Research

A major part of my research has focused on the production of knowledge for agricultural policy, and on the different empirical practices, organisations and forms of expertise through which agriculture was made observable.

In Observing Agriculture in Early Twentieth-Century Italy[-->], I examined three principal modes through which agriculture was investigated and represented: enquiries, statistics and monographs. My subsequent research has extended this analysis in several directions.

One concerns accountancy data, which became central to my work through the MSCA project FARMACCOUNTA[-->]and subsequently the ERC StG DATAREV[-->]. Research into accounting led to the volumeFarm Accounts in Rural Europe, c. 1700–1914[-->], edited with Nathalie Joly[-->], and to my paper on farm valuation[-->].

Another concerns field observation and field trips, explored in my work on Wolf Ladejinsky[-->]. A third concerns the development of international agricultural statistics, particularly through my work on the International Institute of Agriculture with Niccolò Mignemi[-->][-->][-->].

Taken together, these strands describe the emergence of a "first data revolution in European agriculture"in the early 20th century: a transformation in the ways agricultural economies could be observed, represented, and organized, brought about by datafication. This revolution was the result of the conscious action of organizations and experts, as I showed in my work on accounting offices[-->].

Finally, I have increasingly turned from the forms and institutions of agricultural knowledge to the experts themselves and the construction of expertise[-->]. A post in the blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas summarized the "ideology" of early 20th century agricultural economists[-->].

The conference Two Centuries of Agricultural Futures: Actors and Networks of Agricultural Policy-Making in Europe from the 1760s to the 1960s, held in July 2026, was co-organized with Myriam Lichani[-->]and Filippo Soramel[-->]. It was meant to mobilize other agricultural historians around this agenda.Conference programme and poster [-->]

At the origins of political economy, in the eighteenth century, lies a concrete concern with government action. The Neapolitan tradition of Economia civile articulated this concern in terms of felicitas publica[-->]and of thefunctions of government[-->].

Policy action, in this context, depended on the construction of an information space that was complex and articulated. My research on the administrative culture of Ancien Régime Naples has examined the conflicts surrounding the production, circulation and authority of information, particularly in relation to grain policy, in Numeri falsi e numeri errati: le basi informative della politica granaria a Napoli nella seconda metà del secolo XVIII[-->].

My current research takes this question further by investigating the emergence, in the eighteenth century, of a distinctive attitude towards facts. Much of the existing literature has explored the relationship between political economy and the natural sciences, particularly Newtonian physics. My research instead explores the connections between economic knowledge and the antiquarian and philological traditions, asking how these traditions contributed to the emergence of what could count as an economic fact[-->].

Most work on the economic constitution of European institutions has focused on the creation of the Common Market and Single Market, and on the Economic and Monetary Union. My new research takes a different approach by examining more closely the developmental ambitions of European institutions and the ways in which they sought to shape investment and economic transformation.

I am particularly interested in the investment priorities identified by European organisations: first through the activities of the European Investment Bank, and subsequently through initiatives such as the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) and European regional policies.

"But, to take the thing right, it should seem that our counsels and deliberations depend as much upon fortune as anything else we do, and that she engages also our arguments in her uncertainty and confusion. “We argue rashly and adventurously,” says Timaeus in Plato, “by reason that, as well as ourselves, our discourses have great participation in the temerity of chance." (Montaigne, Of the uncertainty of our judgment)

Data are not all there is about decision. Actually, we can only rarely identify the bits of information which underpin specific decisions. I am therefore investigating the early-modern concept of coup d'œil as a way of understanding decision-making and practical judgement[-->]. The advance of Galilean and then Newtonian sciences, with their emphasis on geometry and mathematization, left the problem open of connecting human action to universal geometric rules. To military and art theorists of the 18th century, the coup-d'oeil offered a handy concept to describe the ability of generals and artists to apply and adapt rules to particular contexts.

My investigations on the role of experts and data led me to question how and why ambitious reform plans were launched and justified. I thus plan a new project on the history of backwardness: how the modern concept emerged and became an object of policy intervention. Critical approaches to development studies have traditionally understood backwardness as the result of a foreign gaze upon an organic community, whether a village or a nation. My research instead explores how metrics of progress and backwardness may be constructed within the community itself, and how they can support strategies of catching up through reform, emulation and adaptation. Backwardness thus becomes not simply an external judgement, but an element in the political strategies of historical actors themselves.

I have begun discussing how Marxist intellectual from the Russian empire defined and discussed backwardness here [-->]. Definitions of economic progress and backwardness are also a big topic in my forthcoming book The global economy: history of an idea