Tecnocrazia bancaria, interessi industriali e controllo politico del credito speciale. Il caso dell’Isveimer (1957-1965)

This paper reconstructs the Isveimer activity, responsible for medium-term industrial credit in the continental regions of Southern Italy, taking into consideration the period 1957-65, during which national authorities pursued the industrialization plan with the utmost effort. The availability of new archival sources at the Giulio Pastore Foundation has allowed a more articulated interpretation of the Isveimer's position in the face of the expansion of state capitalism and the conditionalities posed by international financial institutions such as the EIB and the World Bank. The phenomena of patronage and political colonization of industrial credit, already described by historiography, are placed here in the context of several conflicts for the control of development policies occurred at different scales of political and economic-financial power, in which the determining element is given by the contrast between the corporate systems built by local ruling classes and the rationalizing forces of national and international development policies. The conclusions of the paper suggest a critical review of some timeframes and interpretative categories now consolidated in the historiography on the extraordinary intervention, soliciting readings more oriented towards the understanding of factors such as the degree of social tolerability of top-down development policies, conflicts for a fair territorial distribution of investments and the gap between productivist options and employment demands.