Italian Empire

• 1. Introduction

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  The Italian Empire, known in Italian as the Impero coloniale italiano, spanned nearly eight decades, from 1882 to 1960. At its height, between 1936 and 1941, it stretched across the territories of present-day Libya, Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia on the African continent, while also reaching into the Greek island chain known as the Dodecanese, into Albania, and as far as a concession on the Chinese coast at Tianjin. How did a nation so recently unified manage to plant its flag on three continents? What drove the ambition, and what brought it crashing down? The answers involve ancient claims to the Mediterranean, a catastrophic defeat in the African highlands, the rise of a fascist dictator who quoted Roman precedent, and a second world war that stripped away everything in the space of a few years.

• 2. Ancient Claims, Late Start

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  Italy arrived at the colonial table later than any of the major European powers, and it arrived acutely aware of that disadvantage. The Roman notion of mare nostrum, meaning "Our Sea" in reference to the Mediterranean, had never fully faded from Italian political imagination, and it supplied an ideological foundation that Italian nationalists would reach for across the centuries.

  Before Italy even existed as a unified state, Italian-speaking explorers had already mapped much of the world on behalf of other crowns. Christopher Columbus from Genoa sailed for Spain; Amerigo Vespucci from Florence served Portugal, lending his name to an entire hemisphere; the Cabot brothers from Venice served England; and Giovanni da Verrazzano from Florence served France. The geographical position of the Italian peninsula, locked into the center of an inland sea without direct ocean access, meant that no Italian power ever led its own transatlantic venture.

  Ferdinand I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, came closest. In 1608 he organized an expedition under the English captain Robert Thornton to explore the north of Brazil and the Amazon River, aimed at planting a colony in what is now French Guiana. Thornton returned in 1609 only to find Ferdinand dead, and his successor Cosimo II had no interest in continuing. The project died with it.

  Even the Knights Hospitaller of Malta, under the Italian nobleman and Grand Master Giovanni Paolo Lascaris, held four Caribbean islands, Saint Christopher, Saint Martin, Saint Barthélemy, and Saint Croix, between 1651 and 1665. By 1797, both the Venetian and Genoese Mediterranean networks had dissolved, and Italy entered the modern era of imperialism with almost no overseas footing at all.

• 3. The First Foothold

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  The foundation of what would become the Italian Empire was laid not by a general or a politician but by an Italian navigation company. In 1869, the same year the Suez Canal opened to shipping, that company purchased Assab Bay on the Red Sea, intending to establish a coaling station. The Italian government took the territory over in 1882, making it the first modern Italian overseas possession.

  The event that truly shattered Italy's sense of itself in international affairs, however, was what the Italian press called the "Slap of Tunis." Italy had long viewed Tunisia as within its economic sphere of influence, home to a significant Italian community. It did not seriously consider annexing the territory until 1879, when Britain and Germany began encouraging France to do exactly that. A last-minute Italian offer to share Tunisia was rejected, and France imposed a protectorate in May 1881 under the Treaty of Bardo. The humiliation pushed Italy to sign the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1882.

  From that moment, Italy moved aggressively along the Red Sea coast. By secret agreement with Britain in February 1885, it annexed the port of Massawa in Eritrea, seizing it from the weakening Egyptian Empire. The move cut off the Ethiopian Empire of Yohannes IV from sea access, provoking Ras Alula to besiege the Italian garrison at Saati and then ambush and kill five hundred Italian troops at the Battle of Dogali. Italian reinforcements soon occupied the Eritrean Highlands, including Keren and Asmara, by 1889.

  Prime Minister Francesco Crispi, who coveted Ethiopia itself, then signed the Treaty of Wuchale in 1889 with the new Ethiopian emperor, Menelik II. Italy interpreted the treaty as making Ethiopia an Italian protectorate. Menelik did not. When Crispi ordered Italian troops into the country in 1895, they met a catastrophe. The death toll at the Battle of Adwa in 1896 was 6,889 on Italy's side, including 4,133 Italians. The defeat was decisive, and it would haunt Italian colonial ambition for decades.

• 4. Wars, Concessions, and Resistance

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  Even as the memory of Adwa lingered, Italy pressed forward on other fronts. Along the southern horn of Africa, a series of protection treaties signed through the 1880s gradually assembled what would become Italian Somaliland, incorporating the Sultanate of Hobyo, the Majeerteen Sultanate, the Hiraab Imamate, and the Geledi Sultanate. The Bimaal and Wa'dan revolts near Merca in the 1890s marked the beginning of sustained Banadir resistance to Italian expansion.

  In East Africa, Italy fought alongside British-aligned forces in the Mahdist War. At the Second Battle of Agordat in December 1893, Colonel Arimondi led roughly 2,400 Italians and their Eritrean Ascaris against a Mahdist force Ahmed Ali led east from Kassala, numbering between 10,000 and 12,000 men. The Italian victory was described at the time as "the first decisive victory yet won by Europeans against the Sudanese revolutionaries." Italian colonial forces subsequently seized Kassala, returning the city to Britain at the war's end three years later.

  In 1898, Italy attempted to break into the China sphere by demanding the cession of Sanmen Bay. China rejected the ultimatum, correctly calculating that Italy lacked the naval power in Asian waters to back up the threat. Italy's main newspaper called the rebuff a national humiliation, saying it made the country look "like a third or fourth-rate power." The embarrassment contributed to the government's fall and pushed Italy to participate in the international expedition at Beijing when the Boxer Rebellion erupted on the 18th of October 1899. The result was the acquisition of a concession in Tianjin in September 1901, the only Italian colonial foothold in Asia.

  A wave of nationalism at the turn of the 20th century produced the Italian Nationalist Association, which pressed loudly for empire and framed Libya as a former Roman colony to be "taken back." In October 1911, Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti declared war on the Ottoman Empire, and Italy gained Libya and the Dodecanese Islands under the peace that followed. The 1912 desert war in Libya featured the first use of an armoured fighting vehicle in military history and the first significant deployment of air power in warfare. A Tripolitanian Republic formed in 1918 as a short-lived expression of resistance, while Cyrenaica continued significant guerrilla warfare against the Italian colonisers for years afterward.

• 5. Fascism and the Drive for Ocean Access

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  Benito Mussolini became Prime Minister and dictator in 1922, and the character of the empire changed immediately. Where earlier governments had accumulated territory through opportunity and diplomatic pressure, Mussolini articulated a comprehensive ideology of expansion rooted in the idea that Italy was a prisoner.

  In a document drawn up in 1939 called "The March to the Oceans," recorded in the official records of a meeting of the Grand Council of Fascism, Mussolini laid out his thesis in stark terms. "The bars of this prison are Corsica, Tunisia, Malta, and Cyprus," he wrote. "The guards of this prison are Gibraltar and Suez." He argued that nations with free access to the high seas were independent while those without it were not, and that Italy, dependent on French and British acquiescence to navigate out of the Mediterranean, was only "a semi-independent nation" and "a prisoner in the Mediterranean."

  Mussolini resolved the Dodecanese question at the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which formalised Italian administration of both Libya and the Dodecanese in exchange for a payment to Turkey. The month after that ratification, he ordered the invasion of the Greek island of Corfu following the Corfu incident, though Britain convinced him to withdraw in exchange for reparations from Greece. The confrontation did resolve the long-standing question of Jubaland, which Britain ceded to Italy in 1924 to be merged into Italian Somaliland.

  By 1939, the policy of systematic demographic colonisation had brought 120,000-150,000 Italian settlers to Italian Libya and 165,000 to Italian East Africa. Mussolini had also set his sights on the Balkans. In 1939, Italian forces invaded and captured Albania, making it part of the Italian Empire as a separate kingdom in personal union with the Italian crown, with King Victor Emmanuel III taking the Albanian crown and a fascist government under Shefqet Verlaci installed to govern.

• 6. The Second Ethiopian War

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  Italy's second invasion of Ethiopia in 1935-36 succeeded where the first had catastrophically failed. Mussolini merged the conquest with Eritrea and Italian Somaliland to create Italian East Africa, Africa Orientale Italiana, grouping them under the abbreviation AOI. On the 9th of May 1936, Mussolini proclaimed the establishment of the Italian Empire in East Africa, declaring King Victor Emmanuel III Emperor of Ethiopia.

  The human cost of the conquest was staggering on both sides. Italy lost 4,359 killed in action, broken down as 2,313 Italians, 1,086 Eritreans, 507 Somalis and Libyans, and 453 Italian laborers. Ethiopian military and civilian dead, many of them from Italian bomb and mustard gas attacks, were estimated as high as 275,000.

  In July 1936, Francisco Franco of the Nationalist faction in the Spanish Civil War asked Italy for support, promising that future relations would be "more than friendly" and that Italian backing would allow Rome's influence to prevail over Berlin's in Spain's future politics. Italy intervened partly to gain strategic control of the Balearic Islands, from which Italian forces could disrupt communications between France and its North African colonies. After Franco's victory, Italy pressed him to permit an Italian occupation of the Balearics. He refused.

  With his East African empire secured, Mussolini pressed France on the Mediterranean. After the Anglo-Italian Easter Accords of 1938, he demanded concessions regarding Djibouti, Tunisia, and the French-run Suez Canal. Italy opposed the French monopoly over the canal specifically because it forced all Italian merchant traffic to Italy's East African colony to pay tolls. Mussolini told his foreign minister Ciano that Italy would only breathe easily once it had a contiguous colonial domain in Africa stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, with ten million Italians settled in it.

• 7. World War II and Collapse

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  On the 10th of June 1940, Mussolini declared war on Britain and France, entering World War II on the side of Adolf Hitler. In July 1940, foreign minister Count Ciano presented Hitler with a list of Italian territorial goals that ran from Corsica and Nice to Kenya and Uganda. Hitler made no promises.

  The initial Italian campaigns were brief successes followed by rapid reversals. In the summer of 1940, Italian forces invaded all of British Somaliland successfully. By September 1940, Italian troops advancing into Egypt had crossed 60 miles across the border. But in December, Britain launched Operation Compass, and by February 1941 the British had cut off and captured the Italian 10th Army, driving deep into Libya. A German intervention prevented the loss of Libya entirely.

  In East Africa, the British counter-attacked in the spring of 1941. By the 5th of May, Haile Selassie I had returned to Addis Ababa to reclaim his throne. In November, the last organised Italian resistance ended with the fall of Gondar, though some Italians continued a guerrilla campaign for two more years.

  In October 1940, Mussolini ordered an invasion of Greece from Albania, and it failed. Germany launched its own invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece in April 1941, overrunning Yugoslavia in about two weeks and Greece by the end of April. Italy gained control of portions of occupied Yugoslavia and occupied Greece, and Prince Aimone, 4th Duke of Aosta, was appointed king of the newly created Independent State of Croatia.

  By May 1943, Axis forces in Tunisia were forced to surrender. The defeat prompted King Victor Emmanuel III to act. Following the Allied Invasion of Sicily, a meeting of the Grand Council of Fascism on the 24th of July imposed a vote of no confidence against Mussolini. The king deposed and arrested him the following afternoon. On the 12th of September, German paratroopers acting on Hitler's orders rescued Mussolini, and he became leader of the Italian Social Republic. When Italy signed an armistice with the Allies and it was made public on the 8th of September, German forces seized Italy's remaining territories: Albania, the Dodecanese, occupied Greece. In the Dodecanese Campaign, an Allied attempt to hold the islands with Italian cooperation ended in total German victory. In Tianjin, the Imperial Japanese Army occupied Italy's concession after news of the armistice arrived, and the Italian Social Republic later formally ceded it to Japan's puppet regime, the Reorganized National Government of China under Wang Jingwei.

• 8. The Treaty of Paris and Final End

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  The Treaty of Paris of 1947 stripped Italy of every overseas possession it had accumulated across eight decades. The Dodecanese went to Greece. Libya came under Anglo-French administration. Eritrea was handed to Ethiopia. Italy also ceded to Yugoslavia the city of Fiume, the territory of Zara, the islands of Lagosta and Pelagosa, the upper valley of the Isonzo River, and most of Istria and the Karst region of Trieste and Gorizia, reversing much of what Italian forces had seized at the end of the First World War.

  In 1949 the United Nations allowed Italy to exercise a trusteeship over Somalia, the one residual administrative role granted to the former colonial power. Under president Giovanni Gronchi, on the 1st of July 1960, the Italian Empire officially ended when the Somali Republic became independent. The new republic was formed after five-day-old Somaliland merged with the Italian Trust Territory of Somaliland on the same day both achieved independence and union.

  What began with a navigation company purchasing a coaling station at Assab Bay in 1869 concluded with a United Nations-supervised transition in 1960. The Latin phrase mare nostrum, once invoked by Roman emperors and recycled by Mussolini in his prison-of-the-Mediterranean doctrine, outlasted every flag Italy ever planted on foreign soil.