Generations of Empire: Youth from Ottoman to Italian Rule in the Mediterranean. By Andreas Guidi

Abstract

Generations of Empire: Youth from Ottoman to Italian Rule in the Mediterranean aims to provide a post-Ottoman, colonial, and social history of Rhodes from the perspective of generations and youth. The book serves as both a microhistory of Rhodes and a global history of the Mediterranean in the twentieth century. Despite its apparently narrow focus on youth in a single locality, the book provides a compelling macro picture and delves deeper into the issues of post-Ottoman societies, Italian colonialism (and fascism), and the Mediterranean world. As one of the most significant achievements of the book, Generations of Empire offers “a change of framing toward thinking Italian colonialism as post-Ottoman history” (7). The persistence of Ottoman institutions, social structures, as well as forms of belonging during the island’s Italian colonial rule invites further contemplation of the chronological and geographical implications of “post-Ottoman” space and time. Furthermore, Guidi focuses on the Mediterranean as a divided whole, taking into account imperial continuities, colonial legacies, nationalist tensions, economic expropriation, and migration flows. On a more individual, familial, and rather communal level, the research informs the reader with extremely valuable detail on confessional communities, bonds of loyalty, and surveillance. The book treats communities as “intermediary institutions between government and families” (22) and gives voice to actors and institutions from all confessions in its narrative. The book’s engagement with “youth” and “generation” both as concepts and potential social actors is also quite novel. Guidi uses youth as a “situational” term, stressing that “a Young Turk newspaper, an Italian colonial governor, a group of Orthodox students, a rabbi, or a Muslim notable might all use the term youth with quite different aims.” (7). However, for the state(s), communities, and families alike, youth represented what Luisa Passerini has called “a metaphor of social change” and was a correlative term implying binomial references based on one’s standpoint.