Colonial internationalism and the governmentality of empire, 1893–1982

Abstract

politicians co-operated in new projects such as the first national parks and the 1922 law for the protection of natural beauties and historical buildings. His overall assessment, however, is a negative one: state involvement coincided with the slow decline of the movement and resulted in its eventual dismantling under the fascist regime. With a view to the literature about other countries, this seems surprising. In the United Kingdom, for example, noninvolvement of the state was a factor in the emergence of a vibrant network of private conservationist organisations, many of which tried to solicit active state support and legislation in the first half of the twentieth century. In the book’s last sections, Piccioni laments that traditions of nature conservation were not passed on to future generations in the ‘years of darkness’ (p. 283). He suggests that this may explain the late emergence of Italian environmentalism in the second half of the twentieth century (pp. 289–297). For all its justifiable focus on civil society actors in the field of nature conservation, this view seems needlessly negative about any involvement or support by the state in conservationist affairs. Moreover, the narrative does not fit in with more recent works about nature conservation and the environmental history of Italy under the fascist regime, which look beyond the demise of the conservationist movement. Even though the fascist regime’s actions were not usually a success story or even a disaster on the ground, it is valuable to look into what happened and how scientific ideas of nature conservation, local and national traditions, personal continuities, and fascism’s political ideology resulted in these actions. Piccioni did not amend his central state-critical narrative in this updated edition despite the alternative approaches offered by recent works, although these are duly referred to in the footnotes and bibliography. In a similar way, the book does not fully acknowledge recent research on nature conservation under various political regimes elsewhere in Europe in the inter-war period, or on the efforts of international conservationist networks to gain a platform in the League of Nations. Instead, it repeats the assumption that the international movement dwindled with the death of its first founders and the ‘end of cosmopolitanism’ in the 1920s (pp. 220–222). The book is and remains an excellent overview of the history of the first movement for nature protection in Italy. It is great that it can now reach the international audience it certainly deserves. Only for the political aspects after 1919, the audience should note that historiography has taken new directions since the book’s original publication.