Abstract
Many scholars have explored Liberal Italy’s (1861–1922) grandiose territorial ambitions during the First World War and the myth of the “mutilated victory” that followed when Italy failed to secure them all. Yet historians have tended to view imperialism as peripheral to the real substance of Italy’s foreign policy which prioritized relations in Europe. As a part of Oxford University Press’s The Greater War Series, Vanda Wilcox’s new book pushes the geographic and temporal boundaries of scholars’ traditional conceptions of Italian ambitions in the First World War. Wilcox effectively situates Italy’s drive for great power status within its wider global and imperial context by arguing that imperial and expansionist conquest was the motivating force behind Italian intervention in the Great War. The desire to make “greater Italy” a reality dominated Italian diplomacy. The circumstances of the war offered to extend Italy’s borders to the north and definitively complete the national unification process in Europe, but the war also offered Italy the chance to obtain a new colonial empire across the Mediterranean. The Italian Empire makes an important contribution to the growing body of literature devoted to recognizing the First World War as a truly global war.
Wilcox examines the tension among the Italian policymaking elite over competing visions of the empire from the conquest of Libya (1911) to the conclusion of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). She begins by introducing the reader to Liberal Italy’s two strands of empire-building: irredentism and colonialism. In the early twentieth century, many Italians viewed the country’s borders as a work in progress that would not be complete until it “redeemed” the largely Italian-inhabited cities in the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Balkans. But Italian nationalists also wanted a colonial empire in which Italians could settle as an alternative to emigrating to North America. Many looked across the Mediterranean Sea to what became imagined as Italy’s “fourth shore” in North Africa. While these brands of expansionism often went hand-in-hand, the wartime experience frequently pushed Italian leaders to prioritize either irredentism or colonialism over the other. For example, irredentist objectives in Europe took precedence over colonial aims in the crumbling Ottoman Empire during the negotiations for Italy’s entry into war under the Treaty of London (1915).
The middle chapters juxtapose the Italian experience in Europe and North Africa during the “official” years of the war with its impact on Italian imperial thinking. Against Italy’s principal adversary—Austria—the Italian military drew from a wide range of emigrant citizens living abroad, but curiously excluded the use of colonial troops, in a stark contrast to the practices of the British and French empires. The war against Italy’s secondary enemy—the Ottoman Empire—unfolded largely in Libya where the Italian empire struggled to maintain control over widespread anti-Italian resistance dating from 1911. In examining the mobilization of Italian society, Wilcox puts forward the provocative argument that “Italy turned itself into a kind of auto-colony” during the war (88). The powers of parliament were largely eliminated, concentrating decision-making authority within the executive, and the widespread demonstrations against wartime intervention rendered the working class a domestic “other.” This interpretation shines a light on the extensive role of state coercion long before the rise of Fascism.
In the final four chapters, The Italian Empire is at its best. Wilcox picks up on themes from the opening and explores the competing and evolving visions of Italianità during the First World War. Italianità, or what it meant to be “Italian,” was rooted in a racialized hierarchy and couched in scientific terms that emerged not with the rise of Fascism, but with the Risorgimento movement which had paved the way towards Italian unification in the nineteenth century. By 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, irredentist dreams of “redeeming” Italian territory in the Balkans and settling a colony in Anatolia both proved futile. Nevertheless, the Italian government and rogue Italian nationalists had not given up hope even after the peace settlement. Italy continued to pursue territorial expansion through both military occupation and international diplomacy while working to suppress anti-colonial nationalism agitating Italy’s colonies in North Africa. Erez Manela has coined the term “Wilsonian Moment” to describe the brief outpouring of anti-colonial nationalism in the years immediately following the war. 1 In 1919–1920, anti-colonial activists across the globe adopted President Wilson’s rhetoric of self-determination for their own respective causes. It is clear from Wilcox’s analysis that this experience transpired in Italian imperial spaces as well.
The real strength of this book is in its deep explanation of how Italian imperial thinking transformed over the course of the war. Italy began the war with a clumsy, uncoordinated, and informal empire of emigrants, but it ended the war with the goal of far more formal arrangements. It may seem surprising how small a role the rise of Fascism plays in Wilcox’s narrative. Historians have long debated the continuities and discontinuities between Liberal and Fascist Italy. In recent decades, a tentative consensus has emerged which emphasizes the uniqueness of Fascist tactics and technologies of rule which became increasingly pronounced in the years after the March on Rome. In contrast to the dominant view, Wilcox demonstrates that a number of practices commonly associated with the Fascist period actually appear much earlier than previously thought, doing so under Liberal rule. Shifting our gaze to the wartime experience of the empire reveals the violent, repressive, and coercive practices of Liberal Italy for more than a decade before the March on Rome (1922). What may at first appear as a striking omission from The Italian Empire, ultimately emerges as a key strength of this text. By focusing on continuities in imperial practices, Wilcox makes a compelling addition to an emerging trend in Italian history which downplays the rise of Fascism as a moment of rupture in order to make visible the violence that characterized Italian empire-building throughout the twentieth century.
In the end, The Italian Empire ultimately updates an older argument familiar to students of Italian history. As Richard Bosworth first proposed more than forty years ago, Italian policy was motivated by its government’s desire to be respected as a great power. 2 Wilcox shows that it was precisely this policy that caused Italy so many challenges during the war and in the years that followed. The Italian government pursued lofty colonial and irredentist goals in an attempt to demonstrate the young country’s great power status and help it achieve its “rightful place in the world” (19). Though Italians tended to blame the great power politics of 1919 for their mutilated victory, Italy’s perennial problems of money shortages, limited access to resources, and decision-making errors ultimately prevented it from maximizing its imperial potential. Wilcox makes an important contribution to advancing this older school of thought by bringing to the fore the long-neglected role of empire in the Italian wartime experience.