Italian Fascism in Rhodes and the Dodecanese Islands, 1922-44

This book is the first English-language collection of scholarly essays to investigate the ambiguous and supporting role that colonialism in the Aegean Region played in Mussolini’s imperial ambitions, bringing to light a history rarely scrutinized until recently.

The Dodecanese archipelago is often absent from histories of Italian fascist colonialism, as Italian territories in East Africa, Libya, and the Balkans have figured more centrally in discussions of how nationalism and later fascism relied on the empire to promote discourses of national renewal and regeneration. Over the past twenty years, a new wave of research has emerged, animated by the opening of previously closed state archives in various countries. This volume’s international contributors provide fresh perspectives on a topic frequently mythologized as a ＂golden period＂ of social and cultural intimacy among twentieth-century Greeks, Turks, and Jews. Themes include the fascist adaptation in the islands of Ottoman imperial governance, programs of infrastructure, development, and administration in the Dodecanese, Jewish history and memory in Rhodes, and the place of the islands in larger regional tensions of the interwar period.

The volume will be of interest to scholars of Italian history, modern colonialism, fascism, Mediterranean studies, the end of the Ottoman Empire, and Sephardic Jewry.

Valerie McGuire is an Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Italy’s Sea: Empire and Nation in the Mediterranean, 1895-1945, and other articles on modern Italian history and culture.

Aron Rodrigue is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. He is the author of numerous publications on Sephardi Jews in the modern era, with a special focus on the Ottoman Empire.