Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957) is one of the most influential intellectuals of Italian and European twentieth-century history. As 2023 marks the 150th anniversary of Salvemini's birth, this special issue of Modern Italy aims to attract the attention of an international readership and contribute to filling the gap in scholarly publications in English, offering a tool to approach Salvemini's intellectual production and biography. We have chosen to focus on four aspects of Salvemini's life that we consider particularly suitable for introducing his personal trajectory and the evolution of his thinking, adopting a transnational approach: his interpretation of the Great War and the Adriatic question; his antifascist exile in Great Britain and, from 1934, in the United States; and the publication of his most important studies on Fascist Italy. The choice of these topics aims to shed light on Salvemini's contacts and stimulating exchanges with foreign scholars, his international experiences, and how these transformed his ideas on Liberal and Fascist Italy.

In 1925 the Fascist dictatorship forced Gaetano Salvemini to leave Italy and begin a new life in exile. Salvemini understood he could find political and financial support in London to achieve two main aims: to live a decent life as an antifascist exile and fight the Fascist dictatorship from abroad. Thanks to a network encompassing intellectuals, academics, journalists, and politicians, London provided Salvemini with a platform for sharing antifascist stances outside Italy. This essay will develop research on this topic by taking into account Salvemini's conference speeches, articles, books, and essays written while in Britain, from 1925 to 1934. The corpus of the selected texts will show that Salvemini carefully singled out topics that were able to attract the attention of a foreign audience, particularly British public opinion. Therefore, the analysis of Salvemini's intellectual production during this period and the reaction of the press will contribute to cast a new light on his antifascist strategies; in other words, it will lead to a consideration of the extent to which being part of a British intellectual network transformed his approach to the antifascist struggle.

El siguiente artículo analiza el estado actual de la perspectiva de redes intelectuales, especialmente en el cruce con los estudios literarios en América Latina. Partiendo de sus primeros trabajos, discute las mentadas estabilidad y transdisciplinariedad del campo de estudio, proponiendo un corpus de referencia para las estructuras de sociabilidad literaria. Posteriormente, el artículo revisa críticamente los tópicos, métodos y restricciones, así como las actuales indeterminaciones conceptuales y metodológicas, que sugieren que este es aún un campo en construcción. Finalmente, se proponen algunas ideas novedosas que podrían contribuir al desarrollo interdisciplinario del campo, extendiendo las potencialidades y ventajas de esta perspectiva a los estudios de literatura latinoamericana.

Well before the green revolution in the 1960s, hybrid maize technology that had originally been developed in the USA spread across the world, starting before the Second World War. This article uses a framework that analyses the type of transfer (materials, knowledge, or capacity), the roles of diverse actors, and farmer demand and its market context, to trace the diffusion of hybrid technology to Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Africa up to 1970. The article also highlights the importance of access to diverse germplasm from the Americas provided by indigenous farmers. A handful of US public institutions promoted the spread of hybrid technology, with US private seed companies sometimes playing a secondary role. However, most cases of successful transfer were led by national scientists embedded in local institutions, who were able to link to local seed systems and farmers. By the mid 1970s, the aggregate impacts of these efforts were of the same magnitude as for the well-known and much publicized green revolution wheat varieties. Nonetheless, adoption of hybrid maize across and within countries was very patchy, relating to differences in scientific capacity, type of farmer, agro-ecology, and complementary investments in seed systems and extension. Consequently, impacts were often highly inequitable.