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  • Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad
  • Rudolph M. Bell
Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad. By Mark I. Choate (Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 2008) 340 pp. $45.00

In a fascinating conclusion that finally makes clear the purpose of all of the specifics in the preceding chapters, Choate suggests that the "Emigrant [End Page 100] Nation" that Italy nurtured in the early twentieth century is a progenitor of the emigrant states of the twenty-first century—India, Russia, China, Korea, Pakistan, and Mexico. His introductory remarks reject the obvious comparisons of massive Italian migration with the Jewish diaspora, or even with the African diaspora, by effectively pointing out that the Italian state actively supported its emigrants, first with soldiers in Somalia and Eritrea and after 1901 with a vigorous program of consular and commercial influence in host countries, especially in the New World.

Choate is less concerned with offering a sweeping hypothesis to explain the creation of "Italy abroad" than he is with exploring the details of how an "Emigrant Nation" emerged, at least in the hearts and minds of Italians themselves. In the process of unification, after securing their triumph over foreign and papal control, government leaders initially acted upon the assumption that the new country would be able to provide for its people, making them into one Italian nation. By the 1880s, however, rapidly increasing numbers of northern Italians began to migrate, and the government turned its attention to colonizing what little land was left in East Africa. The effort failed, hampered when Ethiopian fighters massacred 422 Italian soldiers near Dogali in 1888 and doomed when Italian forces met defeat at Adwa in 1896, a debacle so total that it brought into question the claim of nineteenth-century Europe to global supremacy.

For a time thereafter, inspired by the economic analyses of Luigi Einaudi, Italy's peoples and their government abandoned the hopeless quest for empire in Africa and embarked instead on a conscious effort toward planned international migration that would build on human capital to generate national economic growth. Money earned in high-wage economies abroad would return to Italy, in official remittances as well as pants pockets, to fuel rising land prices and home building. Italian products would be marketed on a global scale, their virtues loudly proclaimed by immigrant colonies nestled in major cities where family-based small businesses would thrive.

The Einaudi vision moved forward on several fronts, including pride in a common language. The Dante Alighieri Society tried to turn the poet's immortal words into a unifying symbol for money-seeking Italians, an endeavor that in retrospect seems laughable, hardly worthy of the American National Education Association's concerted plan to overcome such resistance to Americanization by converting the nation's schoolhouses into nodes of flag-saluting assimilation. After all, how could Neapolitans, Sicilians, Piedmontese, and Venetians have been expected to understand a Tuscan dialect no less strange to them than, say, Romanian or Spanish? More understandably, the Milan Exposition of 1906 featured an exhibition hall dedicated to the 472 Italian periodicals produced outside Italy, 60 of which were daily newspapers composed largely or entirely in Italian.

One chapter explores how the Catholic Church, which was hostile [End Page 101] to the Italian state, actively sought to preserve Italian identity among emigrants. Another one traces how emigration contributed to a new nationalism and renewed colonial efforts in Libya.

The chapter before the unexpectedly present-minded conclusion discusses events ranging from an earthquake in Messina to outbreaks of cholera in Argentina and Uruguay and the paid return of more than 300,000 men to fight in the army that Italy fielded when World War I began. Overall, the book treats matters of economy, religion, politics, language theory, and more—all within a traditional historical narrative framework.

Rudolph M. Bell
Rutgers University
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