Introduction

Abstract

This book presents a cultural history of Italian colonialism and anti-colonialism. Its aim is to show that Italy’s imperial ambitions played a fundamental, though overlooked, role in the development of an oppositional discourse to Western imperialism more broadly. I examine this claim in relation to a significant moment in the history of empire and resistance: the interwar period, which witnessed the consolidation of anti-colonial ideas that prefigure the work of postwar postcolonial theory.