Imperialism and Irredentism in Liberal Italy

For Italian nationalists, the nation was still incomplete after unification in 1861; they embraced the irredentist goal of incorporating Trento and Trieste, still in Austrian hands. The Triple Alliance which tied Italy to Germany and Austria-Hungary in a defensive pact made it hard to directly pursue this objective. Meanwhile, Italian ambitions to build a colonial empire began in the 1870s with the acquisition of Eritrea and Somalia in East Africa, before meeting a set-back with the crushing defeat by Ethiopia at Adwa in 1896. Liberals embraced an alternate, uniquely Italian vision of empire, built on emigrant colonies around the world. Advocates of traditional settler colonialism instead turned their attention to the Mediterranean and specifically to the so-called ‘Fourth Shore’ of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. Considerable consensus emerged around attacking the Ottoman Empire in 1911; after a year of war, Italy officially acquired Libya and the Dodecanese Islands. But irredentist hopes, and ambitions in the Balkans, were not sated by this expansion.

Conclusion

Opening with an instruction issued just days after the Fadda trial by Italy’s Minister of Justice about ‘emotional management’ of legal spaces, the book’s conclusion reinforces the notion of courts of law as emergent emotional arenas in Liberal Italy. Although the court is the most concrete of emotional arenas to be explored by this book, the conclusion returns to the ways in which documents brought together by the prosecution’s investigation provided the historiographical means to extend the notion outward to less exceptional elements of life, love, and death in 1870s Italy. These rich sources not only shone light on unfamiliar aspects of Italian social history, they illuminated historical processes of emotional encounter, negotiation, navigation, experiment, management, and evolution, within a range of distinctive social spaces, mostly real, but some imagined or virtual. A brief epilogue summarizes what is known of the fates of the three accused in the trial for Giovanni Fadda’s murder.