Abstract
For a long time, the history of Italian colonialism suffered from profound marginalization in international historiography, as scholars tended to regard it as less significant than other major nations’ imperial projects. By originally combining a sophisticated theoretical framework with a rigorous empirical analysis, Valerie McGuire's book, Italy's Sea: Empire and Nation in the Mediterranean, 1895–1945, joins the growing body of work now being published with the aim of correcting such an old-fashioned narrative. It is a much needed contribution to the history of European overseas expansion as well as to the broad, interdisciplinary field of Mediterranean studies. The book adopts a postcolonial critique approach to investigate how Modern Italian imperialists as well as their colonial subjects navigated issues of nation, sovereignty, migration, racial and gender hierarchies, on top of shifting notions of identity and belonging during the interwar period. However, by focusing on the less explored empire-building practices undertaken at the periphery of Europe, in the Aegean region and the Dodecanese islands, the book investigates the different ways in which Italian colonizers imagined and operationalized not just unstable discourses of empire, but also of their own European and Mediterranean identities. By linking the evolution of ideas of nationhood and belonging to the imperial experience, McGuire carefully shows how Italy fully participated in the so called ‘reciprocal condition of empire’ – that is to say, how the colonial encounter fundamentally redefined not just life in the overseas territories, but also domestic notions of sovereignty and national identity (p. 36). In this regard, the Aegean region provides a unique perspective. In fact, much more so than in the case of African imperialism, the encounter with colonial subjects in the Levant forced the Italians to reflect upon not only the differences, but also the similarities they shared with the local population. This resulted in an ambivalent and often unstable process of imagining the colonial subject as a ‘familiar other’. McGuire defines such methodology, which undertakes the study of the Italian nation from the perspective of the Mediterranean, as a ‘thalassological’ (from the Greek word for ‘sea’) approach, namely one that moves beyond traditional metropole-colony frameworks and the limits of area studies, in favour of a more transnational, transimperial, and indeed trans-Mediterranean view (p. 8).
The book's greatest strength is the analysis of the evolving ways in which the Mediterranean was always at the centre of the imperialist and nationalist discourses regarding the identity of the Italian nation-state (p. 12). McGuire shows how the imperial project for overseas expansion in the Mediterranean was not a peculiar ideological feature of the Fascist regime, but rather a long-standing attribute of the Italian nation-building project and something deeply entwined with the nationalist ideology since the Risorgimento and the Liberal periods. Starting at least in the 1850s, Italian nationalist elites cultivated the idea that the resurgence of their nation as a Great Power and the spread of Italianità (Italianness) in the world could only be ensured through the creation of a new Latin Empire in the Mediterranean (pp. 11, 12, 23). This, in turn, eventually spurred the development of the concept of Mediterraneità (Mediterraneanness), namely a cosmopolitan imperial discourse that posited the sea basin as an ‘imaginative geography’ in which the Italian imperial nation-state would rule on a vast range of ethnically diverse, and yet still culturally homogeneous, subjects, from the Greeks to the Turks, from North Africans to the Jews (p. 4). Through such a discursive process, Italian elites were able to redefine domestic issues regarding nationhood, such as whether the South could be considered as an integral part of the nation, as well as navigate their provincial status of ‘least of great Powers’ vis-à-vis the most advanced European countries (p. 6). However, after the Ethiopian War and the onset of the alliance with Nazi Germany, the concern of the Fascist regime with racial and colonial policies greatly intensified, now spurred by the necessity of constructing racial hierarchies to ensure the whiteness of Italians, distancing it from the segregated black subjects of East Africa. This ultimately marked the transformation of Mediterraneità into a more peculiarly ‘fascist’ notion of Romanità (Romanness), namely a biologically-racist form of imperial discourse that rejected any form of ethnic or cultural commonality with the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean region and imagined, instead, the Italian Empire as a Grossraum organized on racial hierarchies (p. 70).
McGuire's work relies on a wide range of sources, integrating extensive, international archival research undertaken in the USA, France, Italy, Tunisia and Greece, with oral testimonies, a close analysis of colonial literature and movies, but also of urban planning, local architecture, touristic enterprises and everyday life stories. Such an interdisciplinary approach enormously expands the colonial archive, integrating administrative and bureaucratic sources with the most various material artefacts, productions and sites (p. 30).
Overall, the book provides a very compelling account of the remaking of the Italian identity through the Mediterraneanist discourse and fills a void in the literature about both Italian and Greek histories by shedding new light on the impact of the colonial domination of the Fascist regime in the Dodecanese islands.