Abstract
We designed this book with two goals in mind: to make the subject of Italian colonialism better known among Anglophone students and scholars of international history and European imperialisms, and to facilitate the integration of the history of Italian colonialism into larger narratives of Italian national experience. Once the province of specialists of Italian diplomatic and military history, the study of Italian colonialism now engages social and economic historians, art and architectural historians, literary and film critics, and anthropologists and sociologists.1 With this expanded disciplinary scope has also come a greater internationalization of the field, as scholars from several continents build on earlier research by historians such as Angelo Del Boca, Giorgio Rochat, and Romain Rainero.2
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Notes
Examples of this work can be found in special journal issues devoted to Italian colonialism: Quaderni storici 109, no. 1 (2002); Modern Italy 8, no. 1 (2003); and the Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8, no. 3 (2003); and in edited volumes such as Patrizia Palumbo, ed., A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003);
Gianluca Gabrielli, ed., L’Africa in giardino. Appunti sulla costruzione dell’immaginario coloniale (Anzola dell’Emilia: Zanini, 1998);
Enrico Castelli and David Laurenzi, eds., Permanenze e metamorfosi dell’immaginario coloniale in Italia (Perugia: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2000); and
Enrico Castelli, ed., Immagini e colonie (Rome: Museo Nazionale delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari, 2000).
See Roberto Battaglia, La prima guerra d’Africa (Turin: Einaudi, 1958);
Romain Rainero, Iprimi tentativi di colonizzazione agrícola e di popolamento delVEritrea (1890–1895) (Milan: Marzorati, 1960), and Uanticolonialismo italiano daAssab ad Adua (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1971);
Angelo Del Boca, La guerra d’Abissinia, 1935–1941 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1966), Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale, 4 vols. (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1976–1984), Gli Italiani in Libia, 2 vols. (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1986–1988), and L’Africa nella coscienza degli Italiani (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1992);
Angelo Del Boca, ed., Le guerre coloniali del fascismo (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1991), I gas di Mussolini: Il fascismo e la guerra d’Etiopia (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1996), and Adua: Le ragioni di una sconfitta (Rome: Laterza, 1997);
Robert L. Hess, Italian Colonialism in Somalia (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1966);
Jean-Louis Miège, L’impérialisme colonial italien de 1870 à nos jours (Paris: Enseignement Supérieur, 1968);
Luigi Preti, Impero fascista, africani ed ebrei (Milan: Mursia, 1968);
Giorgio Rochat, Militari epolitici nella preparazione délia campagna d’Etiopia. Studio e documenti, 1932–1936 (Milan: Franco Angelí, 1971), Il colonialismo italiano (Turin: Loescher, 1973), and Guerre italiane in Libia e in Etiopia. Studi militari 1921–1939 (Paese, Treviso: Pagus, 1991);
Claudio G. Segrè, Fourth Shore. The Italian Colonization of Libya (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1974);
Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini’s Roman Empire (New York: Viking Press, 1976);
Richard J. B. Bosworth, Italy, the Least of the Great Powers: Italian Foreign Policy Before the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979);
Luigi Goglia and Fabio Grassi, eds., Il colonialismo italiano da Adua all’Impero (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1981);
Cesare Marongiu Buonaiuti, Politica e religione nel colonialismo italiano, 1882–1941 (Milan: Giuffrè, 1982);
Francesco Surdich, ed., Üesplorazione italiana dell’Africa (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1982);
Marta Petricioli, L’Italia in Asia Minore. Equilibrio mediterraneo e ambizioni imperialiste alla vigilia delia prima guerra mondiale (Florence: Sansoni, 1983);
Alberto Sbacchi, Ethiopia under Mussolini. Fascism and the Colonial Experience (London: Zed Books, 1985), and Legacy of Bitterness: Ethiopia and Fascist Italy, 1935–1941 (Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1997);
Irma Taddia, L’Eritrea—colonia, 1890–1952: Paesaggi, strutture, uomini del colonialismo (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1986);
Tekeste Negash, Italian Colonialism in Eritrea, 1882–1941: Policies, Praxis, and Impact (Stockholm: Uppsala University, 1987);
Yemane Mesghenna, Italian Colonialism: A Case Study of Eritrea, 1869–1934. Motive, Praxis and Result (Lund, Sweden: University of Lund, 1988);
Alberto Aquarone and Ludovica De Courten, DopoAdua: Politica e amministrazione coloniale (Rome: Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, 1989);
Alessandro Triulzi, ed., L’Africa dall’immagi-nario alle immagini. Scritti e immagini dell Africa nei fondi della Biblioteca Reale (Turin: Il Salone del Libro, 1989);
Timothy W. Childs, Italo-Turkish Diplomacy and the War over Libya, 1911–1912 (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1990);
Giampaolo Caichi Novati, Era Mediterraneo e Mar Rosso: Momenti di politica italiana in Africa attraverso il colonialismo (Rome: Istituto ítalo-Africano, 1992);
Nicola Labanca, ed., LAfrica in vetrina. Storie di musei e di esposizioni coloniali in Italia (Paese, Treviso: Pagus, 1992), and Un nodo. Immagini e documenti sulla repressione coloniale italiana in Libia (Manduria: Lacaita, 2002);
Nicola Labanca, In marcia verso Adua (Turin: Einaudi, 1993), and Oltremare. Storia delVespan-sione coloniale italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002);
Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya. State Formation, Colonization, and Resistance, 1830–1932 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994);
Haile Larebo, The Building of an Empire: Italian Land Policy and Practice in Ethiopia, 1935–1941 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994);
Fabienne Le Houérou, Vépopée des soldats de Mussolini en Abyssinie, 1936–1938: Les “ensablés” (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994);
Federico Cresti, Oasi di italianità. La Libia della colonizzazione agraria tra fascismo, guerra e indipendenza (Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1996);
Carla Ghezzi, ed., Fonti e problemi della politica coloniale italiana. Atti del convegno (Taormina-Messina, 23–29 October 1989), 2 vols. (Rome: Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, Ufficio centrale per i beni archivistici, 1996);
Anna Baldinetti, Orientalismo e colonialismo: La ricerca di consenso in Egitto per Vimpresa della Libia (Rome: Istituto per l’Oriente, 1997), and
Anna Baldinetti, ed., Modern and Contemporary Libya: Sources and Historiographies (Rome: Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 2003);
Gustavo Ottolenghi, Gli italiani e il colonialismo. I campi di detenzione italiani in Africa (Milan: SugarCo, 1997);
Barbara Sörgoni, Parole e corpi. Antropología, discorso giuridico epolitiche sessu-ali interrazziali nella colonia Eritrea 1890–1941 (Naples: Liguori, 1998), and Etnografía e colonialismo. ÜEritrea e VEtiopia di Alberto Voilera, 1873–1939 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001);
Federica Guazzini, Le ragioni di un confine coloniale: Eritrea 1898–1908 (Turin: L’Harmattan Italia, 1999);
Nicola Labanca and Pierluigi Venuta, eds., Un colonialismo, due sponde del Mediterráneo. Atti del seminario di studi storici italo-libici (Siena-Pistoia, 13–14 gennaio 2000) (Pistoia: Edizioni C.R.T., 2000); and
Francesco Sulpizi and Salaheddin Hasan Sury, eds., Gli esiliati libici nel periodo coloniale (Rome: Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 2002).
See on this point Jacqueline Andall, Derek Duncan, and Charles Burdett, “Introduction,” Modern Italy 8, no. 1 (2003): 5–7.
For instance, Paul Rabinow, French Modern. Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989);
Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire. Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997);
Patricia Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
The phrase is Angelo Del Boca’s, from his “The Myths, Suppressions, Denials, and Defaults of Italian Colonialism,” in Palumbo, A Place in the Sun, 17–36. On how Italians remember Italian colonialism, see Irma Taddia, La memoria dellTmpero. Autobiografie d’Africa Orientale (Lacaita: Manduria, 1998);
Angelo Del Boca, “Il mancato dibattito sul colonialismo,” in L’Africa nella coscienza degli Italiani. Miti, memorie, errori, sconfitte, 111–127 (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1992);
Alessandro Triulzi, “L’Africa come icona,” in Adua. Le ragioni di una sconfitta, ed. Angelo Del Boca, 285–281 (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1997); and
Krystyna von Henneberg, “Monuments, Public Space and the Memory of Empire in Modern Italy,” History and Memory 16, no. 1 (2004): 37–85.
See Tony Ballantyne, “Rereading the Archive and Opening up the Nation-State: Colonial Knowledge in South Asia (and Beyond),” in After the Imperial Turn. Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton, 102–124 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003); also see
Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents. Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 271.
Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” (1882), in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha, 8–22 (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Marina Tesoro, ed., Monarchia, tradizione,identità nazionale. Germania, Giappone, e Italia tra Ottocento eNovecento (Milan: Mondadori, 2004).
For this argument see Jane Schneider, ed., Italy’s Southern Question: Orientalism in One Country (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998);
John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno 1860–1900 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999);
Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Mia Fuller, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities, and Italian Imperialism (London: Routledge, in press).
See Carl Ipsen, Dictating Demography The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
Richard Bosworth, Italy and the Wider World (London and New York: Routledge, 1996);
Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000); and
Mark Choate, “Defining ‘Greater Italy’: Migration and Colonialism in Africa and the Americas, 1880–1915,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2002.
Such stereotypes have been perpetuated by a long tradition of Italian and foreign popular and scholarly publications, cartoons, films, and so on. See on the subject of Italian “benign-ness,” especially as compared with Germans, Filippo Focardi, “‘Bravo Italiano’ e ‘cattivo tedesco’: riflessioni sulla genesi di due immagini incrociate,” Storia e Memoria 5, no. 1 (1996): 55–83;
David Bidussa, Il mito del bravo italiano (Milan: II Saggiatore, 1994); and
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “A Lesser Evil? Italian Fascism in/and the Totalitarian Equation,” in The Lesser Evil Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices in a Comparative Perspective, ed. Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin, 137–153 (New York: Routledge, 2004).
On this point see Davide Rodogno, Il nuovo or dine mediterráneo: Lepolitiche di occupazione dellTtalia fascista in Europa (1940–1943) (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003), 90–91.
For first-hand accounts of settlers’ experiences, see Nicola Labanca, ed., Posti al sole. Diari e memorie di vita e di lavoro dette colonie d’Africa (Rovereto: Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra, 2001).
See the essays by Giulia Barrera, Ali Ahmida, and Ruth Iyob in this volume; also Marco Scardigli, II braccio indígeno. Ascari, irregolari e bande nella conquista dell’Eritrea 1885–1911 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1996), and
Domenico Quirico, Squadrone bianco. Storia dette truppe coloniali italiane (Milan: Mondadori, 2002).
On Somalia, see Virginia Luling, “Colonial and Postcolonial Influences on a South Somali Community,” Journal of African Studies 3 (1976): 491–511; on European concessions in Tianjin, see
Ruth Rogaski, “Hygienic Modernity in Tianjin,” in Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–1950, ed. Joseph W. Esherick, 30–46 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000); and on Albania, see
Bernd J. Fischer, Albania at War, 1939–1945 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999); and
Nicola Mai, “The Cultural Construction of Italy in Albania and Vice Versa: Migration Dynamics, Strategies of Resistance and Politics of Mutual Self-Definition Across Colonialism and Post-Colonialism,” Modern Italy 8, no. 1 (2003): 77–93.
On this issue, see Angelo Del Boca, ed., I gas di Mussolini. II fascismo e la guerra d’Etiopia (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1996).
Ann Laura Stoler, “Genealogies of the Intimate: Movements in Colonial Studies,” in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, 1–21 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 15.
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Ben-Ghiat, R., Fuller, M. (2005). Introduction. In: Ben-Ghiat, R., Fuller, M. (eds) Italian Colonialism. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8158-5_1
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