Pietro Di Paola. The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora (1880–1917).

Abstract

Pietro Di Paolo has written an important study on the Italian anarchist diaspora in London in the decades prior to World War I. The author's primary goal is “to contribute to the historiography of diasporic anarchism by exploring the practical and ideological aspects of the Italian anarchists—their everyday lives as well as their ideological thought and its development—in London, one of the most significant nodes of the transnational anarchist network” (p. 5). By this measure, Di Paolo has clearly achieved his objective and much more. Di Paolo points out the limitations of nation-state studies that do not account for anarchist activity abroad, particularly when such movements are experiencing political repression at home. Likewise, the nation-state focus impedes understanding of the dissemination of anarchist militants and ideas across the globe as a transnational movement. The book, for example, gives solid evidence to the continuity of an Italian anarchist movement from the 1880s to World War I, even when anarchist activity in Italy waxed and waned in the wake of fierce state repression.