Italian Eritrea

• 1. Introduction

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  Italian Eritrea was born not from a military conquest but from a business deal. In the autumn of 1869, a former missionary named Giuseppe Sapeto paid a small deposit to the Danakil chiefs at Assab Bay, securing their promise to hand over their coastal territory once he returned with the full payment. Behind him stood not an army but a shipping company, the Rubattino Shipping Company, which completed the purchase in its own name and with its own funds. Italy had acquired its first foothold on the African continent through commercial paperwork rather than cannon fire.

  What followed over the next seven decades was one of the more complex colonial stories in the Horn of Africa. How did a coaling station become a colony? How did a colony nicknamed the Firstborn become the industrial heart of a fascist empire? And how did the city built to feel like Rome end up with more traffic lights than the original? Those are the questions that run through the story of Italian Eritrea.

• 2. Sapeto and the Rubattino Deal

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  Giuseppe Sapeto's path to the Red Sea began in Cairo in 1837, where he was a young monk preparing for missionary work in Abyssinia. By the time the Suez Canal was nearing completion, he had transformed into something else entirely: an active promoter of European commercial expansion, who had initially encouraged the French before turning his energies toward building Italian influence instead.

  Sapeto persuaded both the Italian minister for foreign affairs and King Victor Emmanuel II of the potential value of a coaling station on the Red Sea. The Suez Canal had made the route to India a commercial artery, and Italian steamships needed a port of call. Together with Admiral Acton, Sapeto was dispatched by the government in the autumn of 1869 to find a suitable location. He chose Assab Bay, described as a deserted but spacious bay roughly halfway between Annesley Bay to the north and Obock to the south.

  The government's arrangement with Raffaele Rubattino was deliberate and unusual. The company would buy the territory in its own name and with its own money, but it was obligated to use the land in the national interest. Sapeto returned on behalf of Rubattino, completed the original purchase, and then bought additional land to the south. By March 1870, an Italian shipping company was the claimant to territory at the northern end of Assab Bay. The Italian state formally took possession from its commercial owners in 1882.

• 3. Massawa and the Wuchale Treaty

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  The western coast of the Red Sea was formally claimed by the Khedivate of Egypt in the early 1880s, but two events changed everything. Major Egyptian defeats in the Egyptian-Ethiopian War and the success of the Mahdi's uprising in Sudan left the region without a functioning power. In 1884 the British Hewett Treaty promised the Bogos highlands and access to the Massawan coast to Emperor Yohannes IV in exchange for his help evacuating garrisons from Sudan.

  British diplomats, however, were more concerned about the rapid expansion of French Somaliland than about honoring their commitments to Ethiopia. They openly encouraged Italy to expand north into Massawa, which was taken without a shot from its Egyptian garrison. Located on a coral island surrounded by pearl-fishing grounds, Massawa was fortified and made the capital of the Italian governor, while Assab continued its role as a coaling station.

  The Italians immediately began restricting arms shipments to Ethiopia and imposing customs duties on Ethiopian goods. After the death of Yohannes IV in 1889, General Oreste Baratieri occupied the Eritrean highlands, and Italy proclaimed a new colony named for the Latin word for the Red Sea, with Asmara replacing Massawa as capital.

  The Treaty of Wuchale, signed that same year with King Menelik of Shewa, recognized Italian control over the regions of Bogos, Hamasien, Akele Guzay, and Serae. Menelik received guarantees of financial assistance and access to European arms. His victory over rival kings and coronation as Emperor Menelik II made the treaty binding on all of Ethiopia. But the Italian and Amharic versions of the treaty said different things. The Italian text effectively made Ethiopia an Italian protectorate by prohibiting it from conducting foreign negotiations except through Italy. The Amharic text contained no such clause. Secure with arms flowing through French Djibouti and Harar, Menelik denounced the treaty in full. The war that followed ended with Italy's defeat at Adwa.

• 4. Building the Colony

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  Italy's first development projects in Eritrea launched in the late 1880s. The Eritrean Railway reached Saati in 1888 and was extended to Asmara in the highlands by 1911. The Asmara-Massawa Cableway, later dismantled by the British as war reparations, was during its operating years the longest such line in the world.

  The Italian administration brought changes to medicine and agriculture, and despite the imposition of racial laws, urban Eritreans had access to modern sanitation and hospital services. Eritreans were employed in public service, particularly in the police and public works departments. A succession of Italian governors maintained what the source describes as a notable degree of unity and public order across a region marked by cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity.

  Nicknamed Colonia Primogenita, or Firstborn Colony, Eritrea was distinguished from the newer and less-developed Italian territories of Somaliland and Libya by the scale of its Italian settler population. The first few dozen Italian families were sponsored by the government around the start of the twentieth century and settled around Asmara and Massawa. By World War I that community had grown to around 4,000; by the start of World War II it had reached nearly 100,000.

  The Italians endorsed a large expansion of Catholicism in Eritrea, constructing churches in the highlands around Asmara and Keren, centered on the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary in the capital. By the early 1940s, Catholicism was the declared religion of roughly 28% of the colony's population, while Christianity in total accounted for more than half.

• 5. Asmara Under Mussolini

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  Benito Mussolini's rise to power in Italy in 1922 changed the character of colonial rule in Eritrea. After he declared the birth of the Italian Empire in May 1936, Italian Eritrea was merged with Italian Somaliland and the newly conquered Ethiopia to form Italian East Africa, known as Africa Orientale Italiana. Eritrea was designated the industrial center of this new administrative territory.

  By 1939 Eritrea held around 2,198 factories, producing buttons, cooking oil, pasta, construction materials, packaged meat, tobacco, and household commodities. Most of the workforce was Eritrean, and the factory system drew workers from villages into cities. The number of Italians in the country rose from 4,600 to 75,000 in five years. In 1940, around Asmara alone, more than 2,000 small and medium-sized industrial companies operated across construction, mechanics, textiles, food processing, and electricity. The standard of living in Eritrea in 1939 was considered among the best on the African continent for both Eritreans and Italian settlers.

  Asmara itself was a planned city in the modern sense, with designated zoning, wide tree-lined boulevards, piazzas, and space for expansion. Historian Gian Luca Podesta wrote that the city had become, in practice, an Italian city. In 1935 it held 4,000 Italians and 12,000 Eritreans; by 1938 those figures had shifted to 48,000 Italians and 36,000 Eritreans. The Italian census of 1939 recorded the city's total population at 98,000, of which 53,000, or 54%, were Italian. Asmara was called Piccola Roma, Little Rome, not only for its architecture but for its piazzas, coffee bars, cappuccinos, and car race, the Asmara circuit. It also had more traffic lights than Rome itself during the years it was being built.

• 6. The Ascari and the Wars

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  Mussolini's government treated Eritrea as a strategic base rather than merely a possession. Italy used Eritrea to launch its 1935-1936 campaign to conquer Ethiopia and, in World War II, to attack Sudan and occupy the Kassala area. The colonial troops at the center of these operations were the Eritrean Ascari.

  Italian Marshall Rodolfo Graziani and the officer Amedeo Guillet both described the Ascari as the best Italian colonial troops. After World War I, service with the Ascari became the primary source of paid employment for the indigenous male population of Italian Eritrea. During the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1936-40% of eligible Eritreans were enrolled in these colonial forces.

  When the Allies captured Italian-held Eritrea in January 1941, the infrastructure and industrial areas were, according to contemporary accounts, extremely damaged. The Asmara-Massawa Cableway was removed and shipped to India and Kenya as war reparations. After the Italian armistice in September 1943, an Italian guerrilla campaign continued in Eritrea, supported by many Eritrean colonial troops, including Hamid Idris Awate, later recognized as a hero of Eritrean independence. At the point of Italy's surrender, around 70,000 Italian settlers remained in Eritrea.

• 7. After the Colony

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  In the final years of World War II, some Italian Eritreans began advocating politically for their future. Vincenzo DiMeglio traveled to Rome to attend a Vatican-promoted conference on Eritrean independence and, after the war, was named director of the Comitato Rappresentativo Italiani dell'Eritrea, known as the CRIE. In 1947 he supported the creation of the Associazione Italo-Eritrei and the Associazione Veterani Ascari.

  In September 1947 DiMeglio co-founded the Partito Nuova Eritrea Pro Italia as an Eritrean political party favorable to the Italian presence. Within a single month it received more than 200,000 membership applications, the majority from former Italian soldiers and Eritrean Ascari. The party's central goal was Eritrean freedom, with one precondition: Italy should govern the country for at least fifteen years before independence.

  With the peace treaty of 1947, the Italian Republic officially accepted the end of the colony. The Italian community began to disperse, and the departure accelerated after the Ethiopian Empire took control of Eritrea in 1952. Eritrea became an autonomous part of Ethiopia in September 1952, under United Nations supervision that had begun in 1951. Full Eritrean independence did not arrive until 1991. The currency had gone through comparable transitions: from the Maria Theresa thaler and the Ethiopian birr to the Eritrean tallero, minted in Rome from 1890 and divided into five lire, and finally to the Italian East African lira under the merged colonial administration.