Radical mercantilism and fascist Italy’s East African empire

TURTUR, Noelle

doi:10.1017/S0007680524000138

Radical mercantilism and fascist Italy’s East African empire

dc.contributor.author	TURTUR, Noelle
dc.date.accessioned	2024-08-20T10:24:48Z
dc.date.available	2024-08-20T10:24:48Z
dc.date.issued	2024
dc.description	Published online: 05 August 2024	en
dc.description.abstract	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.	en
dc.description.sponsorship	This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - CUP Transformative Agreement (2023-2025)	en
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf	en
dc.identifier.citation	Business history review, 2024, Vol. 98, No. 1, pp. 165-202	en
dc.identifier.doi	10.1017/S0007680524000138
dc.identifier.endpage	202	en
dc.identifier.issn	0007-6805
dc.identifier.issn	2044-768X
dc.identifier.issue	1	en
dc.identifier.startpage	165	en
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/1814/77115
dc.identifier.volume	98	en
dc.language.iso	en	en
dc.orcid.upload	false	*
dc.publisher	Cambridge University Press	en
dc.relation.ispartof	Business history review	en
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess	en
dc.rights.license	Attribution 4.0 International	*
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/	*
dc.title	Radical mercantilism and fascist Italy’s East African empire	en
dc.type	Article	en
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