In certain regions of the continent, the modern economic transformation could not start as early as in the core countries. This was the case in a number of independent countries, some of them former great powers that had enormous colonial empires and had enjoyed world dominance in the early modern centuries, such as Spain and Portugal. Others were like the expansionist military giant Russia, which had incorporated vast European and Asian territories into its empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but had became frozen under its ancien régime. The Kingdom of Naples, the southern, Mezzogiorno part of united Italy during the last third of the century, shared several similar features and remained the backward part of a modernizing Italy.

The decline of the Mediterranean area, the European economic powerhouse of the late medieval and early modern centuries, is one of the most challenging historical problems. “From the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries the Mediterranean was the world unto itself, a world economy” (Tabak, 2008, 1). Spain, Portugal, and the north Italian city-states were then the strongest and most flourishing part of Europe. By the nineteenth century, however, they were part of the backward peripheries. What happened? Civilizations have continually risen and fallen throughout history, but this doesn't explain the Mediterranean decline. North Italy was the birthplace of the Renaissance and modern capitalism; long-distance trade and banking had been established there. Spain and Portugal had been major world powers with enormous colonial empires enriched by vast amounts of silver and gold. Modern capitalism, however, did not mature there, but shifted to Northwestern Europe. A series of military calamities certainly explain part of the story. But the question might immediately be asked, why were those areas militarily defeated and occupied in the first place?