‘Tracing colonial officials who left utterly dislocated societies in their wake’
R.J.B. Bosworth, Author of Politics, Murder and Love in an Italian Family: The Amendolas in the Age of Totalitarianisms (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
When I was a young lecturer in Sydney and began teaching a course on ‘European fascism’, an older, wiser colleague told me that the reason Oswald Mosley got nowhere with the British Union of Fascists was because all the potential fascist bosses in the United Kingdom were out in the Empire. Caroline Elkins’ Legacy of Violence: a History of the British Empire (Bodley Head) suggests that he may have been right, as she traces a Namierian pattern of colonial officials who moved from one site to the next and left corpses, population transfers and utterly dislocated societies in their wake.
Also important as Giorgia Meloni takes the neo-fascist Fratelli d’Italia party into government in Rome is Paul Corner’s devastating Mussolini in Myth and Memory: The First Totalitarian Dictator (Oxford University Press), showing why Italian memory is fecklessly ready to tolerate a contemporary politician who thinks that the Duce was a great statesman.
