Mussolini's Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and settlement in Italy's borderlands, 1922–1943 by Roberta Pergher (review)

Mussolini's Nation-Empire, by Roberta Pergher, adds an innovative perspective to the vibrant field of Italian colonial studies. Only since the turn of the twenty-first century have historians—aside from a few important pioneers, such as Angelo Del Boca, Giorgio Rochat and Claudio Segrè—focused their attention on the theory and practice of Italian colonialism. That Italy has lagged behind other European nations in exploring its imperial past can partially be explained by its relatively short rule over a small number of subject territories. Unified only in 1861, the modern Italian nationstate was a latecomer to the "scramble for Africa," which awarded most of the continent in which it had most interest to other powers. Thus, Italy acquired only a few territories in east and north Africa before World War I and, although consolidating control of Libya and Ethiopia in the 1930s, was stripped of its colonies during World War II. Research was also slowed by the myth of "Italiani brava gente," which held Italians to have been, even under fascism, benevolent overlords and, compared to the Nazis, tainted by little racism. Such a benign but erroneous view delayed the development of sophisticated research on not only Italy's colonies but also the history of prejudice and repressive policies toward certain categories of its own citizens including supposedly backward Southerners, Slavs in the northeast, and Jews throughout the peninsula.

To reconfigure the category of empire, Pergher carefully compares Fascist policies toward two seemingly disparate territories, the colony of Libya and the largely Slavic provinces in northeastern Italy, during the interwar period. On the surface, and within Italian historiography, the two cases appear disparate. Wrested from the Ottoman Empire by means of war in 1911–12, Libya proved hard to subdue even after the liberal Italian government issued a statute in 1919 that offered a type of second-class citizenship to Libyans. After increasing armed resistance from local militias, Mussolini, soon after the consolidation of his dictatorship in 1926, replaced conciliation with a savage war on the local inhabitants that entailed not only murder but also slaughter of their animals, poisoning of their wells, destruction from the air of tribal villages and incarceration of two-thirds of the civilian population in concentration camps. In contrast, the population of northeastern Italy—a mixture of Croats, Slovenes, Germans and Italians—enjoyed automatic citizenship rights immediately upon their annexation to Italy after World War I. While the fascist state issued culturally repressive policies—for example that only Italian could be spoken in schools—nevertheless the process of trying to assimilate Slavic and German speakers did not employ, for the most part, physical abuse until the outbreak of World War II.

Despite their differences, Pergher offers a complex and intriguing argument that both territories, one inside and the other outside the national border, constituted borderlands over which the Italian state exercised only contested sovereignty. While fascist rhetoric justified rule over both in the name of a return to the Roman Empire, the acceptance of Italian rule was fragile in each. To consolidate his claims to sovereignty, Mussolini employed a common tactic, that of sending Italian settlers to provide "facts on the ground," as an objective demonstration of Italianization (9). In contrast to the unorganized and individualistic nature of migration to traditional settler colonies, the fascist state exercised strict control over selecting the settlers, building their villages, and regulating their lives in the new lands. Rather than elite overlords, in the mold of the British or French empires, Italian settlers were required to work their own land, live separately from the local inhabitants, and maintain a distinctive Italian lifestyle. Although this project of asserting sovereignty through settlement was only moderately successful in Libya and barely implemented in the northeast provinces, Pergher argues for the importance of this unique Italian policy that blurred the lines between nation and empire.

Of particular interest is a chapter exploring the world of the settlers as opposed to...