In 1958, A.J.P. Taylor's essay The Troublemakers explored the tradition of dissent against power politics in the United Kingdom. Gaetano Salvemini, who had always shown a consistent interest in British political and cultural debates, shared many of the positions put forward by these ‘troublemakers’, such as free trade, the fight against military expenditure, and suspicions regarding standing armies. At the outbreak of the First World War, Salvemini used these arguments to support Italy's involvement in the war against autocratic and militarist central powers. Salvemini's journal L'Unità reported the stances expressed by a ‘troublemaker network’ called the Union of Democratic Control, despite their criticism of the United Kingdom's line of action during the war. In the course of the conflict, Salvemini kept in close contact with a specific group of ‘troublemakers’ around Robert Seton-Watson's journal The New Europe. Salvemini championed The New Europe's fight for subject nationalities in the Habsburg Empire, though he criticised their support of Yugoslavian claims to Istria, Trieste and Venezia Giulia. This essay will focus on the complex relationship between Salvemini and these British ‘troublemakers’ through the former's writings and correspondence.

This article addresses a rather neglected aspect of Salvemini's prolific political output. Based on records collected in the Salvemini Archive at the Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Florence, this article examines Salvemini's perspective on the 1948 elections in Italy, through an analysis of his public writings and private correspondence. It considers the decisive impact that exile to the US and the academic environment of Harvard had on Salvemini's conception of democracy and politics, by making him an outsider in post-war Italy, a country polarised into the two competing ideological factions of the Communists and the Christian Democrats. Salvemini's fiercely independent spirit led him to criticise the Allies’ plans for post-war Italy and the American intervention in the 1948 elections under the auspices of the Cold War. Through an understanding of Salvemini's thought, this essay tries to offer a deeper analysis of the meaning of the 1948 elections as a watershed in the history of Italy.