Mussolini as Empire-Builder

Italian Military Occupation in Europe: the Historiographical Developments

“…Revisionist historians, including MacGregor Knox, Esmonde Robertson and De Felice, began to argue from the 1960s onwards that Fascist foreign policy, if not based upon a specific programme, existed out with the traditional image of Mussolini as nothing more than a buffoon. Although these historians debated the extent to which Fascist foreign policy was rooted in both imperialism and traditional Italian foreign policy goals, and how far Mussolini utilised foreign policy merely as a tool to improve his domestic standing, the combined efforts of revisionist historians meant that Fascist foreign policy became a subject in its own right 9 .…”