ITALIAN COLONIAL EMPIRE

Like Germany, Italy was a latecomer to the European scramble for African and other overseas colonial possessions. Both Germany and Italy became unified nations only in the second half of the nineteenth century, when many smaller and often fragmented states united against the longstanding hegemony of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Italy, however, no state with the power and influence of Prussia emerged as the focal point of the nationalist movement. Indeed, while Berlin became the capital of the new German state and in every sense a major counterpoint to Vienna, Rome remained ambiguously within the sphere of influence of the Roman Catholic papacy, which had a long history of political domination in central Italy. Likewise, while both new nations scrambled to establish colonies in areas on the fringes of established British and French colonies, there was a significant difference in their approaches. Whereas the Germans aggressively established colonies adjacent to British and French holdings in East and West Africa, the Italians seemed content to settle for ‘‘leftovers.’’

The initial Italian possessions in Africa were located at what were then the farthest reaches of the decrepit Ottoman Empire. The first Italian colonies were established on the Horn of Africa and in Eritrea and Somaliland in East Africa. In 1885 a Roman Catholic priest, Father Guissepe Sapeto, who was acting in effect as an agent for Italian commercial interests, purchased the port of Assab from the Afar sultanate, an Ethiopian vassal state. The area around Assab was located at the fringes of the Ethiopian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Anglo-Egyptian advancements into the Sudan. In combination with the general decline of the Ottoman Empire, the Mahdist uprising in the Sudan and the confused political situation in Ethiopia following the death of the Ethiopian Emperor Johannes IV (ca. 1836–1889) enabled the Italians to expand their holdings in Eritrea well beyond Assab.

What would develop into longstanding tensions between Italy and Ethiopia had their origins in a dispute over the Ottoman port of Massawa in Eritrea, which had passed informally into the Anglo-Egyptian sphere of influence. The British ceded their own and the Egyptian claims to the port in favor of the Italians, even though the Ethiopians believed they had been promised it in return for harboring Egyptian refugees from the Mahdist massacres. Landlocked, Ethiopia naturally placed a great value on controlling a port, but the British were concerned that the French might use the Ethiopian expulsion of Roman Catholic missionaries as a pretext to oust the Ethiopians from the port in order to establish their own presence in the Horn of Africa. Tellingly, the Ottoman Turks seem to have factored very little in any of these decisions.

The Italians soon discovered, however, that Massawa was the hottest port in the world. In large part to provide a retreat from the oppressive heat, the Italians began to take possession of some of the surrounding highlands. Ras Alula (1847–1897), one of the chief lieutenants of Johannes IV, controlled the territory into which the Italians were making these incursions. Alula’s forces surprised and massacred an entire Italian division near Dogaly. In fact, the Ethiopians might have driven the Italians from Massawa, and perhaps even from all of Eritrea, except that the Mahdists attacked them from the west and Johannes IV was subsequently killed in the campaign to drive the Mahdists out.

In this same regionally tumultuous period, Italy took the first steps toward establishing a fuller presence in the Horn of Africa in the Ottoman-controlled part of Somaliland, adjacent to the established colony of British Somaliland. Over three decades, from the late 1880s to the end of World War I (1914–1918), the Italians increased their holdings in Somaliland incrementally at the expense of the Turks—through purchase, seizure, and transfer by treaty. The last parcels of what would become Italian Somaliland were ceded to Italy at the end of

World War I as part of its compensation for entering the war on the Allied side. In 1896 tensions between Ethiopia and Italy escalated into the First Italo-Abyssinian War. By 1889 Menelik II (1844–1913) had defeated several rival claimants and succeeded Johannes IV as emperor of Abyssinia (Ethiopia). In return for Italian support, Menelik had agreed to recognize Italy’s claim to Eritrea. To formalize this arrangement, Menelik signed the Treaty of Wichale (1889), but it turned out that there were significant variations in the Italian and Amharic (a Semitic language of Ethiopia) versions of the treaty. Most significantly, the

Italian version asserted that Ethiopia should be regarded as a vassal state within the Italian Empire.

In 1893 Menelik formally renounced the Treaty of Wichale. After diplomacy and economic sanctions failed to convince him to reconsider, the Italians began to attack adjacent portions of Ethiopia from Eritrea. Menelik responded by leading a major force toward Eritrea. Because Italy’s forces were outnumbered, the Italian commander, Oreste Baratieri (1841–1901), wisely retreated toward Asmara. But embarrassed by this relatively unprecedented retreat from ‘‘native’’ forces and grossly underestimating Menelik’s leadership and the amount of Western weaponry that he had managed to acquire, the Italian government of Francesco Crispi (1819–1901) ordered Baratieri to attack the Ethiopians.

At the 1896 Battle of Adwa, an estimated 120,000 Ethiopians encircled an Italian force of fewer than 15,000. Concerned about the limited supplies and ammunition available to his forces, Baratieri tried to force a decisive battle but ordered his forces forward into an area of rugged ground almost singularly unsuited to concentrated attack. Menelik’s forces won a convincing victory over the Italians. Despite the great discrepancy in the sizes of the forces, both sides suffered between 10,000 and 11,000 casualties. The remnants of Baratieri’s force

trickled back to Asmara, and Menelik left Eritrea convinced that the Italians would sue for peace on his terms. When the news of this humiliating defeat reached Italy, Crispi’s government was forced out of office and Baratieri was recalled. The new Italian government

signed the Treaty of Addis Ababa (1896) with Menelik, recognizing the full independence of Ethiopia and fixing its borders with the Italian colonies on the Horn.

Italy had more success in the Italo-Turkish War (1910–1911). Concerned that France and Great Britain would soon assume control of the entire coast of North Africa, Italy took advantage of the tensions between those rival colonial powers, and of Ottoman weakness, and seized control of the North African provinces immediately opposite its own shores Tripolitania and Cyrenaica.

Because these two provinces were not deemed economically significant and because the interior beyond the immediate coastal areas was a vast, largely uninhabitable wasteland, the French and British were willing to accept an Italian buffer between their more prosperous spheres of influence in Tunisia and Egypt. In the 1912 Treaty of Lausanne that ended the brief Italo-Turkish War, the Ottoman Turks also ceded Rhodes and the other Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea to Italy, in part to stymie Greek claims to the islands.

Disturbed by extensive emigration from Italy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Italian government attempted to promote the opportunities in the new colonies as an alternative. That immigration to the colonies did occur on a fairly large scale was probably more a testament to the terrible economic conditions in southern Italy and Sicily than evidence of the actual opportunities available in the colonies.

Nonetheless, the Italian government ruthlessly dispossessed the native populations from the most desirable land in the colonies, and some prosperous and attractive colonial communities were established. Most notably, despite the terrible, recurring regional conflicts of the last half of the twentieth century, Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, still retains many fine examples of Italian colonial architecture.

After his fascist regime seized power in Italy in 1923, Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) often declared his ambition to reestablish the glory of the Roman Empire.

Recurringly, he would overestimate and overextend his resources in trying to realize that ambition. The two colonies in North Africa were not completely ‘‘pacified’’ until the late 1920s, but in 1934 Mussolini combined Tripolitania and Cyrenaica into a single colonial province that he called ‘‘Libya,’’ resurrecting a name given to the region some 1,600 years earlier by the Roman emperor Diocletian (245–316 C.E.). Seeking to expand the colonies and to redress the humiliating defeat at Adwa, Mussolini became increasingly bellicose toward Ethiopia and escalated his demands for concessions to Italian interests in that country. In 1935 he ordered the forces he had massed in Eritrea and in Italian Somaliland to subjugate Ethiopia.

The Italian force, which included a large contingent of Askari troops from Eritrea, numbered about 100,000. The force was supported by airplanes, tanks, and mobile artillery. In response, the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie (1892–1975) was able to mobilize about 500,000 men, though many were armed with primitive firearms or even spears and shields.

 After several Ethiopian defeats, the League of Nations denounced the Italian aggression but then refused to impose effective economic sanctions on the Italians.

The Italian advance into Ethiopia continued steadily, but Mussolini wanted a much more dramatic victory. So he replaced the commander of the Italian forces and ordered that the full force of Italian arms be directed more ruthlessly against the remaining Ethiopian forces and against Ethiopian towns and cities that had not yet been subdued. Despite vocal international protests, Italian forces used some 300 to 500 tons of mustard gas against both combatants and civilians. Defeated and demoralized, the Ethiopian resistance collapsed, and some seven months after the Italian invasion had begun, Haile Selassie was forced into exile, where he became a gallant symbol of the growing resistance to fascism. With the Ethiopian defeat, Mussolini declared the formation of Italian East Africa, consisting of all of the Italian holdings on the Horn of Africa. Angered by the British and French opposition to his imperial ambitions, Mussolini was drawn into an increasingly friendly relationship with German dictator Adolf Hitler (1889–1945).

Although Mussolini believed that his alliance with Nazi Germany would permit him to expand his sphere of influence in the Balkans and in northern and eastern Africa, World War II (1939–1945) quickly spelled the end to Italy’s short-lived colonial empire. After some initial successes against the British forces in Egypt, Italian forces were driven back and almost entirely out of Libya. Only the intervention of the Afrika Korps led by German field marshal Erwin Rommel (1891–1944) prevented the annihilation of the remaining Italian forces. As the British were subsequently trying to slow the dramatic advance of Rommel’s forces, and then

building up their own forces at El Alamein, Egypt, to turn the tide against him, other British and commonwealth forces undertook a much less extensive and less publicized, but nonetheless arduous and equally successful, effort to expel the Italians from the Horn of Africa. By the middle of 1943, the Italians and Germans had been driven out of Africa.

After the war, Ethiopia regained its independence. Eritrea was made an autonomous state in federation with Ethiopia. Later Ethiopian attempts to eliminate Eritrean autonomy led to a thirty-year war and ultimately complete Eritrean independence. After being administered by

the United Nations, Libya became an independent kingdom in 1951 and then ostensibly a republic in 1969. In the last three decades of the twentieth century, it became a ‘‘rogue state’’ under the leadership of Mu‘ammar Gadhafi (b. 1942). In 1949 Italian Somaliland was named a UN trust territory, but alone among Italy’s colonies, it was placed again under Italian administration.

In 1960 it was granted independence and almost immediately merged with the former British Somaliland to form the independent nation of Somalia.

Although Italy never established colonies in the Americas, large-scale emigration from Italy, and especially from southern Italy and Sicily, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created sizable and significant Italian populations in both North and South America, in particular within the United States and Argentina.

Ironically, it has become clear that Italian cultural influences will endure in the Americas much longer than in the former colonies of the Italian Empire in Africa.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berkeley, George Fitz-Hardinge. The Campaign of Adowa and the Rise of Menelik, rev. ed. London: Constable, 1935.

Casserly, Gordon. ‘‘Tripolitania: Where Rome Resumes Sway.’’ National Geographic (Aug. 1925): 131–162.

De Marco, Roland R. The Italianization of African Natives: Government Native Education in the Italian Colonies, 1890–1937. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University,1943.

Labanca, Nicola. ‘‘Colonial Rule, Colonial Repression, and War Crimes in the Italian Colonies.’’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies 9 (3) (2004): 301–313.

Larebo, Haile M. The Building of an Empire: Italian Land Policy and Practice in Ethiopia, 1935–1941. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Lewis, David Levering. ‘‘Pawns of Pawns: Ethiopia and the

Mahdiyya.’’ In The Race to Fashoda: European Colonialism and African Resistance in the Scramble for Africa. New York: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1987.

McCartney, Maxwell H. H., and Paul Cremona. Italy’s Foreign and Colonial Policy, 1914–1937. New York: Oxford University Press, 1938.

Palumbo, Patrizia, ed. A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Prouty, Chris. ‘‘War with Italy: Amba Alage, Meqellle, Adwa.’’ In Empress Taytu and Menilek II: Ethiopia, 1883–1910.Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1986.

Robertson, Esmonde M. Mussolini as Empire-Builder: Europe and Africa, 1932–1936. New York: Macmillan, 1977.

Sbacchi, Alberto. Ethiopia Under Mussolini: Fascism and the Colonial Experience. London: Zed, 1985.

Schanzer, Carlo. ‘‘Italian Colonial Policy in Northern Africa.’’ Foreign Affairs (March 15, 1924): 446–456.

Segre, C. G. ‘‘Italo Balbo and the Colonisation of Libya.’’ Journal of Contemporary History 31 (1996).

BELGIUM’S AFRICAN COLONIES

When Belgium became a nation in 1830, it had almost no tradition of long-distance trade or colonial activity. Even in the first decades of its existence, it showed little inclination toward overseas expansion. Although a few attempts were made by the first king, Leopold I (1790–

1865), these were not successful. If this small European country nevertheless succeeded in ruling a vast colony in Central Africa, this was due only to the tenacity of its second king, Leopold II (1835–1909).

THE CONGO FREE STATE (1885–1908)

Leopold II, an ambitious and enterprising monarch, was fascinated by the Dutch colonial ‘‘model’’ in Java and wanted to enhance his country’s grandeur by exploiting a vast colonial domain, destined to enrich the mother country. After several unsuccessful attempts in different parts of Asia and Africa, Leopold developed a keen interest in Central Africa. The king took several personal initiatives, without the formal backing of his country’s government and even without the support of Belgium’s leading economic players.

In 1876 Leopold convoked an International Geographic Conference in Brussels, where prominent geographers and explorers were invited. Under the cloak of humanitarian and scientific interests, he then created successive private organizations, the most important of which was the Association Internationale du Congo (AIC). These organizations, controlled by the king himself, had in fact a commercial purpose. When France, in the early 1880s, started to develop a political hold along the banks of the lower Congo, the AIC (which, in the meantime, had hired the British explorer Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) as its local manager) also began to conclude treaties whereby African chiefs recognized the association’s sovereignty. Because the United Kingdom, France, and Portugal had conflicting interests in this region, Leopold’s skillful personal diplomacy succeeded in playing the contradictory ambitions of these countries against each other.

In the margins of the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference, the world’s main powers recognized the AIC as the legal authority over a vast territory in the heart of Africa, a new ‘‘state’’ called the Congo Free State. The main contenders in this region, particularly France and the United Kingdom, hoped to reap the benefits of Leopold’s ‘‘whim,’’ which, in their opinion, would not last long. Indeed, in the beginning, the Congo Free State seemed to be an unviable enterprise. The Free State’s expenses outstripped its incomes. Setting up an administration and waging exhausting military campaigns in order to secure the Free State’s grip on a territory more than eighty times as large as Belgium turned out to be very expensive. The Congo survived mainly through the king’s personal funds. But from 1895 on, the Congo Free State, which Leopold ruled as an absolute monarch, was saved from bankruptcy by the growing demand for rubber.

The king imposed a harsh labor regime on the Congolese populations in order to extort ever-growing amounts of wild rubber. On the Congo Free State’s own domains, as well as on the vast tracks of land that had been conceded to private companies, brutal and repressive practices took the lives of large numbers of Africans—though exact figures are impossible to establish. The Congo Free State, officially presented to the world as a humanitarian and civilizing enterprise destined to abolish slavery and introduce Christianity, became the target of an international protest campaign, led by the British activist Edmund Dene Morel (1873- 1924) and his Congo Reform Association. In the first years of the twentieth century, the Congo question became an important international issue, since the British government took this matter to heart, especially after an official enquiry commission, appointed by king Leopold, had confirmed the existence of excesses (1904). Belgium itself could not stay aloof, because of its growing involvement in the Congo Free State. An increasing number of volunteers had joined the public service and the military in the Congo; Belgian Catholic missions had been protected and promoted by the Free State’s authorities; the Belgian Parliament had granted loans to the Congo; and important private groups had started investing in colonial enterprises, particularly in 1906. Consequently, the Belgian Parliament agreed in 1908 to accept the Congo as its own colony, in order to avoid international intervention or a takeover by a foreign power.

THE CONGO AS A BELGIAN COLONY (1908–1960)

The so-called Colonial Charter of 1908 set out the main lines of the Belgian colonial system: a rigorous separation between the budgets of the colony and the mother country; a strict parliamentary control of executive power (in order to avoid the excesses of the former Leopoldian despotism); the appointment of a governor-general in Congo, whose powers were strictly limited by the metropolitan authorities; and a tight centralism in the colony itself, where provincial authorities were granted little autonomy.

In reality, Belgium’s political parties and public opinion showed little interest in Congolese matters. Consequently, colonial policy was determined by a small group of persons, in particular the minister of colonies, a handful of top civil servants in the Ministry of Colonies, some prominent Catholic ecclesiastics, and the leaders of the private companies that were investing increasing amounts of capital in the colony. A classic image depicts the Belgian Congo as being run by the ‘‘Trinity’’ of administration, capital, and the (Catholic) Church.

These three protagonists had an enormous influence in the colony, and assisted each other in their respective ventures, even if their interests did not always coincide and, indeed, sometimes openly conflicted.

The Belgian administration of the Congo was run by a relatively modest corps of civil servants (in 1947 only about 44,000 whites, 3,200 of whom were public employees, were present in this vast country, inhabited by some 11 million Africans). The lowest level of administration consisted of the indigenous authorities, the more or less ‘‘authentic’’ traditional African chiefs, who were strictly controlled by Belgian officials. On the local level, in close contact with the African population, the missionaries played an important role in evangelization, in (primary) education, and in health services. Protestant missions were present in the Congo next to Catholic ones, but the latter enjoyed, during most of Belgian rule, a privileged position.

As in most colonies, the Congolese economy consisted of a heterogeneous mix of different sectors. The rural masses were primarily engaged in a neglected and stagnating indigenous agriculture, aimed at self-subsistence but facing growing difficulties feeding the increasing population, particularly from the 1950s. The colonial authorities also obliged these agriculturalists to produce export crops (e.g., cotton), which made them vulnerable to the ups and downs of world markets. A third economic sector consisted of large-scale plantations (e.g., palm oil production by the enterprise founded by the British businessman William Lever [1851–1925]), also oriented toward export. The Congo was also characterized by the extraordinary development of huge mining industries (particularly in the province of Katanga, well known for its copper, and in the Kasai region, famous for its industrial diamonds).

From the 1920s on, heavy investments in the exploitation of the colony’s rich mineral resources transformed the Congo into a major actor in the world economy. During both world wars, the Belgian Congo played a great role as purveyor of raw materials for the Allies, while the Congolese troops also engaged in warfare against the German and Italian forces.

In order to wipe out the stain of Leopoldian ill treatment of the African population and gain international respectability, the Belgian authorities tried to turn the Congo into a ‘‘model colony.’’ Although forced labor, repression, and a ‘‘color bar’’ (a form of racial segregation) persisted till the very end of their domination, the Belgians made serious efforts to promote indigenous wellbeing, particularly during the 1950s, by developing a network of health services and primary schools. From the late 1920s, some important mining companies had also developed a paternalistic policy aimed at stabilizing and controlling their labor force (Congo had one of the largest wage labor contingents in Africa). The final decade of the Belgian presence in the Congo was characterized by a notable improvement of the living standard of the growing black urban population.

However, one of the main failures of Belgian colonial policy was the choice not to develop an indigenous elite. Secondary and university education were seriously neglected.

The Congolese petty bourgeoisie remained embryonic: local entrepreneurs or proprietors were almost nonexistent. Only a tiny fraction of the Congolese population, the so-called e´volue´s, succeeded more or less in assimilating the European way of life, but their Belgianmasters kept themat the bottom levels of the public service or private companies,without any short-term prospects of exercising responsible tasks.

Anticolonialism and nationalism found their way into the Congolese population comparatively late—indeed, not until the second half of the 1950s. Belgian authorities were caught practically unprepared by the sudden wave of black political activism, and subsequently engaged in a process of ‘‘precipitous decolonization.’’ In just a few months’ time (from early 1959 to the beginning of 1960), the political prospects for the colony evolved from a long-term loosening of the ties between Belgium and the Congo, to the immediate independence of the African country. When Congo became a sovereign nation on June 30, 1960, this new state was utterly unprepared to handle the enormous problems that it had to face, and it slid into years of chaos, internal disruption (e.g., regional secessions, such as Katanga’s), and civil war—only to emerge in 1965 under the Mobutu Sese Seko (1930–1997) dictatorship, which was to last more than thirty years and thoroughly pillaged the country’s enormous riches.

BELGIAN MANDATE TERRITORIES IN AFRICA

During World War I, Belgian colonial troops participated in the military campaigns against the Germans in East Africa. They occupied a large part of this German colony. After the end of the war, the Belgian government tried to exchange these territories against the left bank of the Congo River mouth, which was in Portuguese hands. This plan failed to materialize, and finally, on May 30, 1919, according to the Orts-Milner Agreement (named after its Belgian and British negotiators), Belgium’s spoils of war only consisted of two small territories in the Great Lakes region bordering the immense Belgian Congo, namely Rwanda and Burundi (their ancient names being Ruanda and Urundi).

As was the case with the other former German colonies, the League of Nations entrusted both of these territories to the victorious power as ‘‘mandates.’’ Belgium administered these mandates through a system of indirect rule. The pre-colonial social and political authorities, consisting of a Tutsi king (mwami) and a tiny aristocracy (predominantly of Tutsi origin), ruling over a vast majority of mainly Hutu agriculturalists, were kept in place—even if the Belgians reshaped the traditional structures by constantly intervening in them. Until almost the end of the mandate period, the Belgian administrators, with the help of the Catholic Church and its schools, did their best to turn the Tutsi elite into docile auxiliaries of their own rule. Only in the final phase of their presence in Rwanda and Burundi at the end of the 1950s did the Belgians change their attitude toward the Hutu majority. They favored the takeover of political power by the latter, a policy that succeeded in Rwanda but failed in Burundi. When both countries became independent on July 1, 1962, Rwanda was governed by a Hutu president, Burundi by a Tutsi king. Belgian native policy, which had rigidified the ethnic boundaries between Tutsi and Hutu and consequently had exacerbated the ethnic identity of these groups, was largely responsible for the intensification of ethnic rivalry between these groups after the end of foreign rule. This antagonism, coupled with the high population density in these overwhelmingly agricultural countries, was to form a volatile environment in the following decades, causing several interethnic massacres, of which the Rwandan genocide of 1994 was the most terrifying example.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anstey, Roger. King Leopold’s Legacy. The Congo under Belgian Rule 1908-1960. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. ‘‘Archives Africaines’’ of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Brussels (Archives of the former Belgian Ministry of Colonies). In French. Available at: http://www.diplomatie.be/fr/archives/ archives.asp.

Maurel, Auguste. Le Congo: De la colonisation Belge a` l’inde´pendance, 2nd ed. Paris: Harmattan, 1992.

N’Daywel e` Nziem, Isidore. Histoire ge´ne´rale du Congo: De l’he´ritage ancien a` la Re´publique De´mocratique, 2nd ed. Brussels: De Boeck & Larcier, 1998.

Nzongola-Ntalaja, Georges. The Congo From Leopold to Kabila.

A People’s History. London: Zed Books, 2002.