Making of a Historian

Ramella’s work as a scholar is deeply intertwined with his life experiences and political affiliations. He was born in Biella, an industrial town in northern Italy, in 1939. During the 1960s, like many young people of his generation, he became involved in politics, first in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), and from 1964 in the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity, which broke with the PSI after its entry into a governing coalition with the Christian Democrats.

During these years, Ramella closely collaborated with the journal Quaderni Rossi, which appeared between 1961 and 1966, counting among its founders Raniero Panzieri, Danilo Montaldi, Romano Alquati, and Mario Tronti. These men can rightfully be considered the pillars of the initial phase of operaismo (“workerism”), an influential current of the Italian radical left.

The Quaderni Rossi circle argued that factory, society, and state had become tightly interconnected. Industry was fundamentally a political tool deployed to control labor and standardize society. In this new setting, class conflicts no longer revolved around the opposition between wage workers and capital. Since the grip of capitalism over society had grown tighter, the struggle of the proletariat had expanded to encompass other issues, such as culture, imagination, language, forms of life, and reproduction.

In a 1964 article published in Quaderni Rossi, Ramella and his fellow townsman Clemente Ciocchetti shed some light on these new kinds of contention in the textile industry of Biella. The two authors gathered oral and written testimonies from the workers through the method of collaborative research (“conricerca”).

Their efforts aimed to show how the automatization of the producing process and the subordination of workers to the assembly line affected the work environment. In this changed context, a new microphysical landscape of resistance came to the rise. Workers exerted their will for political and social transformation through new instruments of struggle: they refused to work and resorted to sabotage and other means of individual and collective resistance to factory discipline.

Capitalist development had to effectively counter these proactive forms of resistance. Since workers no longer acted as passive victims, capital could not simply rely on its own subjugating logic. It had to resist by inventing new forms of exploitation. In order to bridle the force of living labor, factories implemented different, harsher kinds of working regimes.

Marxism and Microhistory

By the early 1970s, the agenda of the workerists had become impracticable. As the Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity dissolved and workerism entered its crisis, Ramella left politics and moved from Biella to Turin. In a 2014 interview with Serena La Malfa, the historian explained that he dropped out of political activism because he realized that capitalism had won.

However, the acceptance of defeat soon turned into an impulse that fueled a new start. In 1974, under the supervision of Giovanni Levi, he received a degree from the University of Turin. In Ramella’s words, the encounter and subsequent collaboration with Levi was “a watershed for his intellectual biography.” From the early 1970s onward, Ramella has situated himself at the intersection between two historiographical traditions: Marxism and microhistory.

Ramella came close to Marxist historiography through Thompson’s work on eighteenth-century English society. From Thompson, Ramella derived the idea that the advent of capitalism was the result of a succession of confrontations between two main forces: on the one hand, an innovative market economy based on the cash nexus and class conflict, which revolved primarily around the issue of wages; on the other hand, the customary moral economy of the plebian classes, whose tissue of traditional economic customs and usages cut across the principles of the “free market” and thus worked against them.

Microhistory, especially as developed in the works of Levi and Edoardo Grendi, was the second historiographical approach shaping Ramella’s intellectual trajectory. Like Thompson, these two scholars directed their enquiries away from what they called the “center of power” and the great characters that wrote the history of humanity. Their new objective was to explore the overlooked world of the margins and the “many.”

In this view, being one of the many also meant being among the disadvantaged and the exploited. But that does not mean that the identities of “lesser” people, their existence as living and breathing individuals, should be lost within the flow of world history. Their lives cannot and should not be reduced to their social role, like nameless faces in a homogenized, well-organized crowd of workers.

Microhistorians do not consider historical development as a unified, linear process, one that can be recounted in a grand narrative of the world in which only a few names are remembered, while most are obliterated by the waves of time. History is rather a multifaceted flow that consists of many individual centers. These centers are people, and people do not live “history” in a conjectural sense, but histories. Or better yet, stories: their stories are what matter.

In Land and Looms, first published in 1984, Ramella recombined elements from both of these historiographical traditions, thus building his own original perspective. In his view, the making of the working class was far from being a straightforward, linear, and inescapable process that turned a monolithic class of peasants into a monolithic class of industrial workers.

On the contrary, Ramella’s history is composed of many different stories, where the protagonists are men, women, families, and households. In this framework, peasants and factory workers are seen as people, not as social categories or mere cogs in the great historical machine. They appear as people and groups that actively traced the paths of their own lives, whether their existence was deemed worth remembering or not.

A Quiet Place

The story of Land and Looms began in the most unlikely place: the quiet valley of Mosso in the low hills that surround Biella. Like many European villages in the period between the later seventeenth century and the industrial revolution, the small rural communities of Mosso were characterized by low agricultural incomes and the existence of a large pool of cheap labor.

As a result, cultivators there had a strong incentive to turn to manufacturing in order to supplement their earnings. Men, women, and children divided their time between agriculture and industry. Within the walls of their own rural cottages, these people worked to produce manufactures that would later be sold on the market.

In this endeavor, workers could be self-employed or else depend upon some small, town-based entrepreneurs. In either case, their home was their workshop and their household a single, independent cell of production. Most of these manufactures were textile products. Peasants dedicated themselves to these crafts only during slack times — not consistently, but intermittently and depending on the season.

These homemade crafts were intended not only for local consumption, but also for national and international markets. Without the stimulus of large, competitive markets, rural manufactures quietly vegetated in the countryside, supplying household and local needs, but overall remaining untouched by the pressures of commercial capitalism. The link between peasant-producers and the wider world was provided by merchants who visited the market towns in the regions of cottage industry to buy manufactured goods.

Towns were not yet the prime centers for industrial production. Rather, they were places where proto-industrial workers disposed of their goods, purchased raw materials, and bought commodities that they could not produce or grow themselves, such as foods and other agricultural products.

In the countryside of Biella, the demands of the market became so strong that manufacturing outstripped the available labor supply. In doing so, it prompted this germinal form of industrial organization to modify its production techniques. Rural industry thus gradually transformed into factory-based industry.

Farm to Factory

What happened during the nineteenth century was thus an uneasy and uneven transition from the older world of domestic industry — discontinuous, multifocal, and horizontal — to the integrated, centralized, and hierarchical world of industrial capitalism.

In the world of rural industry, peasant-manufacturers managed to somewhat maintain the work-rhythms of the farms, small workshops, or craft guilds from which they came. They were also able to preserve an appropriate degree of differentiation among themselves in both sex and age, thus securing the sufficient division of labor to guarantee the proper functioning of the traditional domestic rural industry.

Nevertheless, as industrial manufacture came to the fore, it altered the nature and function of the peasant households in several ways. Monetary wages gradually replaced the traditional family income, while the weavers became less and less dependent on land revenues and the support of other members of the household.

In this new setting, both men and women were more likely to marry later, around their late twenties. However, the age at which they first had sexual intercourses did not increase accordingly. As a consequence, the number of children born outside marriage grew, while cases of child abandonment became more and more frequent.

Production was moved out of the family house. An ever-larger quantity of workers was assembled into new dedicated establishments: the modern factories. The impact on productivity was huge: human work became faster, as it was progressively subdued to the rhythm of production, altering both the nature of the traditional manufacturing process and of labor itself.

The life of the new factory workers had drastically changed, as they were periodically pushed into precarity by the unstable nature of industrial products and their presence on the market. Whenever trade slumped and factory production stopped, peasant-manufacturers were laid off by their employers. In the absence of industry, farmers and their families went back to their traditional agricultural occupation, from which they derived the basic income for their survival.

Cultural Transformation

Unfortunately, this alternance between industry and agriculture did not work particularly well. Manufacturing slotted into the more labor-intensive periods of the farming year when peasants were busy with the harvest. Workers were therefore overexploited in both industry and agriculture over the summer, while they remained idle (and deprived of an income) for the rest of the year.

The nature of social conflicts changed, too. In the world of rural industry, the working classes were more quickly inflamed to action by rising prices — what Thompson called the bread-nexus, that is, the correlation between the price of bread and rioting. In contrast, economic class conflict in nineteenth-century Italy, as elsewhere in the industrial world, found its characteristic expression over the issue of wages.

As wage workers grew in number, they became more and more dependent on their salaries and employers, while concurrently losing their autonomy as rural workers. Sven Beckert has recently reminded us that the all-encompassing control of workers — a core characteristic of capitalism — experienced its first great success in the textile factory.

The transition from peasant manufacture to industrial work ultimately put an end to what scholars have called the “plebeian culture” of the protoindustrial family economy. All the customs of this surpassed mode of work organization became extinct, together with its associated mindset and its rights. That included the right to work according to a self-determined schedule and to engage in “traditional leisure time rituals,” as well as the sense of belonging to a local village community and the possibility of enjoying long-established patterns of consumption.

A New Labor Regime

The life of factory workers had become significantly different from the manufacturing experience of rural crafters. Factories imposed their own labor regime, and the new, frantic work rhythms pushed many laborers to rise against their masters.

Resistance was the word that unified the proletarian movement. However, its composite nature and the diversity of its objectives (and enemies) gave rise to a multitude of languages, attitudes, and gestures. Each and every one of them was designed to hit a specific target.

In his work, Ramella stresses the importance of this customary devised lingo of protest. As capitalism developed stricter forms of oppression, resistance adopted its own tools to counter them.

Manufacturers tried to exploit the long-established relationships among the peasant households to prevent the concentration of workers into factories. However, both the peasant household and the modern factory relied on a rigid, hierarchical system of governance: within both of these structures, workers established strong bonds of solidarity. This made them allies in the same battle and their camaraderie allowed them to gain partial control over the rhythms of production.

In practical terms, workers tacitly established a standard level of production: those who managed to increase their individual production of fabrics above that level usually found themselves isolated and hampered by the others. The most productive laborers became targets for the average ones, who refused to collaborate with them. Sometimes, they even damaged their looms to stop individual behavior that was considered detrimental to the collective interest of the group.

Strikes were also a crucial moment: in them, every worker had to show solidarity to the common cause. As a form of resistance, strikes were mainly directed against the owner of the factory and his attempts to impose a more rigorous work discipline. However, strikes and protests could also affect other targets: for instance, workers who did not participate in the strike could suffer heavy consequences.

Strikers used to label those who refused to join their action with the insulting name of “Bedouin.” Having been branded in this way, they were cut off from every kind of social relationship with their work colleagues and members of the entire community, with its complex network of solidarity and mutual support. This included the loss of access to water, credit, and any other resource or form of assistance for the “Bedouins.” Such isolation ultimately forced them to leave factory and village alike.

Owners often attempted to replace the strikers with outside workers recruited from areas of structural or periodical unemployment such as Lombardy or Tuscany. Of course, it was in the best interest of local workers to drive them away. From the factory to the tavern, local workers aggressively surrounded the outsiders, pressuring them to hand over a share of their wage as reimbursement for what, in their minds, was considered plain theft.

If the latter resisted, they were punched or stoned. Every time that owners attempted to replace the striking resident workforce, the newcomers decided to leave the factory soon after their arrival, with the intimidating maneuvers by the local workers and their families having played a major part in this choice.

Centers of Solidarity

Since the process of labor specialization broke the ties between workers and the traditional peasant community, the formers had to find new places in which to come together and establish bonds of solidarity on a different basis. In this new setting, the tavern (osteria or bettola) became the most important gathering place for the industrial workers’ community. In the taverns, textile workers discussed the issues that came with their new social condition and fresh kinds of solidarity were born.

The tavern was also the place that hosted the first meetings of the new society of Croce Mosso. Formally, Croce Mosso was a society of mutual aid: in essence, its purpose was to collect funds to assist the workers in their moments of difficulty (illness, unemployment, etc.).

In reality, however, it was much more than that. Gathered together, the members of this association decided the political orientation and the general guidelines of the workers’ movement. It was, to all intents and purposes, an instrument of resistance.

By contrast, the state representatives and the owners of the factories saw the taverns as hotbeds of debauchery and moral corruption. In their view, workers only wanted higher salaries so they could spend their additional income getting drunk. Rather like contemporary Italian politicians and employers who claim that people prefer lazing at home to working for a miserable salary, the owners of textile factories in the late nineteenth century justified their lust for profit by vilifying the tavern and all the anti-exploitation strategies that were conceived within its walls.

The truth was very different, of course. Workers saved part of their wages to complement their meager agrarian incomes, but also invested another share of their salary to finance their strategies to resist industrial exploitation. A state official inquiring into the strikes of the 1870s reported that workers used what little money they received from their employer to support the strike movement. Their motivation was rather straightforward: “There cannot be saving if not aimed at fighting the boss (il padrone).”

As a reaction to workers’ resistance, factory owners adopted the mechanical loom and replaced their male labor force with female workers. The latter were much cheaper and — at least in theory — easier to keep under control. Unlike previous strategies, which still preserved some sort of continuity between the functioning of the household and the factory system, this new policy disrupted the traditional household. It led to children abandoning school at a young age, late marriages, demographic decline, and finally to unemployed male workers emigrating to make their fortune elsewhere.

Patterns of Migration

In Land and Looms, Ramella demonstrated a close correlation between changes in labor regime, alterations in the demographic structure, and migratory cycles. It is thus not surprising if in the years following the publication of his masterpiece, he became more and more interested in the lives and sentiments of the people who left Italy during the emergence of industrial capitalism.

In this particular field, Ramella edited with Samuel L. Baily a collection of letters written by the members of the Sola family: One Family, Two Worlds: An Italian Family’s Correspondence across the Atlantic, 1901–1922 (1988). The Sola family correspondence is a rich and detailed set of documents that gives us unique insight in the subjective process of migration. The book might well be regarded as a complement to Land and Looms, since it describes the vicissitudes of the people who left their home for another country, rather than the ones who left the countryside for the factories in urban areas.

In his later studies, Ramella researched the trajectories of internal and international migrations, investigating the assistance networks that facilitated the integration of newcomers in their adoptive city or country, as well as the many ways in which migrants reshaped their hosting society. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ramella also tirelessly scrutinized the causal connection between human mobility and the diffusion of the virus. This made his own death from the virus on November 25, 2020, even more tragic.

Recovering Ramella

Why has Land and Looms been reprinted nearly four decades after its original publication? In the period since 1984, historians have enormously improved our understanding of capitalism, or rather capitalisms in the plural sense. They have proposed novel definitions of what capitalism is about, with different chronologies and multilinear trajectories leading to the formation of the modern global economy.

They have also reoriented scholarly attention toward topics such as colonialism, race, and violence, and demonstrated the extent to which the violent affirmation of capitalism depended on the intersection of different mechanisms of oppression such as race, gender, and ethnicity.

In the preface to the 2022 edition, Maurizio Gribaudi offers a compelling rationale for the recovery of Ramella’s work. In spite of the passing of time, Land and Looms still stands out for its ability to accurately describe how industrial capitalism changed the social life of ordinary people living in the Biellese valley during the nineteenth century.

Ramella’s stories of Mosso’s agricultural community demonstrate that there is no reason why an approach to historical inquiry that deals with broad social transformations and one centered on the life and existence of common people cannot coexist and supplement each other. The task of the historian is to explore the connections between these two levels of historical experience. Franco Ramella’s lifework is a testimony to the effectiveness of this approach.