Abstract
As a socialist agitator, Benito Mussolini was imprisoned in 1911 for violent protest against the Italian invasion of Turkish Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. As fascist Duce, he visited the Italian colony of Libya three times, in 1926, in 1937, and in 1942. In 1926 he was still consolidating the power he had assumed less than four years before, and he was concerned mainly with the still unsettled state of the colony and its prospects for agricultural development. In 1942 he went to Libya in anticipation of a triumphant entry on a white charger into newly conquered Alexandria; instead, he spent three weeks waiting in vain for an Axis breakthrough at al-Alamein. The 1937 visit was altogether the most successful. Despite some embarrassing news from Spain and Ethiopia, it provided a suitably striking public setting for important initiatives in fascist colonial and imperial policies.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Giordano Bruno Guerri, Italo Balbo, 324 (Milan: Vallardi, 1984);
Claudio Segrè, Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 271f.
Martin Moore, Fourth Shore: Italy’s Mass Colonization of Libya (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1940), 196.
For details, see La strada litoranea delta Libia (Verona: Mondadori, 1937); Giovanni De Agostini, La Libia turistica (Milan: De Agostini, 1938), 19–28;
Alice Polleau Guibon, Routes fascistes: Au Volant sur la Translibyenne (Dieppe: Floride, 1939).
The Times (March 11, 1937); Manchester Guardian (March 12, 1937); Maxwell H. H. Macartney and Paul Cremona, Italy’s Foreign and Colonial Policy 1914–1937 (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 4;
David W. Macarthur, The Road to Benghazi (London: n. p., 1941), 51.
Gaspare Ambrosini, I problemi del Mediterraneo (Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Cultura Fascista, 1937); Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi, 94–95.
Elizabeth Monroe, The Mediterranean in Politics (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 168.
See John Wright, “Italian Fascism and Libyan Human Resources,” in Planning and Development in Modern Libya, ed. Mukhtar M. Buru, Shukri M. Ghanem, and Keith S. McLachlan, 46–56 (Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, U.K.: Middle East and North African Studies Press, 1985), 47.
M. Bovini, “Valore militare delle truppe libiche nelle operazioni dell’Ogaden,” Rassegna sociale dell’Africa italiana 4 (April 1939); Angelo Del Boca, La guerra d’Abissinia, 1935–1941 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978), 176–178.
In the 1930s, media reportage and comment tended to be more restrained and genteel than today. The Arabic-language broadcasts of Radio Bari, which were considered to be strongly anti-British propaganda, and prompted the British to start the BBC Arabic Service in January 1938, would be thought quite unexceptional by present-day standards. See the monthly Radio araba di Bari: Pubblicazione mensile della stazione radio di Bari; C. A. MacDonald, “Radio Bari: Italian Wireless Propaganda in the Middle East and British Counter-Measures, 1934–1938,” Middle East Studies 12 (1977): 195; Public Record Office, Kew, London: Foreign Office Files: FO 371/18958, FO Memo “Anti-British Propaganda in Arabic Broadcasts from Italian Wireless Station at Bari,” September 23, 1935.
Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), 211.
Jane Soames, The Coast of Barbary (London: J. Cape, 1938), 277.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2005 Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wright, J.L. (2005). Mussolini, Libya, and the Sword of Islam. 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_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8158-5_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-60636-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-8158-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)