A fascist/settler country: Patrizia Dogliani, ‘A Fascist Country’, in Patrizia Dogliani, A Social History of Italian Fascism, Palgrave, 2024, pp. 115-144 | settler colonial studies blog

A fascist/settler country: Patrizia Dogliani, ‘A Fascist Country’, in Patrizia Dogliani, A Social History of Italian Fascism, Palgrave, 2024, pp. 115-144

11Jan25

Excerpt: The chapter discusses some fundamental policies put in place by fascism: policies to prevent new emigration abroad, limited urbanization brought about by major public works, reclamation and inland colonization, increase in rural works and rural society, investments in selected infrastructures. To justify these policy the regime espoused the mirage of a new “terre al sole” (lands in the sun) in the colonial territories, while also attempting to redistribute the population across the metropolitan peninsula and islands A wide gap persisted between the language of the reclamation program and its reality. The regime and its officials were ultimately incapable of actualizing the ambitious project of regenerating the landless peasants into a population of autonomous small-scale landowners. Once consolidated in power, fascism took up this legacy of reclamation, placing it at the ideological center of its rural policy. On a concrete level, the Fascist state transformed the reclamation project from an intervention that was essentially directed at land drainage to an “integral reclamation.” Land reclamation became a “national redemption” with the reclaimed areas seen as “redeemed lands.” This land was then mainly settled by veterans, who received the land as compensation for their sacrifice during the war and above all to create outposts of the new civilization. The reclamation was also accompanied by the creation of “news towns” in the Roman countryside.

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