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Milan marked the turn of the century with a fundamental change in both its government and its character. In January 1900 Giuseppe Mussi was formally sworn in as the new mayor of the city at the head of a Radical administration supported by the Republicans and Socialists who had made up the Democratic alliance in the elections of December 1899. For the next four years this coalition presided over a city whose economic and physical growth turned it into a true city of industrial capitalism: a fact confirmed by the 1901 census which, for the first time, recorded over half the city's workforce as employed in manufacturing. Economic and political conflicts, particularly those involving class interests, assumed new forms: old alliances became outmoded. The next three chapters examine the consequences of these developments for the esercenti movement. This chapter analyses changes in the business of shopkeeping at both local and national levels and their relation to the position of small business within the national political process. Chapter 12 focuses on the developments in labour relations within the esercenti sector, whilst chapter 13 analyses the effects of these changes on esercenti political activity in Milan in the first five years of a new century. THE BUSINESS OF SHOPKEEPING The early years of the new century were prosperous ones for the city of Milan and the retailers who served it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the fall of the Crispi government in 1896, a new administration was established under the leadership of Di Rudini. The new government was drawn almost entirely from the landed elite, and agrarian paternalism blinded it to the real nature of many of the urban, commercial and labour questions that confronted the country. The chasm between the ‘legal’ Italy of the state and the ‘real’ Italy of its citizens was the cause of the ‘end-of-century’ crisis whose most spectacular manifestation took place in Milan in 1898. The government's most pressing problem was the rapid rise in bread prices and the public unrest which accompanied this. In 1897 just 23,891,000 quintals of grain were harvested in Italy, compared with figures between 31,798,000 and 39,920,000 for the previous five-year period. The shortfall had to be made up by imports, yet these were subject to a high protective tariff which the government was loath to reduce for fear of offending their supporters. Between them the dazio on grain and the dazio consume accounted for around 40% of the price of bread. Bread prices rose sharply in Milan as elsewhere. The retail price of prime-quality bread in the interno was 30 centesimi per libra at the beginning of April 1897, 34 centesimi at the end of May, and 36 centesimi at the end of July, and it had reached 38 centesimi by January 1898. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic slump between 1890 and 1896 produced an interesting paradox in the history of the Milanese esercente movement. The suffering wrought amongst individual proprietors created new opportunities for the shopkeeper movement and, above all, for the construction of shopkeeper identity. Adversity often breeds unity, but in the case of the esercenti there was a further paradox in that those factors on which they blamed their misfortunes, and that could only be combated by exercising the collective voice in the political sphere that the movement advocated, were not the root cause of the small traders' distress. Indeed, part of the movement's success arose precisely from its failure to address the most fundamental problem of shopkeeping in the period. Chapter 1 illustrated the deep recession in the small retailing sector between 1889 and 1897. Consumption fell as did real prices, although protectionist duties on agricultural produce sometimes forced shop prices upwards, accentuating the drop in demand and contributing to the demands for cheaper bread that fuelled the public disorders of 1898 (see Figs. 1.3 and 1.7). Indicative of the decline in economic activity was the fall in the volume of bills of exchange discounted by the Cassa di Risparmio delle Provincie Lombarde after 1892. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]