Fascism's European Empire: Italian Occupation during the Second World War

Description

This 2006 book is a controversial reappraisal of the Italian occupation of the Mediterranean during the Second World War, which Davide Rodogno examines within the framework of fascist imperial ambitions. He focuses on the European territories annexed and occupied by Italy between 1940 and 1943: metropolitan France, Corsica, Slovenia, Croatia, Dalmatia, Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, Western Macedonia, and mainland and insular Greece. He explores Italy's plans for Mediterranean expansion, its relationship with Germany, economic exploitation, the forced 'Italianisation' of the annexed territories, collaboration, repression, and Italian policies towards refugees and Jews. He also compares Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany through their dreams of imperial conquest, the role of racism and anti-Semitism, and the 'fascistization' of the Italian Army. Based on previously unpublished sources, this is a groundbreaking contribution to genocide, resistance, war crimes and occupation studies as well as to the history of the Second World War more generally.

Davide Rodogno is Academic Fellow in the School of Modern History at the University of St Andrews. Adrian Belton is a freelance translator specialising in the humanities and the social sciences.

'Rodogno's book derives from deep digging in the hitherto almost inaccessible Italian army and foreign ministry files ... Rodogno now offers a rich and innovative analysis of the often radical implementation of fascist policy in the Balkans and southern France ... [he] offers a generally persuasive and sustained analysis of little-known, poorly understood, yet vitally important chapters in the history of Fascist Italy and of the war that it willed.' MacGregor Knox, The London School of Economics and Political Science, Journal of Modern History