Mussolini’s Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy’s Borderlands, 1922–1943

Ettore Tolomei, a Fascist senator whose lifelong goal was to “Italianize” the Alto Adige or South Tyrol region around Bolzano that was incorporated into Italy after World War I, provides the leitmotif for this book and its innovative questioning of the typical rendition of state sovereignty as the simple and easy matching of nation with state. In 1938, Tolomei framed the Italian settlement of Libya in terms remarkably similar to that of its new northern territories as being a legitimation of their essential Italian character. He thus argued for a similar effort in moving Italians northward to that expended in planting Italian settlers in coastal Libya. A classically territorial claim to a previously unredeemed portion of the “homeland” was thus conjoined with a colonial claim to rule at some distance from anything conceivably Italian by conventional naming. It would be the bordering of a “Greater Italy” in terms of ethnic...