Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

On May 5, 1936, year XIV of Italy’s Fascist Era, the legions of the Second Roman Empire entered Addis Ababa, commanded by Marshall Pietro Badoglio, who had already subjugated the Sanussi in Libya.[4] The same day, in Rome, Benito Mussolini proclaimed: “Ethiopia is Italian! Italian in fact, because occupied by our victorious armies; Italian in law, because with the gladiators of Rome, civilization triumphs over barbarity, justice over arbitrary cruelty.”[5] For four days the population held the more enthusiastic celebrations of fascist Italy. The restoration of Roman imperial glory through the ruthless Ethiopian campaign allegedly put Italy in the same rank as other European Great Powers, guaranteeing the survival of the nation. Together with the new status came visionary plans of an empire in which the riches of newly conquered lands would make Italy’s much-desired independence from the “plutocratic states”—France, the United States, and above all the British Empire—a reality. With a clear lack of knowledge of the actual resources of Ethiopia, the official newspaper Popolo d’Italia boosted about “the vast mineral possibilities of the Ethiopian subsoil,” to which were added imaginary descriptions of the unique agricultural possibilities of the Ethiopian plateau that awaited Italian colonists.[6]

Colonial agriculture experts, drawing on their previous experiences in colonizing Libya, were more cautious. Armando Maugini, director of the Colonial Agricultural Institute in Florence and chief technical advisor to the Ministry of Colonies during the occupation of Ethiopia, speaking with the authority of having been the main agricultural expert in the previous settlement plans for the Cyrenaica (more details below), emphasized the difficulty of transforming a backward country into a major producer of raw materials and food for the empire in a short period of time.[7] In the case of Italian fascist colonialism this was made more problematic by an insistence on settlement with people from the metropole, who would demand that an expensive infrastructure of roads, irrigation, settlement, and technical assistance be already in place.

^{Figure 5.1 A 1942 photo of the main building of the Agricultural Institute for Italian Africa in Florence.}

^{(Archivo Istituto Agricola Oltremare, Florence)}

But Maugini was no critic of settlement plans for Ethiopia. Although he criticized “capitalist colonialism”—the exploration of local manpower for the production of commodities by a few white concession owners, which he identified with the British system—he was an unconditional supporter of the Italian white settlement model already tested in Libya.[8] He argued that the entire colonization effort should be coordinated by the State:

The wealth is achieved by the individual, it is not a gift from the State; but when one wants to transplant an entire race into vast territories, the State must resolutely establish with largeness of means the economic presuppositions for action: we want it to contribute—in well studied form and through the better indicated technical organisms—to the foundations of the large building.[9]

Besides making the case that fascist imperial ambitions for settlement could be achieved only through the State, Maugini was demanding better knowledge of local conditions through detailed surveys of the territory (geological, botanical, soil, entomological, and so on). It is not only, as Helen Tilley as convincingly suggested for the British Empire, that scientists’ knowledge of actual conditions in the field put some restraint on imperial visions.[10] Maugini was not downsizing imperial reveries; he was asserting the importance of using the expertise of the technical personnel trained in his Florence colonial institute for Ethiopia to sustain imperial ambitions.