Financial globalization and peripheral integration: business groups, relational infrastructures and networked intermediation in the south of Italy (1820–1903)

This article analyses the integration of Southern Italy into the first wave of financial globalization through the lens of transnational business groups (BGs) and relational infrastructures. Drawing on an original micro-level dataset and employing advanced Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques, we map the evolving structure of business and financial relationships that connected the Neapolitan periphery to core European financial centres in the nineteenth century. The article offers a relational reinterpretation of peripheral integration, showing that global capitalism advanced not merely through markets or states, but through densely structured networks of trust, influence and institutional proximity. It proposes a methodological and conceptual framework relevant to comparative histories of financial globalization and to rethinking the role of peripheries in shaping, and not just receiving, the trajectories of modern capitalism.