Sea Control - Sea Control 582: Guns, Ships and Money.

Episode Date: July 13, 2025

Ships, Guns and Money: The Logistics of Revolution and Garibaldi’s Campaign of 1860 Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (Yale University Press, 2007), by Lucy Riall. Enrico Acciai with a more long-term history of Garibaldi's legacy in the terms of war volunteeringMaurizio Isabella providing a good summary of histories of Italy in the nineteenth-centuryDavid Sims with using a "follow the money" approach to Irish nationalism in the same time periodAnd finally some background on the nineteenth-century Mediterranean

Welcome aboard Sea Control fans. This is Jay. My guest today is Dr. Daniel Banks. He's going to talk about his article from late last year titled Ships, Guns, and Money, the Logistics of Revolution and Garibaldi's Campaign of 1860. Daniel, first off, please tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. Hi. Yeah. So my name's Daniel Banks. I'm a historian. I'm just kind of starting out in my career as a historian.

I recently defended my Ph.D. thesis at a place called the European University Institute in Florence. And I'm now starting to work as a postdoctoral researcher at an institution in Naples. called the Scuola Superiore Meridionale and I'm kind of trying to put together the pieces of my first of my first book and kind of this article we're talking about today um came out of the research I was doing both for my PhD and for the and for the book itself at least okay you I'll ask a little more of your background here you you okay so you grew up in you you grew up in Italy but you you've got a little more of a Brit accent perhaps going on too is that correct yeah um I I was born and grew up in Italy, but both my parents were teachers of English as a foreign language.

So both of them kind of arrived in Rome at some point between the late 70s and the early 80s and kind of stayed there ever since. My education was kind of in Italy up until the end of high school. Then I was in the UK for about three years. I spent a couple of years in Spain doing a master's and then moved back to Italy for my PhD. Nice, nice, cool. SimSec is International Maritime Security, so that's really cool. We get to get folks like you in. So anyway, really honored to have you on the podcast.

Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks so much. As always, we want to remind our listeners that all opinions here are our own and not necessarily those of any organization which we are or may be affiliated. So I'm going to start by reading a few sentences from the abstract of your article, just to give the Secret Internal listeners an idea of why this subject should be of interest to anyone today who has an interest in maritime or naval issues. So we start out there. When Giuseppe Garibaldi set sail for Sicily on the campaign that led to the unification of Italy in 1860,

he gave a group of exiled political radicals living in the port city of Genoa the task of procuring weapons, equipment, and reinforcements for his expeditions. These exiled veterans of the 1848 revolutions quickly developed a fluid yet highly integrated fundraising and procurement organization that provided Garibaldi with the means for success. To do this, they leveraged decades of experience as clandestine transnational organizers, but also relied on business and professional expertise and contacts they'd accrued during a commercial and industrial boom in Genoa in the 1850s. So right there, although that may seem, you know, kind of convoluted, I think, if you had no familiarity with this sort of thing, I think we're talking about, for the listeners of SimSec and Sea Control, we're talking about non-state actors, irregular warfare, logistics in a contested environment, expeditionary warfare, something we talk about a lot in the U.S., especially in the Marine Corps here, called expeditionary advanced space operations. And all this, of course, is ultimately successful because, you know, Italy's a unified country. So I think we have, while this is history, we're going to have some contemporary naval and maritime lessons here, too. I'll start off by asking you, since I think probably the majority of our listeners may be from the U.S., explain who Giuseppe Garibaldi was.

OK, yeah, that's a great question, actually. And, yeah, slightly, slightly difficult because, I mean, this this guy is really kind of like the superstar of Italian 19th century history, I'd say, but not just Italy. I mean, in the 19th century, he was a kind of a global superstar and he was famous for. I mean, the most famous thing he ever did was this specific expedition in 1860 where he brought together a bunch of revolutionaries and kind of sailed across the sea from northern Italy to the south, which was still a separate kingdom at the time. And over the course of just a few months, kind of completely dismantled this separate kingdom and helped set up a unified Italian nation state. But he'd kind of been quite famous for a long time beforehand. He spent a lot of time in Latin America fighting in various kind of wars between the newly independent states in Latin America in the 1830s and 1840s. He played a really big part in a series of revolutions across Europe in the middle of the 19th century that, you know, most people will remember as the 1848 revolutions.

So this was kind of a guy who was kind of moving from one revolutionary moment to the next throughout his life. He even had a role in the early 1870s in the Franco-Prussian War, fighting with the French against the Prussians. So, you know, he's kind of like the international revolutionary superstar of the 19th century. He's often kind of sometimes he's been likened a bit to Che Guevara, you know, There was this big revolutionary superstar who just kind of pops up in all of these different places. And he was very much kind of a figurehead for a certain type of way of thinking about constructing liberal nation states in the 19th century. I mean, that's kind of one of the big legacies is also the fact that Italy kind of emerges as this more or less liberal nation state, thanks to what him, but also lots of other people were involved in.

And so I hope I've kind of done justice to the person, but this is more or less how I would explain who Garibaldi was. Sure. Thanks so much. I think that's great. Yeah, I encourage readers, if you're not familiar, aside from this article, also go and read a little bit about Serpio Garibaldi. He spent a little time in the U.S. too, I believe, during our Civil War. I think that's correct. And like Che Guevara, had a really cool beard.

All right. I know from traveling a little in Italy, you do see, I've seen statues of Garibaldi and lots of things named for him and all. What inspired you as someone into naval maritime issues there? What inspired you to write about, do your research on Garibaldi in particular? It's interesting, actually, because at the beginning, I wasn't so interested in maybe Garibaldi himself because he's such a famous figure. You know, I was kind of interested in looking at what was kind of going on behind the scenes at the time. Most of my work as a historian is actually about trying to connect lots of different groups of these kind of radical 19th century liberals and see how they cooperate across borders and across the sea, especially.

And so I was kind of trying to look into international connections between revolutionaries in Spain, in France, in Italy. And so I kind of started off looking at some letters that lots of people who were in other countries were sending during this campaign in 1860, in which, you know, Garibaldi was conquering southern Italy, all of these letters that people would be sending from around the world saying that they also wanted to volunteer and join the campaign. That's what I was originally interested in. But then in the same archive files, so, you know, among that documentation, there was also all of this documentation about actually buying weapons

and buying ships and, you know, kind of the whole maritime element of what was going on behind this campaign. And I thought that actually this was probably a much more interesting story than the story of, you know, individual people who came from abroad to fight with him. I thought, okay, actually there's this whole world of kind of logistics and procurement going on. You know, Garibaldi himself had this army marching through Sicily

and southern Italy. there are all of these people in Genova especially so in this port in the north of Italy who were in charge both of recruitment but also of making sure that he had or that this army had you know enough guns enough transportation options had a way of actually kind of materially sustaining this campaign and it was something that I thought hadn't really been looked into so much so that was kind of my way into it a little bit i started off being interested in you know what were the international bases of support let's say in terms of volunteers wanting to take part and ended up um being much more interested in the in the kind of element of military logistics

themselves nice yeah that's that's what i got out of it i mean there's the uh the old sort of thing we all say that strategy is for amateurs professionals to study logistics so i think while it may be it's a very overlooked thing a piece of i think revolutions and and groups like this and you and you can i started thinking about the things like the you know castro taking a little boat into cuba in the late 50s these the various revolutionary moments up to the current um period where we have transnational criminal groups terrorist groups or or you know freedom fighters all like getting support from abroad is a huge is a huge piece of that more than well while it it may seem more interesting and sexy to talk about the foreign

volunteers and all that's getting that getting the stuff they need is a is is of great importance did you you mentioned there were because of course there's there's lots of other revolutions going on in this especially right before this 1848 and all do you do you see did garibaldi's uh did he do particularly well do you think compared to some of the others do you think his his logistics uh sell as it were did they did they seem to do fairly i mean he obviously was successful in the end but compared to some of the others going on any any thoughts on that oh yeah definitely definitely i think that's what makes um this moment so interesting actually is that you know of all of um or of many of these revolutionary moments that are happening kind of the middle of

the 19th century um this is really the one where these kind of more radical people are actually able to kind of gain the upper hand in a certain sense and achieve something um because in many other occasions they're kind of seen as these uh you know these these dreamers who kind of get involved in these hopeless lost causes of volunteering to fight against traditional monarchies or these conservative regimes and it almost always goes wrong and this is one of the very few times in which it actually works out so that's another thing that kind of got me interested into the into the logistical kind of background of it is that often this kind of success or the fact that this time it works and they are able to kind of dismantle this monarchy um that they're

looking to get rid of very often it's explained by the fact that um you know maybe it's because um he was just incredibly charismatic and get could get all of these people on side Maybe it's because, you know, other great powers kind of stood by and let it happen when they could have intervened against these people. Maybe it was because actually secretly they were being helped by the government of the kingdom of Piedmont, Sardinia in northern Italy, which kind of ended up annexing the south to create this new Italian nation state. i actually wanted to kind of see if they were actually being successful on their own terms in a certain sense and say okay yes all of these other things kind of played a role um but actually you know none of this would have worked if these people hadn't been smart organizers who were actually able in this one occasion to to um kind of get the logistics right in a certain sense

yeah and i kind of yeah so maybe this particular article is about that but you know a lot of the other work i do is also about looking at other occasions in which these people try to start revolutions and it doesn't really work out and kind of maybe comparing it to this one and saying you know on that occasion um sometimes there are kind of elements of contingency that don't work And sometimes, you know, they just hadn't planned it well enough. Yeah, there's a there's a parallel just a kind of three years before this whole thing with Garibaldi happens. There's a very kind of similar attempt to start a revolution in southern Italy with an armed expedition. There's a man called Carlo Pisacane who also hijacks a ship, packs it full of revolutionaries and sells it from the north to the south of Italy.

um and lands in a village kind of a couple hundred miles south of naples but kind of immediately gets surrounded by government forces and is eventually kind of massacred by angry villagers and so when you kind of compare the two moments one thing that really does make a difference between this earlier attempt and the later attempt is that in the later attempt they kind of also have thought out the logistics a lot better in a certain sense yeah was there anything uh that may have sort of answered this or anything really surprised you once you you started you started going down this road i mean obviously you sort of already we already know the outcome like italy got unified but anything surprised you in particular from what you knew already about

garibaldi or this these events yeah i think the one thing that surprised me really is that a lot of these um revolutionaries were actually kind of very or at least the ones who are organizing this particular expedition were kind of very high-end professionals in their own fields and that this is kind of what really helped them to work very well on an organizational level you know this is why they really knew what they were doing i mean i guess the the example that springs to mind and that i i found kind of quite surprising but also really interesting um is that kind of three of the closest uh collaborators um with kind of the setup the original setup of this revolutionary attempt and also you know the three people who were very close and kind of

helping to um maintain this kind of logistical supply route working were three brothers um from sicily who'd kind of escaped sicily after the 1848 revolutions um you know after 1848 this kind of um very autocratic monarchy was reinstated in southern italy so these three escaped and ended up settling in in genoa in northern italy where there was a kind of a slightly more liberal monarchy and throughout the 1850s they set up a shipyard um and kind of took control of the city's iron foundry, the iron works, where they were producing kind of iron-hulled steamships and railway locomotives, railway

carriages, but they were also producing guns occasionally. So, you know, here are these three kind of revolutionary exiles who actually end up owning a factory in which they can produce or fix steamships or motors for steam ships um and in which they can produce and fix cannon in a certain sense and so here are people who kind of really really know what they're doing you know they're not just kind of these crazy radicals um they're also people who know exactly um how to equip the kind of ship that they need to transport troops to southern italy and they know exactly what kinds of things

they need to be looking for when they're buying things like guns and cannons so then one of them and goes off on a trip throughout the UK and France, kind of getting in touch with all of these weapons dealers and inspecting weapons and kind of making sure they're buying the right ones. I think this is one of the things that really surprised me. It's just that, you know, these people, they're often painted as, you know, only existing in the sense of their politics, but actually their professional lives and their lives also as businessmen

and their lives as technicians are very important to kind of sustain the types of revolutionary activity that they're interested in promoting. Yeah, that's definitely, I think, an often overlooked something there about we look into revolutions, irregular warfare, that kind of thing. so yeah i found that found that all very fascinating you said you're you were working on a book too could you could you give us a little spoiler but what's that about yeah yeah definitely um so the the book is kind of based on the um on the work i was doing for my for my phd and it's kind of um trying to see if it's like what i talk about in this article as

part of kind of a wider pattern in a certain sense um especially by focusing on the sea and kind of the space I've chosen for the book is kind of the western half of the Mediterranean, not because there's anything kind of particularly unique about the area itself, but more because I kind of see a whole kind of pattern of revolutionary activity taking place there between the 1850s and the 1870s that is very much focused on the sea. So the book is about, you know, how revolutionaries in this area in general are using the sea both to kind of create an international revolutionary community in which they all see themselves as part of kind of a big common group, which, you know, involves people in Spain, but also in France, in Italy, also maybe even further north. so it's both about how they kind of use the sea to foster a common community and about how they try to take advantage of maritime transport and logistics to actually you know ferment revolution

in a certain sense so you know this this article is kind of about one part of of what i'm trying to look at in the book which is you know how they help how they contribute to the unification of italy in a certain sense by using the sea but i'm also looking at um i'm also looking at a revolution that takes place in spain in 1868 which has quite a similar pattern in the sense that um they convince a navy squadron to kind of declare itself in favor of the revolutionaries um just outside the city of cadiz in southern spain and you know thanks to that they kind of take control the city and then in the city they set up a revolutionary army and march it all the way to madrid and take over power at the state level and um for about six or seven years after this there's

kind of an experiment in what what has been called like a democratic monarchy in spain so they set up a new constitution they get rid of the um they get rid of the ruling dynasty they invite a new came to come they have elections with um universal male suffrage and kind of have a democratic constitution they also have a republic there's a republic for about a year after this a first spanish republic then it all ends a bit badly but you know for a while they also use this technique of kind of arriving from the sea to kind of set up a very different type of of state in spain yeah and and similarly another thing i look at is um what goes on in southern france after the end of the second empire so uh you know there's this this moment of kind of chaos during the franco

prussian war where it's not really clear you know who's going to be in charge in france in the early 1870s it's also this moment in which the paris commune happens right um but i i look at what's happening in marseille at the same time there's also a short-lived commune in marseille but it kind of has a very different feel to it to the one in to the one in paris and it's has a different feel to it because these people are kind of more in touch with other revolutionaries who are coming across the sea from italy and from spain and they are kind of imagining a very different type of france compared to what's being imagined in paris um again that doesn't work out as well as things happened in italy in 1860 for example but um i'm kind of trying to kind of build this

space as a region in which people are moving across the sea a lot and using the sea to kind of ferment revolution let's say that that's i gotta say i i don't think anybody that's going to be listening to this would would not find that fascinating that's that's up every even if our Sea Control and SimSec audience isn't really into, doesn't know much about it and all that, that topic seems incredibly relevant for, it seems like a good read and then just incredibly relevant for what we're all, what's going on right now in the world. Do you, since some of these didn't go on, and maybe this is just speculating on your part, but do you see something, while there was good, obviously the logistics, this sort of thing, but was there something about what Garibaldi did?

Was there something special about him, do you think, as a person perhaps that made him be more successful in this in this arena than some of the other folks oh yeah definitely i mean i think sky was definitely this uh this incredibly magnetic like international celebrity right um this is something that's really well i mean it's very well documented it's the thing that kind of everybody focuses on when writing about this um when writing about this particular moment and you know this particular expedition you know the number one thing that always gets brought up is the fact that this was this incredibly charismatic person um who could you know was able to really build a very wide-ranging revolutionary coalition and get all of these people on board who are usually kind

of involved in infighting between different groups you know he's able to kind of get them all on side and he's also someone who's actually very very good at different types of tactics associated with guerrilla warfare in a certain sense so you know once they do arrive in sicily he's very good at using the terrain kind of against the regular army that's already there um that belongs to the kingdom to sicily which is the kingdom that is kind of controlling sicily at that time so i mean definitely this is a huge huge huge part of what makes this kind of such a famous moment and what makes him such a famous person and i think you know maybe we can uh link um link uh to a couple of um to a couple of pieces that have been written about him and kind of his

charisma and his his role as this kind of very as a celebrity in in doing that because i think you know there's there's a lot um there's a lot that's been written about it and some some really really good work actually um about how how he is so good as a politician that is able to kind of fashion himself as someone that people want to follow in a certain sense on these on these adventures so yeah i think there's definitely an element of that i guess i was kind of trying to fill in the other side of the story and say yes you know he is this incredibly charismatic um very successful at guerrilla warfare he knows what he's doing he's able to get people to follow him But still, you know, if you can't get the people to the right place at the right time, and if you don't have enough guns, that won't really get you anywhere.

He was able to get actually experts on his side, I suppose, as just those with. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So that's again, I think this is all fascinating. And I think it's going to be a lot of our listeners going to find this really relevant for today's topics. And we will, for listeners, these articles that Dr. Banks mentioned will be in the show notes, as well as some other stuff about some of his writings and perhaps a little more about his book. And I'll encourage everyone to look. It's probably going to be a little bit before that comes out, if you're just beginning to work on it, I imagine. Sounds like a lot of research, but got any publication dates or hopefuls out there?

I don't know. I mean, I have a few drafts of some of the chapters. I need to kind of bring them together a bit. But hopefully, you know, hopefully it shouldn't take too long, maybe, you know, in a couple of years or so. I hope to have kind of this thing out on the market. But in the meanwhile, maybe I can try to write up something else. You know, unfortunately, the academic publication process is very slow in a certain sense. You know, there's lots of, you know, reviewing and kind of going back and rewriting.

and but hopefully yeah it shouldn't take most of the research is already done i kind of just need to finish with some of the framing and the writing and redo a couple of the chapters so hopefully it shouldn't take too too long yeah excellent well i look forward to seeing the finished project um in the meantime is there a place to follow you online see what you're up to um yeah i do have um i do have a count on an account on um on blue sky so you can um you can find me there i'm not sure what the handle is exactly just look it up um we'll try and put it in that we'll put it in the in the show notes for folks if that's cool okay great yeah um i'm kind of learning how to use social media basically slowly slowly so yeah um i'm not kind of the most

active poster but i try to kind of share things that i'm interested in or things that you know are important about my work yeah right and i and i think that'll be uh the folks listening will be interested too because this is this is up our collective alley there so all right well again thanks so much dr daniel banks everyone um go out and follow him check out his work and with that we will see the uh and talk to you c-control listeners later goodbye Oh, help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alley, way, hey, pulling the alley, help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alley, pulling out the shimbo now. A porter of a porter gin, oh, way, hey, pulling the alley, a porter of white, of white and red, oh, pulling out the shimbo now. Oh, help me, oh, I'm bullying the addicts.

Why are they bullying the addicts? Help me, oh, I'm bullying the addicts. What did I do to you? Oh, no.