Giuseppe Finaldi – författare

This volume takes a comparative approach, locating totalitarianism in the vastly complex web of fragmented pasts, diverse presents and differently envisaged futures to enhance our understanding of this fraught era in European history. It shows that no matter how often totalitarian societies spoke of and imagined their subjects as so many slates to be wiped clean and re-written on, older identities, familial loyalties and the enormous resilience of the individual (or groups of individuals) meant that the almost impossible demands of their regimes needed to be constantly transformed, limited and recast.

This book examines Italy’s colonial history from the turn of the twentieth century to the outbreak of the First World War.This first volume engages with a period of huge social, political and cultural change in Italy resulting in a new dynamism on the African and expansionist front. Offering a sweeping account of events and a vast array of characters, it tells the story of a nation bent on conquest in China, Africa and the Mediterranean, of indigenous resistance in Libya and East Africa, of defeat and of victory. It recounts how Italy dreamed and pursued an empire, and how reality was never far from tripping up this, the least of the European Great Powers. From the ramifications of the defeat at Adowa in 1896 through the rule of Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti to the attack on the Ottoman Empire in 1911 and beyond, the history of Italian colonialism is followed here up to the looming of the First World War. This volume is of great value to students and scholars alike interested in Italian, European, African and colonial history.

This book examines Italy’s colonial history from the outbreak of the First World War to the first stirrings of Fascism in 1919.Offering a sweeping account of events and a vast array of characters, this second volume moves between Rome and the Alps, Libya, East Africa and beyond to tell of an Italy struggling to profile itself as an empire while it fought out the First World War. It recounts how Italy clung on in Africa with anti-colonial forces triumphing in Libya and threatening in Eritrea and Somalia, and how finally emerging victorious in Europe, it hoped to reap the rewards of victory on the colonial front.This volume is of great value to students and scholars alike interested in Italian, European, African and colonial history..

This book provides a narrative history of Italian colonialism from Italian unification in the 1860s to the first decade of the twentieth century; that is, it details Italy’s imperialism in the years of the Scramble for Africa. It deals with the factors that drove Italy to search for territory in Africa in the 1870s and 1880s and describes the reasoning behind the trajectories adopted and objectives pursued. The events that brought Italy to open conflict with the Ethiopian Empire culminating in the Italian defeat at Adowa in March 1896 are central to the book. However its scope is much broader, as it considers the establishment of Italian power in Eritrea as well as Somalia before and after the defeat. By telling its history, it explains why Italy emerged irresolute and humiliated in this, its first thrust into Africa, yet nonetheless determined to pursue expansion in the future. The seeds for the conquest of Libya in 1911 and Ethiopia in 1935 had been sown.

This book provides a narrative history of Italian colonialism from Italian unification in the 1860s to the first decade of the twentieth century; that is, it details Italy’s imperialism in the years of the Scramble for Africa. It deals with the factors that drove Italy to search for territory in Africa in the 1870s and 1880s and describes the reasoning behind the trajectories adopted and objectives pursued. The events that brought Italy to open conflict with the Ethiopian Empire culminating in the Italian defeat at Adowa in March 1896 are central to the book. However its scope is much broader, as it considers the establishment of Italian power in Eritrea as well as Somalia before and after the defeat. By telling its history, it explains why Italy emerged irresolute and humiliated in this, its first thrust into Africa, yet nonetheless determined to pursue expansion in the future. The seeds for the conquest of Libya in 1911 and Ethiopia in 1935 had been sown.

Fascism was one of the defining experiences of the European 20th Century. Within it many of the economic, political, social and cultural contradictions that had been brewing in the unprecedented transformation that European society underwent in the 19th and early 20th century came to a head. Mussolini, the man who most fashioned Italian Fascism, dramatically expressed the unease and the hopes of his age. To what extent can we compare Mussolini's Italy to Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia? What legacy has the experience of Fascism left behind in Italy and in Europe? These and many more important questions are explored in Finaldi's introduction to one of the most important movements of the European 20th Century.

This book locates totalitarianism in the vastly complex web of fragmented pasts, diverse presents, and differently envisaged futures to enhance understanding of the fraught era in European history. It explores empirical ways to the resurgence of the concept of totalitarian dictatorship.