The idea of this book had two origins: a remark by Arnaldo Momigliano that Edinburgh and Naples were good places from which to observe the legacy of feudalism in the eighteenth century, and a journey in 1978 through southern Italy in the company of my wife Maxine, my late brother Mark, and Norman Douglas's Old Calabria. The latter's tales of flying monks and the pleasures of ‘reposing at Castrovillari’ were happily confirmed by observation and experience; but gradually I also appreciated the deeper affinity which Douglas felt as a Scot for the Italian south. Waiting the obligatory hours for the bus connection between the railway station for Matera and the city, itself still many miles distant, I was struck by a resemblance between the landscapes of Basilicata and the Scottish Highlands. In colour and natural aspect, of course, they could hardly be more different: by late September the hills of Basilicata are bleached white, turning lunar in appearance. Yet there was a historical, human reality in common: this too was a land once occupied by many more inhabitants, who had laboured for their lords until modern commercial agriculture had made the way of life redundant. In the event, neither feudalism nor the Highlands were to play more than a very small part in the book, and the truth of Momigliano's remark (to which I return only in the conclusion) remains to be properly investigated.