Book Review: War in the Mountains: Peasant Society and Counterinsurgency in Algeria, 1918–1958 by Neil Macmaster

Abstract

geography’ in which the Italian imperial nation-state would rule on a vast range of ethnically diverse, and yet still culturally homogeneous, subjects, from the Greeks to the Turks, from North Africans to the Jews (p. 4). Through such a discursive process, Italian elites were able to redefine domestic issues regarding nationhood, such as whether the South could be considered as an integral part of the nation, as well as navigate their provincial status of ‘least of great Powers’ vis-à-vis the most advanced European countries (p. 6). However, after the Ethiopian War and the onset of the alliance with Nazi Germany, the concern of the Fascist regime with racial and colonial policies greatly intensified, now spurred by the necessity of constructing racial hierarchies to ensure the whiteness of Italians, distancing it from the segregated black subjects of East Africa. This ultimately marked the transformation of Mediterraneità into a more peculiarly ‘fascist’ notion of Romanità (Romanness), namely a biologically-racist form of imperial discourse that rejected any form of ethnic or cultural commonality with the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean region and imagined, instead, the Italian Empire as a Grossraum organized on racial hierarchies (p. 70). McGuire’s work relies on a wide range of sources, integrating extensive, international archival research undertaken in the USA, France, Italy, Tunisia and Greece, with oral testimonies, a close analysis of colonial literature and movies, but also of urban planning, local architecture, touristic enterprises and everyday life stories. Such an interdisciplinary approach enormously expands the colonial archive, integrating administrative and bureaucratic sources with the most various material artefacts, productions and sites (p. 30). Overall, the book provides a very compelling account of the remaking of the Italian identity through the Mediterraneanist discourse and fills a void in the literature about both Italian and Greek histories by shedding new light on the impact of the colonial domination of the Fascist regime in the Dodecanese islands.