For much of the twentieth century the Mediterranean was a colonized sea. Italy's Sea: Empire and Nation in the Mediterranean (1895-1945) reintegrates Italy, one of the least studied imperial states, into the history of European colonialism. It takes a critical approach to the concept of the Mediterranean in the period of Italian expansion and examines how within and through the Mediterranean Italians navigated issues of race, nation and migration troubling them at home as well as transnational questions about sovereignty, identity, and national belonging created by the decline and collapse of the Ottoman empire in North Africa, the Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean, or Levant. While most studies of Italian colonialism center on the encounter in Africa, Italy's Sea describes another set of colonial identities that accrued in and around the Aegean region of the Mediterranean, ones linked not to resettlement projects or to the rhetoric of reclaiming Roman empire, but to cosmopolitan imaginaries of Magna Graecia, the medieval Christian crusades, the Venetian and Genoese maritime empires, and finally, of religious diversity and transnational Levantine Jewish communities that could help render cultural and political connections between the Italian nation at home and the overseas empire in the Mediterranean. Using postcolonial critique to interpret local archival and oral sources as well as Italian colonial literature, film, architecture, and urban planning, the book brings to life a history of mediterraneita or Mediterraneanness in Italian culture, one with both liberal and fascist associations, and enriches our understanding of how contemporary Italy-as well as Greece-may imagine their relationships to Europe and the Mediterranean today.

About the Author
Valerie McGuire is a Lecturer of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of St Andrews.

Reviews
'This book is a much needed and welcome addition to the growing body of work on Italian colonialism, as well as broader Mediterranean studies, that also sheds new light on Italian fascism. Valerie McGuire provides an empirically rich and conceptually sophisticated analysis of one of Italy's lesser studied "colonies": the Dodecanese Islands.'
Pamela Ballinger, University of Michigan
'In Valerie McGuire's Italy's Sea, we encounter two kinds of Italian Mediterranean imaginary. In unearthing the largely forgotten history of Italy's colonial rule in the Aegean (1924-1943, but de facto since 1912) the author distinguishes between two phases of colonial administration that were characterized respectively by two different Mediterraneanist ideologies. [...] Through thorough research of largely unexplored material [...] the author offers a masterful account not only of how Italian colonial subjecthood was imagined in the Aegean but also of how it was practiced by both colonizers and colonized. [...This book] is a welcome and valuable addition to the field of Italian and Mediterranean studies. [It] deserves high praise for [its] interdisciplinarity and for providing useful tools for addressing the issues with which [it is] concerned.'
Konstantina Zanou, Italian American Review

'[Italy's Sea] 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.'
Matteo Giordano, Journal of Contemporary History

'McGuire's ambitious and comprehensive work contributes essentially to understanding the intersection of colonial expansion, citizenship, and the construction of race in the Eastern Mediterranean.' Joanna Burger, H-Italy

'Valerie McGuire's book is a fundamentally important contribution to colonial and postcolonial studies... an excellent text, written in captivating prose, a supreme novelty in the field of Italian studies and also in the broader context of colonial and postcolonial studies. The chapter "Everyday Fascism in the Aegean" will become required reading for students in my fascism class.' Sergio Ferrarese, Quaderni d'Italianistica

'Italy's Sea is a fine book that achieves its aims admirably. It makes very important contributions to our understanding of both Italian imperialism and the history and culture of Dodecanese. Its great innovation is to link, convincingly, the Mediterranean heritage of connectivity and pluralism to Italy's modern imperial project.' Nicholas Doumanis, Journal of Modern Greek Studies

'The way in which McGuire's book adds to and expands the recently proliferating literature on Italian rule on the Dodecanese is by offering to write not simply a history of the archipelago under Italian administration, but a history of Italy - and even of Europe - through the experience of the Dodecanese... this is an important study that speaks to several literatures across disciplines.' Alexis Rappas, Mediterranean Historical Review

'McGuire's book is thorough, creative, and groundbreaking, building upon her dissertation at New York University and perspective gained from years of archival research and oral history interviews in Italy and in Greece. This is an important work for historians of contemporary Italy, Greece, Turkey, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean, and for the field of Italian studies, and will be appreciated by both undergraduate and graduate students... fascinating both as a historical and as a present-minded study.' Mark I. Choate, Mediterranean Studies

'Unlike the many recent studies of empire that focus on Italy's African colonies, the book's focus on the eastern Mediterranean allows for unique and illuminating perspectives on the trajectory of Italian colonialism and nation-state building... McGuire masterfully recounts the Italian transformation of Rhodes into a cosmopolitan tourist destination that showcased the island's Mediterranean and Levantine cultural heritage... an important addition to the growing scholarship on Fascism, Italian Empire, and the Mediterranean.' Michael R. Ebner, Journal of Modern History

Book Information
ISBN 9781800348004
Author Valerie McGuire
Format Hardback
Page Count 320
Imprint Liverpool University Press
Publisher Liverpool University Press