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White Goods in Italy During a Golden Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xliv:1 (Summer, 2013), 83–110. WHITE GOODS IN ITALY Ivan Paris White Goods in Italy during a Golden Age (1948–1973) The spread of consumer durable goods is a char- acteristic element of consumption patterns during the golden age of the Western economy. Within this category of products, do- mestic appliances are of particular signiªcance. The study of how Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/44/1/83/1585130/jinh_a_00502.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 they spread brings new information to the understanding of how Italy completed the transition from an agricultural country to an industrial power. Today, Italy is among the world’s top consumers of such products, the result of a rapid growth that started during the 1950s and continued for the next two decades. In 2003—when the macroregional differences between north, south, and central Italy were minimal—the three consumer durables most popular with Italian families were the refrigerator (99.4 percent), the tele- vision (97.4 percent), and the washing machine (97 percent). These market-saturation rates (the number of families that own the goods in question) are even more signiªcant when compared with those detailed in Table 1, which treats the two appliances that are the main focus of this study—refrigerators and washing ma- chines. The increase in market-saturation rate is evident for both products, though their ªgures were well behind those found in countries with higher standards of living, such as the United States, as well as West Germany and France—two countries with socioeconomic conditions similar to those of Italy after World War II that also beneªted from strong economic growth. But not until the mid-1960s did the differences between these two coun- tries and Italy begin to diminish, eventually disappearing at the be- ginning of the following decade (Table 3).1 Ivan Paris is Assistant Professor of Economic History, University of Brescia. He is the author of Oggetti cuciti: L’abbigliamento pronto in Italia dal primo dopoguerra agli anni Settanta (Milan, 2006); “Fashion as a System: Changes in Demand as the Basis for the Establishment of the Ital- ian Fashion System (1960–1970),” Enterprise & Society, XI (2010), 524–559; “The Italian White Goods Industry and the European Common Market during the Years of the Economic Miracle (1958–63): Quantitative Evidence and Interpretative Hypotheses,” European Review of History, XIX (2012), 575–599. © 2013 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc. 1 For domestic appliances and consumption patterns, see, for example, Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2005), 84 | IVAN PARIS Italy’s modest consumption of domestic appliances contrasted with its impressive production of them, especially refrigerators and washing machines. In 1963, for example, Italy was the most proliªc producer of refrigerators in Europe and in third position world- wide, just behind the United States and Japan, and exports ac- counted for about half of that production. The domestic-appliance industry represents the most resounding example of how, in just a few years, Italian entrepreneurs managed to reach the top of a mar- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/44/1/83/1585130/jinh_a_00502.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 ket that was already occupied by the largest foreign multinationals. The quantitative and qualitative growth of the domestic-appliance industry was paramount in Italy’s postwar economic boom.2 The focus of this article, however, is not the domestic- appliance sector from the point of view of supply. Our attention is on consumption, about which no studies of the Italian case exist at an aggregate level. In addition to offering a previously unpublished quantitative study, the data collected herein make two other com- plementary contributions—highlighting the factors that inºuenced the progress of Italy’s domestic-appliance consumption and ex- plaining how and why it might have differed by geographical area and social class. In addition to such strictly economic variables as income, other factors (social, cultural, technological, etc.) mattered as well.3 438–457. With regard to the spread of domestic appliances, it is important to focus attention on the family unit and not the individual. Recent studies of consumption start from the as- sumption that the family acts as a genuine productive unit. Products purchased are considered as the input to the domestic processes linked to time, economic resources, and capital goods available to the family. Hence, consumption is not an act that ªnishes with purchase but a more complex process in which goods and services are manipulated to produce other goods and services. See Luca Pellegrini and Luca Zanderighi, Le famiglie come imprese e i consumi in Italia (Milan, 2005), 100–101; Emanuela Scarpellini, L’Italia dei consumi: Dalla Belle Époque al nuovo millennio (Rome, 2008), 155; Paul Ginsborg, Storia dell’Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi: Società e politica 1943–1988 (Turin, 1989), 283–343. 2 Franco Amatori, “La grande impresa,” in idem and Duccio Bigazzi (eds.), Storia d’Italia. L’industria: imprenditori e imprese (Turin, 1999), 732; Adriana Castagnoli and Scarpellini, Storia degli imprenditori italiani (Turin, 2003), 325; Valeriano Balloni, Origini, sviluppo e maturità dell’ industria degli elettrodomestici (Bologna, 1978), 223–235; Paris, “The Italian White Goods Indus- try and the European Common Market during the Years of the Economic Miracle (1958–63): Quantitative Evidence and Interpretative Hypotheses,” European Review of History, XIX (2012), 575–599. Ofªciel Magazine des Arts Ménagers, “Statistiche comparate della produzione di elettrodomestici nel mondo dal 1959 al 1970,” Apparecchi Elettrodomestici nella Casa Moderna (hereinafter AE), 20, 3 (1972), 30–52. 3 For the supply side, see Balloni, Origini, sviluppo e maturità; Carlo Castellano, L’industria degli elettrodomestici in Italia: Fattori e caratteri dello sviluppo (Turin, 1965), 2–3; Sergio Paba, Reputazione ed efªcienza: crescita e concentrazione nell’industria europea degli elettrodomestici bianchi Table 1 Market-Saturation Rate of Refrigerators and Washing Machines in Italy, 1938–1973 1938 1950 1953 1956 1959 1962 1966 1970 1973 Refrigerators 0.49% 1.01% 3.67% 8.31% 23.60% 32.00% 55.00% 76.30% 86.00% Washing machines — — 0.18% 1.17% 2.80% 6.25% 8.00% 38.00% 52.60% 63.60% sources Pierpaolo Luzzatto Fegiz, Il volto sconosciuto dell’Italia: seconda serie, 1956–1965 (Milan, 1966), 1718–1719; Franco Papette, “Il mercato degli apparecchi elettrodomestici in Italia (2),” Apparecchi Elettrodomestici nella Casa Moderna, 5, 12 (1957), 25–34; idem, “Confronti internazionali,” AE, 6, 7 (1958), 21–35; G. B., “Il mercato delle lavabiancheria in Italia,” ibid., 8 (1960), 61–70; Rosen and Marini, “Il mercato dei frigoriferi in Italia,” ibid., 10 (1960), 33–37; “La diffusione di beni durevoli nel 1965,” ibid., 13, 2 (1966), 51; A. Gattoni, “Tecnologie di massa,” ibid., 15, 1 (1967), 17–18; “Statistica dell”Unipede sull”indice di saturazione in Europa dei principali elettrodomestici,” ibid., 19, 2 (1971), 20; “Gli elettrodomestici in una radioscopia dell”Europa,” ibid., 8 (1971), 33; “La diffusione degli elettrodomestici nel mondo occidentale agli inizi del 1974,” ibid., 22, 2 (1974), 11–15. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/44/1/83/1585130/jinh_a_00502.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 September 24 on guest by http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/44/1/83/1585130/jinh_a_00502.pdf from Downloaded 86 | IVAN PARIS The importance of the period from 1948 to 1973 in this re- spect is well established. Between the start-up of the Marshall Plan in 1948 and the 1973 oil crisis, the entire Western world beneªted from unprecedented economic growth, sustained by and centered around United States and the strength of the U.S. dollar. Certain countries, such as West Germany, Japan, and Italy, beneªted more than others, greatly reducing the gap between themselves and the most advanced economies. Italy’s economic growth was suf- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/44/1/83/1585130/jinh_a_00502.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 ªciently intense to spur talk of an “economic miracle.” The inau- guration of the Marshall Plan saw Italy already fully entered into the international economic scene, thanks to its previous participa- tion in the institutions deªned by the Bretton Woods agreement. Between 1948 and 1973, Italy entered into a genuine “age of indus- trialization,” the consequences of which were not solely eco- nomic. According to the literature, during this quarter of a century, the social values and problems generated by industrial development involved all of Italian society.4 The reason to study a sub-group of domestic appliances (white (Bologna, 1992); Paris, “L’industria italiana degli elettrodomestici bianchi e la conquista del mercato nazionale (1953–1958),” Imprese e Storia, XXXVIII (2010), 79–120. The need to study variables not strictly economic arises from the fact that most of the works that dealt with this subject more or less directly focused on the rapid growth in Italian market-saturation rates as much as domestic differences, connecting them to disposable income (see, for example, Fabio Lavista, Sessant’anni di associazionismo imprenditoriale: ANIE e la trasformazione dell’Italia industriale, [Milan, 2007], 80–81). Economic variables certainly played an important role, but as studies of other countries have shown, the social, cultural, and technological context cannot be overlooked. See, for example, Sue Bowden and Avner Offer, “The Technological Revo- lution That Never Was: Gender, Class, and the Diffusion of Household Appliances in Inter- war England,” in De Grazia and Ellen Furlough (eds.), The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Prospective (Berkeley, 1996), 244–274. 4 After World War II, the new ruling class used Italy’s joining the World Bank and the In- ternational Monetary Fund as a tool to obtain full international legitimacy for the electoral results in 1946 and 1948.
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