Though twentieth century Italy was its own way as aggressively ambitious and imperialist as France or Britain, the Italian colonial experience is practically unknown to English speakers. This book brings to life the sad paradoxes of Italy's self-styled proletarian imperialism. Here, readers will find fresh documentation on the desert concentration camps where colonial conquerors interned hundreds of thousands of Libyan nomads, new details about the tons of poison gas bombs dropped to subdue Ethiopia in 1935, vivid treatment of the New Rome's plans to renew Tripoli and build model settlements in Somalia, and sharp analysis of the colonial films created to celebrate the Italian Empire. The most telling episode, perhaps, is the pathetic fate of the unemployed colonizers of this mean-spirited imperialism on the cheap, by the eve of World War II reduced to begging food from the very people they had conquered. Gathering the expertise of fully twenty African, Italian, and American specialists, Ben-Ghiat and Fuller's volume gives us an all-embracing history of Italy's unedifying quest for its 'place in the sun.' - Victoria de Grazia, Columbia University, author, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth Century Europe
Italian Colonialism offers a fascinating introduction to a subject that has for too long been ignored. Detailing episodes ranging from quasi-genocidal practices in north Africa to the wide use of chemical warfare in East Africa, it reveals a part of Italy's history that Italians today are happy to forget. At the same time it goes beyond ideological bromides to offer a more complex view of the colonial encounter. Through highly readable chapters by many of the major scholars in the field, the book puts both Italian history and the history of European colonialism in a new light. - David Kertzer, Paul Dupee Professor of Social Sciences, Brown University
