Mediterranean Historical Review ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fmhr20 Italy’s sea: empire and nation in the Mediterranean, 1895–1945 by Valerie McGuire, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2020, xvi + 295 pp., ₤90 (hardback), ISBN 9781800348004 Alexis Rappas To cite this article: Alexis Rappas (2022) Italy’s sea: empire and nation in the Mediterranean, 1895–1945, Mediterranean Historical Review, 37:1, 117-120, DOI: 10.1080/09518967.2022.2052483 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2022.2052483 Published online: 24 Jun 2022. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fmhr20 Mediterranean Historical Review 117 by former captives, renegades, and others mentioned in Chapter 6 would make valuable additions. In short, what Hershenzon achieves is no small thing. He turns on its head a phenomenon that has traditionally been treated as the ultimate proof of a religious and cultural divide, instead presenting it as a medium contributing to the connectedness of the early modern Mediterranean. This book will likely influence the field for years to come and should be read by any student or researcher of early modern Mediterranean history. Ali Atabey University of Texas at San Antonio ali.atabey@utsa.edu © 2022, Ali Atabey https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2022.2052476 Italy’s sea: empire and nation in the Mediterranean, 1895–1945, by Valerie McGuire, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2020, xvi + 295 pp., ₤90 (hardback), ISBN 9781800348004 Fittingly published in Liverpool University Press’s Transcultural Italian Cultures, Valerie McGuire’s book is a study of the role imperialism in the Mediterranean played in the formation of modern Italy in the first half of the twentieth century (1895–1945). Focusing on the Aegean archipelago of the Dodecanese, now a Greek province located in the eastern Mediterranean, McGuire revisits some of the most debated themes in Italian studies, such as the Southern question, the articulation between nation and empire, and modern Italy’s handling of its colonial past. This book is decidedly interdisciplinary, productively bringing into one field of analysis Italian studies, Mediterranean history, and postcolonial theory. Drawing on different sources, such as official archives, architectural drawings, footage, and interviews, this project suggests that Italian representations of the eastern Mediterranean as a liminal space where familiar and foreign cultures meet is one that the European Union readily adopted for the conceptualization of a European identity (6). The book is chronologically and thematically organized. Chapter 1 explores the “romantic and nostalgic” (252) evocations of the Aegean and the Dodecanese in writings by Gabriele D’Annunzio, Giuseppe Sergi, Edmondo de Amicis, Enrico Corradini, Luigi Federzoni, and Orazio Pedrazzi, and the role these intellectuals attribute to the archipelago in the crystallization of modern Italian nationalism. Chapter 2 looks at how a tourism-oriented architecture in the Dodecanese allowed Italian authorities, once they occupied the archipelago, to address some of the paradoxes inherent to Fascist ideology. Chapter 3 shows that the unique citizenship Italians designed for Dodecanesians (cittadinanza egea, often invoked by scholars as an indication that the archipelago was never, properly speaking, a “colony”) was the result of an evolving racial representation of the islanders. Finally, Chapter 4 reverses the perspective and, using mainly interviews with actors of the time, looks at Dodecanesians’ ambivalent perceptions of their Italian rulers. Every chapter in the book logically builds on the preceding one in a sophisticated and elegantly written demonstration of the importance of Fascist colonial experiments in the eastern Mediterranean for the consolidation of modern Italian national identity. This 118 Book Reviews review will however focus on the three larger ideas running through the study, namely the articulation between nation-building and imperial expansion, the often-alleged distinctiveness of Italians as more humane colonizers, and finally the significance of Italian colonial experimentations for the formation of a European identity. The alignment of nation-building and empire-making in the case of Italy was not only, argues McGuire, a matter of chronological coincidence, with both the final unification of the peninsula and the occupation of its first colony in Africa (Eritrea) taking place in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was also the result of an intellectual effort to define the link between the new Italian state and the large overseas Italian communities, constituted by years of emigration. In a context of intense inter-European imperial rivalry, that link, conceived as italianità, allowed the Italian state to claim some control, or oversight, over large Italian communities located in what became the possessions of other European powers in the eastern Mediterranean (19, 38), in Frenchcontrolled Tunisia, for instance. The Great War and its aftermath magnified this claim, as it extended, within the broader economy of the discourse on vittoria mutilata or “mutilated victory” – to the terre irredente of the Adriatic, the unredeemed territories denied to Italy to which, nationalists contended, they “naturally” belonged. The deterritorialization implied by italianità, that is, the idea that Italy’s imperial claims stretched far beyond the narrow borders of the emerging nation-state, was also useful in resolving one of the greatest challenges faced by the Risorgimento, the “question of the South” (known as the Mezzogiorno). The latter, theorized by Gramsci in the interwar years, notoriously referred to the seemingly unbridgeable divide between the peninsula’s industrial North, and its largely agrarian, and – for Northerners – “exotic” South. McGuire shows in her study how, by charting out the Aegean, Italian intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contributed to define a location for the familiar-foreign within the imaginary realm of italianità (5, 40–43). In Italian colonial discourse, the Dodecanese became Italy’s new “South”, the imperial limes where civilization faded out into the exotic, and “Europe” blended with the Levant, or the “Orient”. This discursive shift allowed for a better absorption of the Mezzogiorno in Italian nationalist discourse (27). Even when of an uneasy nature, the familiarity claimed by Italian intellectuals and imperialists with the populations of the Mediterranean stood in contrast with the official French and British discourses, which remained dismissive of their colonial subjects. As is well known, racial laws were implemented late in the Italian Empire when compared with other European powers. They were the result, as McGuire reminds us, of a fundamental paradox in the Fascist project, which, although it was premised on the notion of national homogenization, also prioritized imperial expansion, and therefore the exponential increase of the number of non-Italians subjected to Rome (27). However, as McGuire shows, nowhere did Italian authorities think more intensely about the racial affinities and differences with their colonial subjects than in the Dodecanese. The archipelago thus became the meeting point of discourses and policies meant to clarify Italian “self-representations as a Mediterranean race” (20). After the foundation of the Turkish Republic dashed their dreams of territorial expansion in Anatolia, Italian authorities began to conceive of the Dodecanese as an advanced post for the projection of Italian culture and influence throughout the Orient. Drawing inspiration from the writings of authors such as Gabriele D’Annunzio or Edmondo De Amicis, Fascists invoked history to legitimize their claims to Rhodes and the other Dodecanesian Islands. Hence, the dominion of Rome, that of the Italianate Mediterranean Historical Review 119 maritime republics, and, later, of the Knights of Saint John, were presented as logically interconnected and forming a clear path to modern Italian identity (22–24). Archaeological restoration and architectural projects were meant to cement such representations, with, for instance, the Palazzo del Governo, designed by Florestano Di Fausto, evoking Palace of the Doges of Venice (101–102). Italianizing the Dodecanese also involved transforming it into a tourist destination for Europeans to experience the thrills of a domesticated Orient. The baths of Kallithea built by Pietro Lombardi perfectly embody this policy, borrowing as they did from Roman, Byzantine, but also Ottoman architectural styles (96–109). Yet as McGuire shows, representations of the Dodecanese as the limes of the Italian Empire and Italian national identity were never stable. Italianità thus soon gave way to mediterraneità in the official discourse, as Italy was presented as the quintessential Mediterranean nation (4, 61–81), naturally destined to rule the Middle Sea. Mediterraneità, argues the author, functioned as a “chronotope” (93, 100) designed to resolve two paradoxes besetting Fascist ideology: the ambiguous relation between modernity and tradition, both of which were officially extolled (90–91); and the distance required by a colonial form of rule over a population with which, nonetheless, Italians claimed a familiarity. It inspired an “architectural vernacular” (81) strategically blurring the divide between the “European” and the “Oriental”. Such ambiguities were no longer tolerated in the aftermath of the Abyssinian campaign (1936), the subsequent declaration of the Impero italiano, and Fascism’s racialist turn. Mediterraneità hence receded from the official discourse and was replaced by the much more racially connoted term of romanità (94, 135–136, 146–147). This discursive shift pushed Italian policy in the Dodecanese towards its natural inclination. Greeks, deemed racially assimilable, were subjected to a thorough Italianization, a “social engineering” project (2) articulated around education, mandatory participation in the local Fascist movements and marriages between Italian men and Orthodox women (208–222). Turks and Jews, considered racial others, were marginalized, the latter exposed to the anti-Semitic 1938 provvedimenti per la difesa della razza, a sinister prelude to their deportation to the death camps once the Germans took control of the Islands in 1943. Everything reminiscent of Oriental influences, including in the architecture, was to be eradicated. Presenting romanità as a logical continuation of mediterraneità, rather than as an epistemic shift, allows McGuire to pick one more hole in the idea, enduring in the historiography, that compared to other European powers, Italians were “good colonizers”, treating the populations under their rule more humanely. Further, it enables the author to mitigate considerably the assumed break, regarding colonial rule, between the periods of liberal and Fascist government in Italy. The latter simply built on the momentum initiated by the former. The more openly racialized policies that Fascism implemented were meant to address official fears of miscegenation provoked by the empire’s expansion. In this context, the enduring myth of the Italiani brava gente (Italians as good people, 247) and the proximity they claimed specifically with Dodecanesians (una faccia, una razza: one face, one race) merely served and still serve to whitewash Italy’s colonial past (22). However, it is also, as the author persuasively argues, used by Dodecanesians themselves to better account for their own accommodation with Italian rule. The historical actors McGuire interviewed thus make an interesting distinction between the “Italian” period of colonization, which they describe 120 Book Reviews in nuanced terms, and, after 1936, the “Fascist” one, unanimously presented as oppressive and which they claim they had always resisted (196–201). Throughout the book, McGuire contends that her findings about Italian rule on the Dodecanese are relevant not only to the history of Italy, but to that of Europe as well. Her claim that, in the context of the current refugee crisis, the archipelago has become “Europe’s Southern Question” (the title of her introduction) is convincing (252–261). The Dodecanese is indeed the site where refugees transiting through Turkey are caught and detained, the European Union’s liminal space where what it considers as familiar and what it views as foreign fuse, and where regimes blending compassion and repression, perhaps inspired by Italy’s administration of the archipelago, are experimented. The way in which McGuire’s book adds to and expands the recently proliferating literature on Italian rule on the Dodecanese is by offering to write not simply a history of the archipelago under Italian administration, but a history of Italy – and even Europe – through the experience of colonial rule in the Dodecanese. In this sense, this is an important study that speaks to several literatures across disciplines. These include Italian and European studies, the historiography of Italy and Italian colonialism, and that of the Mediterranean. Alexis Rappas Koç University, Istanbul Turkey arappas@ku.edu.tr © 2022, Alexis Rappas https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2022.2052483 Στη δίνη της Χιακής καταστροφής (1822)· Διασταυρούμενες ιστορίες και συλλογική ταυτότητα [Entangled histories and collective identity: narratives of the Chios Massacre] (1822), by Maria Christina Chatziioannou, Athens, National Hellenic Research Foundation (Ethniko Idryma Erevnon), 2021, 184 pp., €12, ISBN 9789607905666 Chatziioannou’s book arrives on the scene at a very timely moment: the 200-year commemorative anniversary of the Massacre of Chios is upon us, as is the 100-year anniversary of the Asia Minor Catastrophe. The human losses associated with both events marked the Greek psyche, and the precarious future of the survivors generated what Chatziioannou referenced as a “victim diaspora”. But Chatziioannou makes it clear from the very beginning that destruction is not the focus of her book. Rather, her book centres on productive networking before, during, and after 1822. Thus the “turmoil” or “vortex” of the Greek title (δίνη) becomes the latest challenge facing an island of enduring connections.1 Consecutive generations of Chiots have established decadeslong familial, communal, educational, philanthropic, and commercial relationships that reach well beyond the island, and beyond the eastern Mediterranean, extending as far as Britain, India, and the United States of America. Readers may be familiar with Adamantios Korais, who combined medical training in France with philological activity and expertise, as well as with visionary thinking about Greek language, literature, culture, statehood, heritage preservation, and so forth. Also well known is the trading empire of the Ralli Brothers, which, if not born from, was certainly strengthened by the