2025 Theses Doctoral
Bitter Harvest: The Militarization of Agriculture in Mussolini's Italy, 1915-1945
This dissertation offers an economic, political, and environmental history of the mobilization of agriculture in Italy and the Italian Empire from the First World War to the Second World War. Based on new and neglected sources from the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Supreme Commission for Defense, it offers a first comprehensive interpretation of how the Committee for Grain, the Council of Ministers, and the Italian Parliament under the National Government (1922-29) and the Fascist Government (1929-45) formulated, negotiated, and promulgated these policies as their solutions to the problems from the First World War, the Fascist Revolution, and the Great Depression.
In each of the chapters, the dissertation examines one series of policies from the Council of Ministers, the Chamber, and the Senate and advances an argument about how the successes of the policies the Italians pursued for the modernization of agriculture after the March on Rome prefigured the failures of their policies for the mobilization for war across the Mediterranean. The project thus provides a new interpretation of the making and breaking of agriculture in Mussolini’s Italy, but it also presents new answers to old questions about the conceits of fascism, the contours of capitalism, the course of empire, and the causes, conduct, and consequences of war across Italy, Southern Europe, and the Mediterranean.
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This item is currently under embargo. It will be available starting 2030-01-08.
More About This Work
- Academic Units
- History
- Thesis Advisors
- De Grazia, Victoria
- Degree
- Ph.D., Columbia University
- Published Here
- January 29, 2025