Board: OCR | Unit: Y215 | Component: 2 (Non-British Period Study)
About this option
Italy and Unification covers the most dramatic transformation in nineteenth-century European politics — from the Congress of Vienna’s restoration of the old order through the revolutionary movements of 1848, the Piedmontese initiative under Cavour, Garibaldi’s Thousand, and the creation of the Kingdom of Italy, to the troubled early decades of the unified state. Students examine the competing visions of Italian nationalism — Mazzini’s democratic republicanism, Cavour’s pragmatic diplomacy, and Garibaldi’s popular military leadership — and the question of whether unification was a success or a disappointment.
Key themes
- Italy after 1815: the fragmented peninsula, Austrian dominance, the Carbonari, and the problem of nationalist organisation
- Mazzini and Young Italy: the ideology of democratic nationalism and its limits as a political programme
- The revolutions of 1848: their course, the Roman Republic, and the failure of the revolutionary wave
- Piedmont and Cavour: constitutional monarchy, industrialisation, the Crimean War, and the Franco-Piedmontese alliance
- The war of 1859 and the unification of northern Italy: the role of France and the limits of Cavour’s diplomacy
- Garibaldi and the Expedition of the Thousand: the conquest of the south and the question of popular nationalism
- The Kingdom of Italy after 1861: the ‘Southern Question’, brigandage, and the incompleteness of unification
What the exam asks
Y215 is a depth study. Questions require analytical depth within a defined period, focusing on causation, significance, and historical judgement. Students are expected to engage with historical debate and are rewarded for the ability to challenge or qualify interpretations rather than simply describing events.
Historiography
Italian unification has been interpreted through liberal nationalist and revisionist frameworks:
- The Risorgimento debate: the liberal nationalist interpretation that celebrated unification as the fulfilment of Italian national consciousness versus the revisionist challenge that emphasises the very limited popular support for the nationalist programme and the extent to which unification was imposed by Piedmont on a reluctant south (Denis Mack Smith)
- Cavour versus Garibaldi: the tension between two visions of unification — top-down Piedmontese diplomacy versus popular mass mobilisation. How far did Cavour actually control events, and how far was he repeatedly overtaken by Garibaldi?
- The ‘incomplete’ Risorgimento: Antonio Gramsci’s argument that the failure to achieve a genuine social revolution in 1861 created the structural weaknesses that would later produce fascism
- Popular politics: how far was there genuine popular support for unification outside the educated middle class?
Interpretations pack — coming September 2026
A teaching pack for this option is in development, covering all core historiographical debates. It will include named historians with argument summaries, paired comparison tasks built to OCR mark scheme logic, and provenance analysis prompts — all in a downloadable PDF.
£9.99 per pack · Available September 2026
