IN THE NOVEL North and South (1854–5), Elisabeth Gaskell explores the clash between tradition and modernity through the conflicting lifestyles and worldviews of the rural gentry in the south and the industrial entrepreneurs in the north of England. The title was suggested by Charles Dickens and part of the book is indeed focused on tensions between southern landed interest and northern industrial capitalism, as well as the regional particularities that contributed to the uneven distribution of industrial and social progress in England. But Gaskell’s novel also shows that the relationship between geography and social relations in nineteenth-century English society was much more complex than the binary framework of North and South implies. Physical, socio-economic and discursive at the same time, the North–South divide was at the centre of a moral map of national space, and the fact that internal North–South tensions in England were affected by the very same globalisation it had been instrumental in producing added complexity to the issue.

Just as the Global South today is more of a social than a geographical category, these insights by the Victorian novelist draw attention to the interplay between geography, society, culture and the economy with respect to the North–South relation, at a time when the political and intellectual elites in Europe devoted their attention to the project of consolidating ‘national territory’. The unified Italian nation-state that came into being shortly after Gaskell's novel appeared provides a paradigmatic example of the North–South division and its many layers between the local and the global. Ever since unification in 1861, Italy has struggled to overcome regional imbalances, mainly although not exclusively along a North–South axis. With an emphasis on the post-unification decades, the period in which the divide became articulated as an opposition between a North and a South, the present chapter surveys the lingering debates on Italy's so-called Southern question. This question emerged in the context of the specific dynamics of nation-state formation in Italy.