The Italian Empire and the Great War by Vanda Wilcox

Abstract

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 47, 1, 2022 © The Maghreb Review 2022 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS Books reviewed in The Maghreb Review can be ordered from The Maghreb Bookshop. Our catalogue is also available on our website: www.maghrebbookshop.com VANDA WILCOX, THE ITALIAN EMPIRE AND THE GREAT WAR. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2021. In October 1911 Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire and mounted a massive seaborne invasion of Turkish Tripolitania and Cyrenaica across the central Mediterranean. If at that time Italy was generally seen as ‘the least of the Great Powers’, so its prime foreign policy objective seemed to be the achievement of Great Power status by taking on no less an opponent than Turkey and seizing its last remaining North African possessions. But what was expected to be a swift and simple campaign, a mere ‘military parade’, turned into a vicious and prolonged war of colonial conquest. And, as Vanda Wilcox argues in her new study of the Italian empire, the story of Italy and the First World War actually begins with the war against Ottoman Turkey in 1911, after which Italy was to experience more than a decade of conflict, ending only in 1923-4 (or up to 1932 in the case of Libya). During the Libyan war the Italians for the first time used many of the latest tools of twentieth century technology – barbed wire and machine guns, motor transport, aircraft (both airships and aeroplanes, tried and tested for reconnaissance, target-spotting, strafing and bombing) and (thanks to Guglielmo Marconi) wireless. Yet Wilcox asserts that among the obvious defects of this imperial venture into Libya were an essentially inept military machine and precarious state finances, both with serious implications for Italy’s forthcoming performance in the First World War. Intriguingly, she argues that the Italo-Turkish war of 1911-12, and the two Balkan wars of 1912-13 are integral to an understanding of how the First World War began, and also many aspects of how it was fought. She suggests that ‘it was the succession of defeats suffered by the Ottomans in North Africa and the Balkans which began the process of destabilising the precarious European balance of power’. (p.13) (Here there seems to be an echo of events that led up to the Second World War, notably the international crisis provoked by Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.) Wilcox also suggests that for Italy the most important legacy of the Italo-Turkish war was the experience of ‘unprecedented’ cross-party mobilisation. ‘This both demonstrated the new power of the media and mass culture to shape public opinion and indicated that the process of ‘creating Italians’ was well under way. Fatally, however, the 114 CURATED BY MOHAMED BEN-MADANI experience taught that the shared causes around which Italians could coalesce were expansionism and war.’ (p.39) Here the implications for the rise of Fascism are clear. Then, because this is a contemporary book, much space has to be devoted to issues of race and Italian ‘whiteness’ in the context of the Libyan experience. Yet given Italy’s own history of repeated invasions, partitions and foreign subjection and rule, Italians tend to be defined less by physical, racial characteristics than by culture (in the broadest sense), language and religion. And in any case the similarity in appearance of many northern Libyans and southern Italians often leaves little room for active ‘racial’ discrimination, at least on grounds of physical appearance. This book offers an arresting and important thesis, which indeed suggests that this is a subject that deserves further and wider study. The Libyan side of the story is perhaps presented with less assurance than the other issues (for instance, the common religion of Turks, Berbers and Arabs, and the allimportant role of the Sanusi religious confraternity might usefully have been given more weight). Also reliance on contemporary Italian ‘historians’ such as Angelo del Boca and his following tends to distort and even falsify much of the the Italian colonial record in Libya in particular and in Africa in general. For the writers of this school can find little good at all, no merit...