The fascist breadbasket: food, empire, and modernity in Italian East Africa, 1935–1941

ABSTRACT

Food was critical to the fascist project of occupation of Ethiopia and construction of the Italian Empire in East Africa between 1935 and 1941. The plan, deployed as part of the last and most modern war of aggression in the European Scramble for Africa, included the transfer to Ethiopia of plant and animal breeding biotechnologies and the transplantation of Italian farmers to develop a massive;demographic colonization’; first in experimental model settlements, and then replacing Ethiopian biodiversity with Italian agriculture, husbandry, and civilization. The project of extraction of food resources from Ethiopia prioritized mobility – the construction of the road infrastructure necessary to transport colonial crops to the seaports on the Red Sea and from there to Italy and global markets. As the mass demographic colonization project faltered, though, the Empire absorbed food rather than produce it, and the unexpected most important function of Mussolini’s highways was to deliver high volumes of food imported from Italy to settlers. While the consumption of imported processed food represented an exciting experience of modernity and social mobility for Ethiopia’s Italians, Ethiopian armed and spontaneous resistance insisted on the disruption of the invaders’ colonial food system as the pathway to regain control of their land, agriculture, and food sovereignty.

RIASSUNTO

L’impero italiano dell’Africa Orientale, fondato nel sangue della guerra di aggressione all’Etiopia del 1935–1936 e terminato nel 1941 pochi mesi dopo l’inizio della Seconda guerra mondiale, mirava a mettere in moto un massiccio trasferimento di corpi, piante, animali, tecnologie e culture dall’Italia in Africa, allo scopo di crearvi un Impero del Cibo che avrebbe sostenuto con le necessarie calorie l’espansione demografica della giovane nazione italiana, proiettandola verso una politica di potenza internazionale. Il colonialismo demografico italiano avrebbe dovuto svilupparsi nel trasferimento dall’Italia all’Etiopia di forme di vita avanzate (agricoltori, piante e animali) per sostituire l’agricoltura abissina del bue e dell’aratro con un’agricoltura moderna, razionale e meccanizzata. L’imponente infrastruttura stradale creata subito dopo l’occupazione per permettere il trasporto del cibo prodotto nell’Africa Orientale Italiana verso l’Italia e i mercati globali, tuttavia, si rivelò distrarre fondamentali risorse umane e finanziarie dal processo di colonizzazione, che infatti rimase in fase di stallo per tutta la durata dell’Impero. Sulle strade di nuova costruzione circolarono quindi soprattutto i cibi industriali importati dall’Italia, su cui i coloni italiani costruirono la base della loro dieta quotidiana, esperendo livelli di consumo privato molto più alti dei corrispettivi in patria. La Resistenza armata etiope, nella sua azione di riconquista della propria terra e sovranità alimentare, focalizzò i propri attacchi sul sistema alimentare imperiale italiano, comprendendo come questo costituisse il primo fondamento e ragione politica della presenza in Africa degli invasori europei.

KEYWORDS:

• food
• fascism
• Empire
• colonialism
• Ethiopia

PAROLE CHIAVE:

• Cibo
• Alimentazione
• Fascismo
• Impero
• Colonialismo
• Etiopia

Acknowledgements

Versions of this article were presented at the LSE-Sciences Po Seminar in Contemporary International History and at the Culinaria Research Centre-Department of History of University of Toronto. I want to thank all organizers, discussants, and participants for their critically helpful questions, comments, and feedbacks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

^1. On Ente di Colonizzazione Romagna d’Etiopia see Paolini and Saporetti (1999).

^2. Similar reasons for frustration were also common to the experience of Italian settlers in Libya (Pergher 2012).

^3. On Italian bars and restaurants’ segregationist practice of serving food and drinks to Africans in empty food cans see the many oral history testimonies in Taddia (1996).

^4. On the Gondrand massacre see Sbacchi (2005, 50); Forgacs (2016, 123–124).

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Simone Cinotto

Simone Cinotto teaches Modern History at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. He is the author of Soft Soil Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California (2012) and The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City (2013); the editor of Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities (2014); and the coeditor, with Hasia Diner, of Global Jewish Foodways: A History (2018), and, with Daniel Bender, of Food Mobilities: Making World Cuisines (2023). Cinotto is Research Unit Coordinator of the National Interest Research Project “Transatlantic Transfers: The Italian Presence in Postwar America,” and taught Italian and Italian American Studies at several international universities, including Indiana University and New York University in the United States.