The fascist breadbasket: food, empire, and modernity in Italian East Africa, 1935–1941

Cinotto, Simone

doi:10.1080/1354571x.2022.2145760

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 16 publications

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“…113 To support the army and this growing population, Italy exported foodstuffs, fabric, machinery, and fuel to AOI. 114 Some products, like petroleum, had to be imported and then re-exported to AOI. 115 In 1938, Italian exports to AOI totaled 2,447 million lire, an amount that dwarfed AOI's exports, which amounted to 192 million lire, about 60% of which was to Italy.…”

Section: "Thementioning

confidence: 99%

Radical Mercantilism and Fascist Italy’s East African Empire

Turtur

2024

Bus. Hist. Rev.

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This article traces the evolution of Italian strategies for imperial expansion from the decades after unification—when many came to believe that imperial conquest would more advantageously position Italy in the liberal capitalist global economy—to the height of the fascist colonial project in the Horn of Africa—when the fascists tried to break with the liberal global economy and construct a new, radical mercantilist and corporatist empire. Taking inspiration from their predecessors, the fascist regime extracted capital, resources, and labor from Africans and Italians to finance its war against the Ethiopian empire and its colonization of the Horn. While the war temporarily stimulated Italian industry, employed hundreds of thousands of work-hungry Italians, and consolidated the regime’s many corporatist institutions, it drained Italy’s reserves and alarmed the Duce’s allies among Italy’s industrial and financial elite. The regime, thus, shifted strategies, focusing on reducing the cost of the empire by exploiting African workers, eliminating inefficient small enterprises, and creating vast concessions for Italian industrialists. Conquering new territories and markets, acquiring a variety of primary resources, and empowering industry, Mussolini and the radical mercantilist-corporatists aimed to resolve Italy’s perceived under-development, by placing Italy at the center of a great fascist Eurafrican empire that could dictate the terms of its engagement with the rest of the world.

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Section: "Thementioning

confidence: 99%

Radical Mercantilism and Fascist Italy’s East African Empire

Turtur

2024

Bus. Hist. Rev.

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The ‘full-flowing stomach’: unwholesome food, climate, and colonialism in King Lear and Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive

Swanner

2024

Adaptation

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This article considers Kristian Levring’s 2000 film The King is Alive from a radically open historicist methodology, analysing the film as a product of multiple interleaved archives. An adaptation of King Lear, the film’s relevant archive includes documents from the English Renaissance like the early modern recipe books and seventeenth-century medical treatises that this article uncovers. Yet because The King is Alive was filmed in an abandoned German mining colony in the Namib desert, the archive must also include accounts of the colonialist ‘Scramble for Africa’ more than two centuries after King Lear was written. The methodological deftness of history-as-adaptation allows us to see the film’s anxieties about food that rest at the nexus of these two archives. Shakespeare’s play worries about liminal foods—species-specific foods, foods that fail to nourish, and foods that become poison—but the film updates these concerns to implicate Western imperialism and global capitalism. Surrounded (and, in one instance, killed) by potentially botulistic cans of carrots that remain after the German occupation, the characters in the film must grapple with the toxic leftovers of colonialism, including Shakespeare’s playtext. The film thus asks its audience to consider further archives related to the imperialist roots of the invention of canning, the discovery of vitamins, and the export of Shakespeare as a ‘civilizing’ figure. Finally, the film gestures to the foodway challenges exacerbated by both capitalism and climate change, becoming a palimpsest of archives from across multiple temporalities: a Shakespearean past, a colonialist present, and a warming future.

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The fascist breadbasket: food, empire, and modernity in Italian East Africa, 1935–1941

Cited by 2 publications

References 16 publications

Radical Mercantilism and Fascist Italy’s East African Empire

Radical Mercantilism and Fascist Italy’s East African Empire

The ‘full-flowing stomach’: unwholesome food, climate, and colonialism in King Lear and Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive

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