despecialized to specialized financial activity. Insurance companies in Naples over the 19th century. A network approach

The economic history of Naples belongs mostly to its port and sea. The largest port on the Tyrrhenian coast south of Leghorn, during the centuries, it catalyzed the most of Southern Italy’s commercial fleet and import and export trade. With so much at stake, in the face of such associated uncertainty and risk, Naples had developed a long tradition in marine insurance. Literature generally describes local marine insurance companies as a strongly entangled business system before the Unification of Italy (Davis 1979) while, after 1861, when the old Bourbon kingdom opened to free trade, there is no further track about the sector consistency, its organizational dynamics or its power in the local economic landscape. The paper presents a first endeavor into exploring the Naples marine insurance business history across the entire 19th century, a rather overlooked field of research in the rich literature on the troubled economic history of Southern Italy. The paper focuses on evaluating and explaining the power position that this dynamic component of the South’s economy had within the business environment of its most important metropolitan area. The analysis is based on original archival data on the universe of Neapolitan enterprises in the 19th century gathered in the IFESMez database. The interactions among agents and firms are analysed by using Social Network Analysis (Wasserman and Faust 1994), focusing on interlockings as one of the major techniques of power structure research. We look for the most central and powerful companies within the business structure by building interlocking networks (co-shareholding, interlocking directorates, kinship, etc.) for five sliding twenty-year periods before and after 1861. We capture the market structure by formulating and testing a core-periphery model in each time span, through blockmodeling approaches and we trace the trajectories of marine insurance companies within the local business structure. We find declining trajectories from core to periphery associated to a loss of interest of the most powerful city-based elites in this kind of business over Unification, also related to the progressive specialization of financial activities, when insurances were “forced” to deal exclusively with their own sector.