When settler Libya was the model: Patrick Bernhard, ‘Libya, Mussolini, and the “White Race” : Fascist Colonialism and its Imprint on the British Empire’, in Cyrus Schayegh, David Motzafi-Haller (eds), Knowledge in Modern Transimperial History: Actors, Formations, Causes,Leiden University Press, 2025, pp. 203-233 | settler colonial studies blog

When settler Libya was the model: Patrick Bernhard, ‘Libya, Mussolini, and the “White Race” : Fascist Colonialism and its Imprint on the British Empire’, in Cyrus Schayegh, David Motzafi-Haller (eds), Knowledge in Modern Transimperial History: Actors, Formations, Causes,Leiden University Press, 2025, pp. 203-233

04Dec25

Abstract: This chapter studies how journalists from Britain and key white dominions, especially Australia, collected knowledge on the fascist Italian empire’s settler-colonial efforts in the 1930s and in which complex ways they interpreted those efforts; and shows how such information helped shape contemporary political and administrative debates about Britain’s own settler-colonial efforts. In so doing, the chapter shows how people at the time saw differences and commonalities between their own colonial practices and the fascist vision of empire, what they deemed worthy of imitation and what they rejected, and how competing notions of empire were negotiated in sometimes fierce debates.

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