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Introduction to Part I Italy’s ambition to become a colonial power in the last two decades of the 19th century floundered on the battlefield of Adowa. For all its efforts, and they were considerable, Italy was left with nothing more than a few strips of barren land on the Red Sea coast and the humiliation of defeat. As more than a thousand Italian soldiers (these were the lucky ones compared to the far greater number who had perished in battle) were marched off to an embarrassing but relatively benign imprisonment in Addis Ababa by the celebrating army of Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II, Italy could only look on aghast. The fiery deserts of Eritrea offered few prospects for the settlement of It-aly’s excess population and were almost bereft of commercial possi-bilities without investments on a scale Italy could hardly contemplate. While Ferdinando Martini, intellectual and bohemian of advanced liberal pedigree, was packed off to govern Italy’s miserable colony (it was unfortunate that the singular was still required to describe Italy’s possessions) and to preserve by making Italy ‘cease to remember it’, the defeat of Adowa and, more generally, the vicissitudes of the Prima Guerra d’Africa (the ‘First African War’) remained embedded in Italian consciousness. A few years later when Martini was asked to send something which might adequately represent Italy’s colony to the In-ternational Paris Exhibition of 1900, he rued the fact that he could find nothing except ‘the bones of the dead, some military plans gone awry, and a list of sums of money thrown to the wind.’1 It would have been too much for this refined and bookish gentleman, who de-spised the penchant for rhetoric and exaggeration of his countrymen, to have also added that Italy’s woes in Africa had given birth to a set of icons and myths, a database of heroic events and memories which were to have a significant place in newly unified Italy’s self-image and

1 Martini F. Il diario eritreo, vol. I (Florence, Vallecchi, n.d.) p. 159.

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in its efforts to find a role in a Europe that was falling over itself to stake out a place in the sun. In the 1880s and 90s the ideal of La Grande Italia (a Great Italy) was hopelessly constrained by its youthful Risorgimento garb of self-determination and progressive and moderate nationalism; notwithstanding defeat, the quest for empire in Africa gave the Italy of prose a few moments of poetry. Italians had been willing to die (it was at least portrayed that way) for their newborn country and if the whole experience of the African War had not re-sulted in the Italian flag flying over a vast expanse of new and valu-able territory, at least that tricolour emblazoned with the cross of Sa-voy, had caused the immolation of a not inconsiderable number of Italians. ‘To lift Italy out of the pettiness and misery in which it con-sumed itself for trivial interests and inconsequential arguments’ wrote the Gazzetta di Messina in 1887,

A bloodbath was necessary… The battle of Dagoli [sic] not only served to reawaken the old enthusiasm and to write one of the finest pages in the an-nals of world military history, but it showed the extraordinary and incredible heroism of which our soldiers are capable and that our army is first among the first. It revealed to us the firmness of Italian unity built on the love of all Italians, and I mean all!2

The editor of Messina’s most influential newspaper, echoing the prominent Neapolitan journalist Rocco De Zerbi, here expressed some of the major preoccupations, fears and hopes that in those years were tied up with the myth and desire of la Grande Italia and its colonial manifestation. ‘Dagoli’ or ‘Dogali’ was Italy’s first serious military engagement (and defeat) in the African War that was to reach its climax at Adowa.

Italian historian Angelo Del Boca, whose opus remains the starting point for any enquiry into the history of Italian colonialism, states that what really distinguished Fascism’s war on Ethiopia (in 1935) from liberal Italy’s botched attempt to make itself an empire, apart from the scale of resources invested, was that Italian colonialism during

2 ‘In Alto’, La Gazzetta di Messina 28. 2. 1887.

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the dictatorship at last achieved significant popular support. ‘Fascism,’ writes Italy’s foremost imperial historian,

which despised the laxity and half-measures of liberal democracy, needed to invent nothing when it came to colonialism the liberals had not already put into practice. It was merely more efficient thanks to the mechanisms and propaganda of the dictatorship, and thanks to the adhesion of the masses to the myth of a place in the sun.3

Although, in this view, it was liberal Italy which did the groundwork for Fascist empire-building, caution is the watchword when it comes to evaluating the efficaciousness of the former’s capacity to make the colonial myth penetrate, to win some kind of ‘adherence of the masses’ to the myth of a place in the sun. Yet there are countless examples in the much more thoroughly studied war of 1935-1936 that the experience of the 1880s and 1890s had dug deep and was still tangible in Italy’s collective memory forty years on. Commenting on the morale of his troops, the Italian army officer Paolo Cesarini was taken by surprise by the fact that ‘[in 1935] the fear of the Black Continent and the reputation of the Abyssinian warrior… was still strangely alive amongst our people after so long.’4 Amedeo di Savoia (commander of the Italian army in East Africa during the Second World War) chose the Amba Alage as the place for a last stand against the British in 1941 (it was an indefensible site) because it was here that Pietro Toselli had offered heroic resistance to the Ethiopians in 1895.

Adowa and its unavenged status became a vital theme in Italian consciousness in the forty years that followed. As Del Boca’s star pupil Nicola Labanca has pointed out, the painful awareness of an unhealed lesion may have tortured the Italian ruling elite but who is to say that at the mention of the great defeat in Africa more lowly citizens did not

3 Del Boca A. Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale. I. Dall’Unità alla marcia su Rome (Milan, Mondadori, 1992), p. 880.

4 Quoted in Del Boca A. Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale. II. La conquista dell’Impero (Milan, Mondadori, 1992), p. 335.

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flush red too and perhaps whiten their knuckles.5 The influential nationalist Enrico Corradini put 1896 as the watershed for his intellectual political development, and in one historical school the Crispi-Corradini-Mussolini genealogy preserved as a vitally significant node that same date. What came to be called the ‘Adowa Complex’ was a most vital ingredient in the potent mélange of concepts that resulted in a morbid condition known in Italian culture as Mal d’Africa (the African Malady); but its precise symptoms and long-term effects were never precisely diagnosed. How far this malaise percolated downwards in Italian society during the Prima Guerra d’Africa remains a question that has rarely attracted the attention of historians. Did the colonial enter-prise, as a kind of lieu de memoire, actually penetrate Italian society, even in the years before the economic take-off, before industrialisation, before the establishing of effective communication networks, before mass-parties, widespread literacy, schooling, and the establishing of a common-national language? In a word, could a ‘culture of colonialism’ be born and thrive in an Italy which in many ways was still struggling with its own tortured (and fledgling) modernity? In the 1890s contemporary commentators expressed surprise and not a little consternation at finding normal people being interested in the vicissitudes of the Dark Continent. Our Ferdinando Martini, writing at his desk in a colonica at Monsumanno (Tuscany) in February 1896, noticed some peasants chatting outside and commented:

As I write I can see them through the windows; one has been ploughing since this morning…the other on a ladder leaning on the elm tree… the third opposite, on the edge of the ditch, reads them news of the wars in Africa. These families of Tuscan peasants… are all subscribing to the Nazione, or the Tribuna or the Corriere della Sera.. In front of the wide crackling hearths they discuss none other than Taitù, Mangascià and Makonnen. And so it is everywhere.6

5 Labanca N. ‘Memorie e complessi di Adua. Appunti’ in Del Boca A. (ed.) Adua. Le ragioni di una sconfitta (Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1997), p. 402.

6 Quoted in Luchini A. Popolarità dell’Affrica in Italia (Rome, Quaderni di cultura politica, 1942), p. 46.

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The Socialist journal Critica Sociale on 1 November 1895 bewailed that

… this Africa, so cursed and calumniated, is, after macaroni, the most popular thing in Italy. Italians don’t read books or newspapers… but when it comes to Africa… they are willing to pay their penny for the gazette and want to know everything.7

The creeping into the Italian language of terms and characters associated with the African wars may also be telling. The word Ras (which stands for an Ethiopian prince) was used by the Fascists to signify provincial party leaders (Roberto Farinacci was, for example, the ‘Ras’ of Cremona) well before the war of 1935, and it would perhaps not be going too far to suggest that the Fascist wearing of black shirts may well have had its psychological foundation (and its effective impact) at least, in the deeply embedded and forceful imagery the Ethiopian Ras leading his black troops into battle? In Neapolitan dialect ‘nu Menelicche’ came to mean a weird and unusual personality8; in Sicily and in other parts of Italy ‘una Taitu’ (Menelik’s wife), means a woman who thinks too much of herself, and ‘Una guerra d’Africa’ (an ‘African War’) has become proverbial to the point that it can stand for any costly and fruitless venture.9 We also know, as Ruggero Romano pointed out, and Labanca reminds us, that in the valleys surrounding Bergamo effigies of Menelik were burnt into the 20th century instead of the more traditional ‘vecchia’ (hag) during rituals warding off calamity in the piazzas of the villages; although the fear of being called up to serve in Africa rather than a patriotic desire for an enemy of Italy to meet a ghastly end may have been at the root of the Ethiopian Emperor’s sudden appearance on

7 Quoted in Dota C. ‘Il dibattito sull problema coloniale nella stampa socialista (1887-1900)’ in Storia Contemporanea, 1979, vol. X, pp. 1047-1087, and also in Labanca N. ‘L’Africa italiana’, in M. Isnenghi (ed.), I luoghi della memoria (simboli e miti dell’Italia unita), (Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1996), p. 258.

8 I am indebted to my father for this reference, who, however, learnt Neapolitan dialect in the 1940s.

9 I am indebted for this reference to Prof. G. Fiume of Palermo University and to Barbara Bampi of Trento.

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village bonfires. While being open to contrasting interpretations, that those bonfires were lit at all points to the possibility that an awareness of the African war and its protagonists in the 1890s was not confined to Italy’s major cities or to an exclusively middle-class reading public.10 The Canta D’Africa, a song on the battle of Dogali (1887), was still being heard in rural Italy a couple of decades after the event if we are to believe a Fascist account of a travelling story-teller relying on research carried out by the folklorist Balilla Pratella.11 For Italy’s Ethiopian war of 1935-1936 some important explora-tions of what could loosely be termed the ‘culture of colonialism’ that grew up around that occasion have been published,12 but for the 1880s and 1890s little is available.13 This lack of research has often led to the belief that in the years of the Prima Guerra d’Africa such a culture simply failed to materialise. For example, Gianfranco Calchi Novati, one of Italy’s most eminent Africanists has said that ‘There is a general consensus that in Italy the development of a colonial consciousness

10 Romano R. La storiografia italiana oggi (Espresso Strumenti, 1978), p. 94; but quote taken from Labanca N. ‘Memorie e complessi di Adua. Appunti’ in Del Boca A. (ed.) Adua. Le ragioni di una sconfitta (Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1997), p. 400.

11 Luchini A. Popolarità dell’Affrica in Italia (Rome, Quaderni di cultura politica, 1942), p. 38.

12 Most importantly Mignemi A. (ed.), Immagine coordinata per un impero. Etiopia 1935-1936 (Turin, Forma, 1984). Also Centro Furo Jesi (ed.) La menzogna della razza (Bologna, Grafis, 1994). See also the recent Terhoeven P. Oro alla Patria (Bologna, il Mulino, 2006).

13 Of seminal importance are, however, Labanca N. ‘L’Africa italiana’, in M. Isnenghi (ed.), I luoghi della memoria (simboli e miti dell’Italia unita), (Bari, Laterza, 1996); Labanca N. (ed.) L’Africa in vetrina (Treviso, Pagus, 1992); some important contributions to this subject are Laforgia E. ‘L’elaborazione del mito di Adua nella cultura letteraria’ in Studi Piacentini (vol. 20, 1996), pp. 205-236; and in the same volume Marotta M. ‘Adua e gli abissini nell’opera romanzesca di Guglielmo Ferrero ed in alcuni suoi scritti minori di fine Ottocento’, pp. 237-266; Labanca N. Oltremare (Bologna, il Mulino, 2002) now investigates the subject at length.

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was belated and sluggish’.14 Yet Sergio Romano, among others, has argued that it was the experience of defeat itself which became the primary motor behind predatory impulses on Africa. As he puts it:

It came to pass, paradoxically, that a defeat suffered in the course of a colonial campaign whose causes were contested and fragile, became itself the central theme of the new ideology. Thanks to Adowa, paradoxically, Italy could excuse itself from discussing the merits of its colonial policies. In other words, having been defeated was in itself a reason to go to war and to forget that the debate on the utility of Italian colonialism remained incomplete and unsatisfactory.15

Romano may be exaggerating here; the main goals of the ‘culture of colonialism’ developed during the First African War, the civilising mission, the search for international prestige, the reclamation of Italy’s classical heritage, the rekindling of the spirit of the Risorgimento, to mention but the most obvious, were severely damaged by defeat at the hands of Ethiopia, but the memory of Adowa acted also to make their fulfilment all the more pressing. At Adowa it was not just the Italian army that was routed but a whole set of aspirations and concepts about what Italy stood for. Avenging that defeat became a short hand for a particular way of imaging what Italy was about and more importantly what it should become. For the present study, it is important to point out that Sergio Romano’s ‘unsatisfactory debate’ took place in what that very perceptive historian of Italian culture, Mario Isnenghi, has called ‘a veritable sea of printed paper yet to be explored’.16 Italy’s assailing of Ethiopia through the 1880 and 90s was accompanied by torrents of ink. What all this ink said and what it sought to achieve is what this book aims to unravel.

14 Calchi Novati G. ‘Studi e politica ai convegni coloniali del primo e del secondo dopoguerra’, in Fonti e problemi della politica coloniale italiana, Atti del convegno (Rome, Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1996), p. 166.

15 Romano S. ‘L’ideologia del colonialismo italiano’ in Fonti e problemi della politica coloniale italiana, Atti del convegno (Rome, Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1996), p. 30.

16 Isnenghi M. ‘Il sogno africano’, in Del Boca A. (ed.), Le guerre coloniali del fascismo (Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1991), p. 49.

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Trying to understand this ‘sea of printed paper’ has been a minor research interest of some historians. Nicola Labanca, for example, discusses at length the relevance to Italy of Hans Wehler’s ‘social imperialism’ thesis17 which, in a seminal history of the German Second Reich, had argued that Bismarck’s turn to colonial expansion in the 1880s could be put down to an attempt to resolve internal contradic-tion by external (and very cheap) war. Labanca suggests that apart from the difference in scale between Germany’s colonial ambitions and Italy’s, between the strength and modernity of the Reich as compared to the weakness of the ‘least of the Great Powers’, ‘Crispi’s imperialism never achieved social integration for the simple reason that it never posed the problem in these terms.’18 That is Franceso Crispi (Prime Minister of Italy during the Adowa campaign) chose the path of repression, not integration, of all those forces considered dangerous to the state. The subtle balancing of social forces through patriotic foreign war was a concept beyond the Sicilian statesman’s political acumen. This discussion is brought forward in more recent work by the same author where it is argued that Italy’s ruling class did attempt at various times and in a variety of ways to popularise expansionism in Africa, and that its effects on the Italian masses should not be discounted a priori, but that ultimately divisions within that ruling class itself, ambiguity, and indecision towards the colonial enterprise, as well as the influence of important and self-conscious opposition groups were the primary causes for the failure of a fully fledged ‘culture of colonialism’ taking-off19 during the Prima Guerra d’Africa. That Italy’s political class was divided over the need for a colonial empire in the years of the First African war is beyond doubt and has been reaffirmed again by Sergio Romano when he explains that

… the choice to pursues a colonial policy was experienced by Italy’s ruling class as a forced one. It had been imposed by circumstances … Italy was never

17 Wehler H. L’Impero guglielmino (Bari, De Donato, 1981). 18 Labanca N. In Marcia verso Adua (Turin, Einaudi, 1993), p. 315. 19 Labanca N. ‘L’Africa Italiana’ in Isnenghi M. (ed.) I luoghi della memoria, simboli e

miti dell’Italia Unita (Bari, Laterza, 1996), pp. 255-289.

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autonomously colonialist on the basis of autonomous interests and evaluations. Rather, Italy was colonialist by rebound.20

The idea that Italy’s colonialism was forced by external circumstances and lacked any kind of autonomous and material justification in Italian society, barring disembodied and fuzzy notions of ‘catching up’ and the need for a ‘place in the sun’ in order to accepted as a Great Power, is central to the work of Roberto Battaglia and Angelo Del Boca, who, it is true, have told the story of Italy’s ‘actual’ expansion in Africa but have, to a certain extent, dismissed as insignificant the ‘imagined’ mythology of Empire (in the years of the Prima Guerra d’Africa) and have lightly brushed it aside. Del Boca says:

In [liberal] Italy…, sixty per cent of the population is illiterate, there are only a little over fifteen thousand university students and readers of daily newspapers number no more than a few hundred thousand… Italy is an underdeveloped country, beset by new and chronic problems, but its ruling class searches for diversions due to its incapacity to resolve internal problems more than because it was firmly convinced that ‘colonies are an absolute necessity for modern life’ (Crispi).21

Roberto Battaglia, in the first history of the Prima Guerra d’Africa published after World War II, on evidence that does not go much further than speeches by Italy’s first socialist member of parliament, Andrea Costa, suggests that in 1887, ‘the majority of the country had already demonstrated that it wanted nothing to do with [the Italian government’s colonial politics]’.22 But what Del Boca and before him Battaglia fail to point out is that no study of the ‘culture of colonial-ism’, which both are fully aware existed (indeed, its unearthing has in some measure been the result of Del Boca’s historical endeavours),

20 Romano S. ‘L’ideologia del colonialismo italiano’ in Fonti e problemi della politica coloniale italiana, Atti del convegno (Rome, Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1996), pp. 29-30.

21 Del Boca A. Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale I, dall’ Unità alla Marcia su Rome (Milan, Mondadori, 1992), p. 299.

22 Battaglia R. La Prima Guerra d’Africa (Turin, Einaudi, 1958), p. 263.

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has seriously considered the possibility that liberal Italy was able to ‘sell empire’ to any significant degree. For Nicola Labanca, there is a historiographical deficit here. He says:

Partly because of its traditional backwardness and closure, and partly because of the little energy dedicated to the issue, colonial historiography has tended to focus on political history… We have a fairly reliable picture of the colonial ambitions of the political ruling class of liberal and Fascist Italy. But the penetration of non anti-colonial attitudes and orientations among Italy’s popular classes has received no significant attention.23

This missing link in the historiography of Italian colonialism has some far-reaching consequences. It makes the interpretation of Italian colonialism as ‘social imperialism’ speculative and does not allow for more than a few offhand phrases on the potency of colo-nialism as a myth of patriotic mobilisation to be thrown in among discussions dealing mostly with something else. Even the work of someone like Giuseppe Are, (which will be examined further on) that purports to be a description of Italy’s ‘culture of imperialism’, does not go beyond looking at the thought of politicians and intellectuals. Nor, for example, does Silvio Lanaro’s epochal study of culture in post-unification Italy24, or Francesco Francesco Surdich who looks at ‘Colonial expansion and the organisation of consensus’.25 As Labanca says, negative popular reactions to colonialism have certainly been studied26 and to a degree a view has emerged on the subject which can best be summed up by an article published in the culturally influential newspaper Il Manifesto on the hundredth anniversary of the battle of Adowa. On that significant date it said:

23 Labanca N. ‘Coscritti in Colonia’, in Materiali di Lavoro (1990, 1-2), pp. 94-95. 24 Lanaro S. Nazione e Lavoro (Venice, Marsilio, 1988). 25 Surdich F. Esplorazione geografiche e sviluppo del colonialismo nell’età della rivoluzione

industriale (Florence, La Nuova Italia, 1979). 26 See the excellent Rainero R. L’anticolonialismo italiano da Assab a Adua (Milan,

Comunità, 1971).

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Colonial adventures, their cost and military risks, became ever more unpopular in the poverty-stricken Italy of the last years of the 19th Century… the non-Crispian Left, socialists and radicals, pressed ever more strongly for an end to the African endeavour… After Adowa they protested for years to the cry of ‘Long Live Menelik’, until the machine guns of Bava Beccaris cleaned up the canaille on Italy’s piazzas’.27

Fiorenzo Bava Beccaris was the general who became famous for bloodying the streets of Milan in 1898 with the corpses of anti-government demonstrators. The attitude of Il Manifesto has become something of an axiom.

It may well be that the highlighting of anti-colonialism amongst Italy’s population has been of contemporary importance to historians trying to break the strangle-hold of the ‘storici coloniali’28 on the subject of Italian colonialism, but not that much work has been done on what might be called ‘Italian Jingo’ in the years of the Prima Guerra at all, and so in the history books it does not exist. But replacing the ‘storici coloniali’ with wall-to-wall anti-colonialism among ‘non-bourgeois’ Italians throughout the Prima Guerra d’Africa is little short of a new mystification. The historical problem of popular ‘consensus’ for the more unsavoury agendas of the modern state, and for Italy one need not emphasize how acridly the use of this word has been contested, should be examined critically. Rescuing the Italian masses from overt patriotic jingoism throughout modern history has been one of the main jobs Italian historiography has set itself in the big clean up after Fascism. The myths that fired the Ventennio had to be unhinged from Italy’s innocent masses and colonialism had, of course, been one of Fascism’s most important. In reality there was

27 Ragozzino G. ‘Adua, I cinque generali sconfitti da Menelik’, in Il Manifesto, 1 March 1996.

28 These were often ex-colonial administrators, or in any case ‘historians’ tied up to the colonial conceptions of the dead Fascist regime. Their most impor-tant publications have been the Italia in Africa series published between 1945 and the early 1980s. This ‘official’ summation of Italy’s experience in Africa is considered by Del Boca to be (as history) almost entirely worthless. None of of these works concentrate on popular culture.

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some congruency between Fascist and Post-Fascist culture with regard to the colonial issue during the Prima Guerra. While the latter blamed a corrupt and undemocratic government for having dragged a kicking and screaming Italy into Africa, the former instead argued that Liberalism had failed to really make Italians into ‘Empire-Builders’. ‘The new Italian, a far cry from the stereotypes of the past, would be born on the African frontier, the gymnasium of boldness, sacrifice and discipline’ wrote Mussolini in 1935.29

It remains true, however, that if there was a ‘culture of colonialism’ in the period under hand, it came into being when the leadership of the state was generally speaking undecided over the colonial issue, and was in many ways, as Romano has argued, forced into an adventure that was not autonomously elaborated and wanted. That in these circumstances the ‘culture of colonialism’ should have been weak, contradictory and difficult to define comes as no surprise. The articulation of its precepts was left in the hands of individuals, clubs, societies and patriotic organisations which were not provided with a firm orientation from central government. The Italian situation was somewhat anomalous in a Europe where in these years there was a blossoming of state-fostered pro-colonial propaganda acting in harmony with both ‘men on the spot’ (in the colonies) and a plethora of civil society institutions ranging from newspapers to scientific think-tanks to businesses, clubs and cultural associations.30 No serious attempt has been made to assign Italy a place in the theories developed in debates over the nature of colonialism and the new imperialism in general. Claudio Segrè points out that the great theoreticians who studied the issue of new imperialism, from Lenin and Hobson, right down to D. K. Fieldhouse and Robinson and Gallagher, have all

29 In Del Boca A. Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale. I. Dall’Unità alla marcia su Rome (Milan, Mondadori, 1992), pp. 421-422.

30 See for France Chafer T. and Sackur A. (eds) Promoting the Colonial Idea. Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France (Bsingstoke, Palgrave, 2002).

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overlooked the Italian case.31 The same remains true in the exceptional-ly rich torrent of research in the Studies in Imperialism series edited by John MacKenzie for Manchester University Press. Italy is universally ignored.32 The implications of the mislaying of the Italian case are that one is constantly tempted to argue that when we look at Italian colonialism during the Prima Guerra and its attached ‘culture’ we are examining a piece of jig-saw puzzle that has become muddled and has got into the wrong box. Nicola Labanca has said as much: before 1896, he argues,

Colonial politics served, for the governments of Humbertine Italy much more in terms of internal rather than foreign policy. It is true that Italy’s colonialism emerged due to diplomatic circumstances and the search for prestige as a Great Power… but it perhaps served to the governments who had promoted it more in terms of their legitimisation, in terms of creating parliamentary majorities and the transformation in the decision making process of government. The primacy of Italy’s first Imperial experience was to be found in foreign policy – the 1911 Libyan war and the 1935 Ethiopian one were altogether different- but its upshot was very much internal.33

But Labanca’s distinction between foreign and internal politics is created by the requisites of historiography. Being or becoming a ‘Great Power’ is as much to do with one’s image and reputation among the diplomats and statesmen at the Congress of Berlin, as it is to do with the identity and opinion of the nation’s citizens. By the late nineteenth century diplomatic manoeuvres, the successes and failures of the nation’s foreign policy were, or were becoming, a

31 Segrè C. ‘Italy and Classical Theories of ‘New Imperialism’: the Missing Italian Case’, in Fonti e problemi della politica coloniale italiana, Atti del convegno (Rome, Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1996), pp. 536-546.

32 An exception is David Atkinson, Denis Cosgrove and Anna Notaro ‘Empire in Modern Rome: Shaping and Remembering an Imperial City, 1870-1911’ in Driver F. and Gilbert D. Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999.

33 Labanca N. In marcia verso Adua (Turin, Einaudi, 1993), p. 65.

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language of controversy, of debate, which went well beyond the ‘informed’ opinion of an educated and restricted elite.

Like Labanca, Giuseppe Are, in an earlier study attempting to fathom Italy’s turn to Imperialism in the liberal era, also argues that it was only in the Giolittian period (i.e. the decade or so before 1914) that colonialism began to resonate with some important sectors of Italian society and culture. Before this certain crucial components were missing. Are says:

Only in the years [1898-1910] did all the external and internal conditions and all the cultural re-examinations which had originated in the intellectual impulses, the political forces and economic interests come together to determine a full and active participation of Italy in the inter-imperial competition.34

Before this time, Are argues, Italian culture was locked in a liberal paradigm that was bound to look at imperialism with circumspection whatever isolated politicians or intellectuals may have said or done. The actual humus in society in which imperial ideas could grow and mature was simply missing.

Only in these years did the locomotive forces of the Italian economy, the banks and industries, become capable of imposing on the Italian state the kind of political economy which is associated with the imperial phase of capitalist development.35

The paradigm Are is working in is Lenin’s of course. He concludes pointedly that alternatives to traditional liberalism in the years bridging the 19th and 20th centuries began to emerge throughout Europe, including in Italy, and their basis in Italy’s industrial take-off, beginning around 1898

caused the coming into existence of consistent and dynamic forces which were capable of exerting an ever-greater hegemony (in the Gramscian sense)

34 Are G. La scoperta dell’imperialismo (Rome, Edizioni Lavoro, 1985), p. 130. 35 Ibid., p. 131.

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over Italian society. This was something entirely different from the con-tingency of forces which had directed Italy’s previous African adventure.36

Italian imperial expansion was the result of economic and social changes in Italy after 1896. Italy’s industrial ‘take-off’ around this date and the expansion of a political-national consciousness among broadening strata of the Italian people made the war against Libya in 1911 something much more than that which had been waged in East Africa in the 1880s and 1890s. The latter had been a war of individuals, of small circles, of elites and had had little impact on or basis in the sinews of Italian society.

Although working from within an altogether different paradigm Emilio Gentile also decides that Crispian imperialism is a kind of ab-errant one off. Its main thrust lay, to be sure in conceptions of power politics and aspirations to national greatness embedded within Risor-gimento nationalism and not just in Crispi’s personal foibles, but it was ‘[a proposition] that finished rapidly in the disastrous defeat of Ad-owa.’37 As for Are, the war for Tripoli (the Seconda Guerra d’Africa) is instead assigned a place of very great relevance. Gentile argues:

The colonial venture leading to the conquest of Tripoli introduced some im-portant innovations in the rhetoric of the Grande Italia… these were faith in the morality of war as a way to regenerate the nation and to generate the en-ergy and will to power, preparing thus the grounds for interventionism [in the Great War]. The war was celebrated in itself as a rite of passage … towards achieving the status of Great Power. The colonial adventure was hailed as a new resurrection of the nation which, through the sacrifice of its sons, deliv-ered Italy from the indignity of Adowa… The Italian soldiers fighting in the Libyan Desert were transformed into heirs of the Roman legionaries, cham-pions of a renewed Italian race fortified with the rehashed civilising mission, which was the incumbent duty of the heirs of Rome… To this was added the recent myth of the ‘proletarian nation’… and finally the idea that the com-mon struggle for victory superseded divisions of class and ideology.38

36 Ibid., p. 130. 37 Gentile E. La Grande Italia (Milan, Mondadori, 1997), p. 52. 38 Ibid., p. 74.

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Without doubt a potent melange and one from which much might well have been expected. On the possibility that all these concepts may have been present during the Prima Guerra d’Africa too, Gentile remains silent. Yet in many ways this luminary of the historiography of Fascist culture is here only reiterating what philosopher-historian Benedetto Croce had said almost three quarters of a century before. ‘… Italy went to Tripoli’, the Neapolitan wrote in 1925,

because it would have been intolerable that upon no stretch of the African coast that lay before her was the Italian flag flying. Because it would have been intolerable for Italy not to participate in the European project for the Europeanization of Africa, or to pronounce that the setback of Abyssinia under Crispi had been final. Italy was not the same as it had been fifteen years before; it desired and knew that it could undertake a military campaign and pursue it until victory had been achieved. In other words Italy went to Tripoli for reasons of sentiment which are as real as all the others.39

For Croce then, well before Gentile or Are, the successful colonial venture of Tripoli in 1911-1912 was the product of a modern and mature nation, something that under Crispi Italy had yet to become. In his seminal analysis of Italian culture in the liberal era, Silvio Lanaro saw this Crispian to Giolittian ‘modernisation’ as a the ruling class’s conscious shedding of the tenets of traditional liberalism Very quickly after unification the new Italian ruling class, Lanaro argues, realised that it was only through the industrialisation and commercial expansion of Italy that the gains it had conquered at unification could be made permanent. Its privileged role in the new state could only be guaranteed by a culture of ‘greatness’, by unifying the population be-hind an ideal that above all stressed the magnificence, but also the in-timacy and the familial embrace of what writers referred to pointedly as la madre-patria, (the ‘Mother-Fatherland). In a telling passage Lanaro writes:

From the 1870s on the ruling classes eliminated the last vestiges of their civil liberalism as they steadily made a series of valuable discoveries… [they

39 Croce B, Storia D’Italia dal 1871 al 1915 (Bari, Laterza, 1928), pp. 271-272.

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realised] that an authoritarian activation of ‘national’ resources required a corresponding ‘nationalist’ and demagogic ideology which – resting on values accepted by broad strata of the population – would allow the unequal distribution of the sacrifices required by accumulation.40

The aspiration to national greatness was a most effective device for the ruling class to prevail in a violent social situation marked by poverty and inequality; it was also the only way the progressive sides of liberalism could be killed off without risk and the potential of the nation be released in a headlong rush towards industrialisation. From unification itself Italy was ceasing to be liberal and so Lanaro cautiously releases a statement concealed in a question: ‘Perhaps the notion of ‘liberal’ Italy has now been superseded?’41

Although Lanaro’s argument is attractive, it has the merit of going some way in explaining how Italian liberalism slipped so easily into Fascism after World War I, the notion that liberalism had been stillborn at unification surely needs some major qualifications. The abandonment of the Italian elite’s ‘progressive’ outlook may not have been a foregone conclusion. In an early study of ‘expansionist concepts’ in Italy from unification to the 1890s42 Andrea Castagno, has shown that the foreign policy of Visconti-Venosta, De Launay and Di Robilant in the years up to 1880 was characterised by a profound rejection of notions of aggrandizement, and that the Italian political class was unanimous in its support of arbitration with regard to international dispute. This was the period when even Britain rejected formal empire (it had, for example, invaded Ethiopia in 1868 but had not followed up with permanent occupation). For many Italian politicians and thinkers there was much commendable self-restraint embedded in the notion of what a civilised and liberal nation could and could not do. For men such as Italian foreign minister Luigi Corti, who had proudly left the congress of Berlin in 1878 with

40 Lanaro S. Nazione e Lavoro (Marsilio, Venice, 1988), pp. 20-21. 41 Ibid., p. 87. 42 Castagno A. The Development of Expansionist Concepts in Italy (1861-1896). (Phd.

Dissertation, Columbia University, 1956), pp. 10-19.

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‘clean hands’, and for many an Italian liberal, a moral foreign policy meant having the power to subjugate others but choosing not to do so. This was the difference between a gentleman and a savage, a liberal and a reactionary. Yet, as Europe changed its tune, and for Italy this was made painfully clear when France occupied Tunisia in 1881, and Britain Egypt a year later, Italy was forced to follow suit if only to continue to be respected as a peer in the councils of Europe. Liberalism in its anti-imperial phase had throughout Europe lasted little more three decades.

Still, there is some usefulness in the idea that Italian unification occurred as the high tide of liberalism in its most ‘typical’ manifesta-tion, Gladstone’s Britain, was already on the wane. Like their contemporaries in France and Germany, some Italians were not slow to realise that ‘Manchester’ liberalism and its associated informal and tariff-free empire had been little more than a front for British world hegemony; there was no guarantee that applying its verities to one’s own nation would automatically deliver economic development, social peace and progress as well as Great Power status. The notion of a world divided up into a series of discrete nations, each contributing to the general improvement of mankind in a spirit of free trade and reciprocal respect was called into question. A nation lived, died or stagnated, some argued, by the laboriousness, by the preparedness and compactness of its population as well as by the resources it could claim exclusive rights to. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century Liberal-Nationalism was clearly splitting into these two, in many ways, mutually exclusive branches. The debates culminating in Joseph Chamberlain’s launching of the Tariff Reform League in 1903 were a sign that, even in Britain, the consensus for free trade and the refusal to envisage a world populated by contending imperial blocs was over.

As regards Italy, historians have argued that the path towards external expansionism and away from the liberal morality of the ‘Clean Hands’ variety lay in the failure of the Risorgimento to deliver stability, wealth, and prestige in a European situation characterised by a veritable ‘scramble’ for the appropriation of territories in Asia and

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Africa; even countries as insignificant and as tiny as Belgium were in the process of accumulating millions of square miles of territory. Italy could not simply stand aside and let the ideals of the Risorgimento spend themselves in the achievements of 1859-1870 and straight-jacket the country thereafter. As Labanca shows, the ‘liberal’ commentator Attilio Brunialti penetratingly bewailed the plight of the ruling class ‘if the exhausted ideals of 1870 were not replaced by others able to keep the mind and the imagination of the majority (educated or non-educated) fired and alert.’43 The Nation, as an ideal that held the imagination, had to change to develop and to adapt. It had to constantly furnish new and stimulating images; a new and authentic sense of purpose which blended with the particular circumstances of the times and which constantly re-proposed ways to fulfilment that, once fulfilled, threw up others which appeared to be virgin and challenging once again.

Was colonialism in Italy in the years of the Prima Guerra one of these? Can the Italian quest for empire in the 1880s and 90s be regarded as a replacement for the ‘exhausted ideals of 1870’? Shedding light on these questions sums up the agenda of this monographic study. Primarily it aims to be an enquiry into whether a ‘culture of colonialism’ may have taken root in Italy as it fought its First African War. It is then interested in how this culture (in fact one could say in order for it to be a culture of any significance) may have reached the minds of sizeable sections of Italy’s population. It aims to show how and where this culture was actually carried, and is therefore a study that unearths wholly new or certainly neglected sources. If this ‘culture of colonialism’s’ distribution can be considered in any way significant (if not to say widespread) then it is legitimate to ask what particular role it may have played in the formation of Italy’s national identity in the years up to the turn of the century. How did colonialism fit into and develop nationalist discourse in this period? Was it significant in the construction of a

43 Brunialti A. L’Italia e le colonie (Turin, Utet, 1896), pp. 343-344. Quoted in Labanca N. In marcia verso Adua (Einaudi, Turin, 1993), p. 66.

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general culture that became (or was on the way to becoming) what Antonio Gramsci has defined as ‘national popular’44, that is a culture to which the ‘people’ contributed and in which they participated? This study seeks also to bring a specific (in this instance as a ‘case-study) ‘culture of colonialism’ back within national and historically limited boundaries and attempts to combat the trend which studies ‘colonial culture’ as kind of separate literary discursive sphere that purports to comprehend all of Europe or the ‘West’. This study seeks to under-stand the power of the colonial discourse, but to see it firmly embedded within the socio-political-historical realities and concerns of one particular nation-state. It is therefore a study that is national-centric. It is about Italy, but it is also an attempt to make a contribution to understanding and developing universal theories of nationalism and colonialism, and as such remains a comparative study, in that it seeks to highlight Italy’s particular ‘contribution’ to a phenomenon that, by the years in question, had already led to or played a significant part in the swallowing up by a handful of European powers of almost the entire world.

44 See especially Gramsci A. Letteratura e vita nazionale (Rome, Editori Riuniti, 1996, III edition), pp. 121-127.