Abstract
There are few research fields in European history that have received as much scholarly attention over the last few years as citizenship and the First World War. While this is also true for the Italian case, there is still a striking absence of research on citizenship laws in the colonial territories under Italian sovereignty. The present article addresses this gap and challenges the long-established assumption – due to an all too narrow focus on the historical military framework – that the First World War did not really affect the colonies of the Kingdom of Italy. An investigation of how the legal status of the colonial population – especially in Eritrea, on the one hand, and in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, on the other – was regulated, but also contested, claimed and negotiated, both during the conflict and in its immediate aftermath, reveals that a global event like the First World War actually had a significant impact on the Italian territories in the Horn of Africa and in North Africa. To illustrate this point, the article adopts an approach based on local players in the colonies rather than on legislators or policymakers in the metropole. Contemporary sources collected from several different archives are used to retrace personal stories and administrative processes which reveal important aspects in the story not only of Italian colonialism but of the Italian state in general. Citizenship in the Italian territories in Africa, as much as in other European colonies, was marked by the prejudicial concept of the backwardness of Africans, who were thus excluded from metropolitan citizenship. Beyond that, the article highlights utilitarianism as a concept that can help us to understand how Italy dealt with the inhabitants of its colonies during the First World War.
In January 1918, Gaspare Colosimo, Italian Minister of the Colonies, granted an interview to a journalist of the Roman newspaper La Tribuna in which he reflected on the ongoing First World War and discussed how, in his view, the Italian colonies positively contributed to the metropolitan homeland. In this interview, later also published in Rivista Coloniale, the organ of the Istituto Coloniale Italiano, Colosimo made a list of economic, political, strategic and military circumstances in the colonies which could benefit the Kingdom. In his view, this corresponded to the colonial policy adopted at the very outbreak of the First World War, and could be summed up in the sentence: ‘to put the colonies in a condition to ask as little as possible of the mother country and to give her as much as possible’. 1 In the context of a global war, the Kingdom of Italy could not afford to waste time and energy dealing with its small colonial empire; the latter, on the contrary, had to help the motherland to face the risks of the global war. This utilitarian principle can be seen as the true orientation of the Kingdom towards its colonies during the war. 2 The aim of this article is to find out to what extent this principle also applied to the field of citizenship policies in the Italian colonial empire.
The historical research on citizenship as a legal institution has expanded considerably in recent years. 3 Influential investigations on citizenship in various nation-states have enriched the field of European history, whereby moments of political crisis and national conflicts with heavy consequences for matters of identity have gained special prominence. Within this context, considerable attention has been paid to the First World War, 4 not least following its first centenary and the many academic events related to it. 5 The history of citizenship in Italy is no exception in this regard. 6 In particular, the emigration of millions of Italians has made citizenship a relevant topic of political and scholarly debate. From the unification of the Italian state onward, the citizenship policies adopted in the country were essentially tied to the concept of italianità – meaning exclusive belonging to the national community – and at the same time reinforced this concept. At the turn of the century, being an Italian citizen meant being a member of the Italian national community, born of an Italian father. Both mass emigration and Italy's limited colonial expansion helped to strengthen this view: on the one hand, the relocation of many Italian citizens to faraway countries made the cultural and biological dimension of national belonging even more relevant; on the other hand, the imposing of Italian sovereignty on colonized people that were considered less civilized assigned an important meaning to (metropolitan) citizenship, not least as a means to stress the superiority of Italian citizens vis-à-vis other members of the colonial empire. The First World War, with its nationalistic rhetoric, contributed to underlining the relevance of the principle of nationality in relation to citizenship as an instrument of both inclusion and exclusion.
The present article touches upon these two research fields with the aim of contributing a perspective on the lively scholarly debate about the colonial and global dimension of both citizenship and the First World War. Citizenship is now being largely investigated in its imperial and colonial interconnections and new research on the First World War has focused on the global dimension of the conflict, especially in non-European contexts. More specifically, this article will deal with citizenship in the Italian colonies and will do so by looking at local citizenship policies in the North African territories of Libya and in Colonial Eritrea. Despite the growing interest in both citizenship and the First World War in relation to Italian (colonial) history, a close investigation of citizenship practices in the Italian colonies during the world conflict is still missing. 7 The aim of this article is to bridge this gap by drawing upon different sources from that period, such as documents of the colonial administration, private correspondence and legal texts. In particular, naturalization requests addressed to the colonial administration provide some interesting insights into the agency of different members of colonial society and their desire to receive Italian citizenship; at the same time, the responses to these requests, be they positive or negative, shed light on how the colonial state reacted to this desire.
The construction of the Italian state took place on the basis of the idea that being an Italian citizen had to reflect one's belonging to the Italian nation; the relevance of this organic national belonging was expressed by the strictly patrilinear character of Italian citizenship law. This exclusive character of citizenship intensified with the colonial expansion when the Kingdom of Italy found itself having as subjects people belonging to communities and civilizations assumed to be inferior. Consequently, from the beginning the ‘native’ inhabitants of the Italian colonies were set apart from metropolitan Italians as far as the legal sphere was concerned. They were not to be considered citizens. Having the existence of this racialized order in view, the focus of this article is on the impact of First World War on colonial rule and citizenship policies. For this purpose, two main research questions are represented, on the one hand, by how wartime nationalism interfered with key concepts of colonial governmentality like race and civilization and, on the other hand, by the role the international context and transnational influences played in the redefinition of imperial forms of belonging.
Enemy Aliens in Colonial Eritrea
At the outbreak of the First World War, Eritrea had been an Italian colony for over 20 years. Major administrative reforms had been carried out since the turn of the century, first by governor Ferdinando Martini and then by Governor Giuseppe Salvago Raggi. 8 The reorganization of the judiciary, which Salvago Raggi carried out by simplifying the previous juridical system, had a particularly significant impact on colonial society. Many of these reforms were laid out in the Ordinamento giudiziario of 1908, which is also a fundamental text for citizenship relations in the colony and in the history of the Horn of Africa. 9 Article 2 of this legal text defined the legal status of those colonial inhabitants who were not Italian citizens (or Europeans). This definition made two points clear: firstly, the majority of the colonial population was made up of subjects and subjecthood became the legal status of the ‘natives’; secondly, the colonial population also consisted of a conspicuous number of people who were not exactly of local origin, but hailed from neighbouring regions, especially from the Ottoman Empire. These people were granted a special legal status, as they were considered assimilati (i.e., equated with colonial subjects). As a matter of fact, the creation of this legal category had more to do with issues of colonial policy than it had with racial motivations, as assimilati and sudditi de facto enjoyed the same (very limited) set of rights. On a political and symbolic level, acknowledging the role of non-native colonial inhabitants was a way to formally embed them in the social and economic life of the colony. Just how important for the colony's economy the presence of its Arab (and Indian) inhabitants was, has been clearly demonstrated by Jonathan Miran's investigation of the cosmopolitan population of the coastal city of Massawa. 10
Especially for the many colonial inhabitants hailing from the Ottoman Empire, many of whom were residents of Massawa and engaged in trade and other forms of business there, the First World War represented a relevant political event that had a significant impact on everyday life conditions. This was the case for John P. Efthymiades, a Greek Ottoman subject born in Constantinople in 1886, who was a prominent personality in Massawa. In December 1914 he submitted a request for Italian naturalization (written in French). 11 Efthymiades declared that he was ‘forcement sous la nationalité Ottomane’, since he had been born in the Ottoman capital, but that this citizenship did not correspond to his ideals, as he felt no attachment to Turkey. Indeed, he had left the country nine years earlier and settled in Eritrea in 1909. There he had opened a branch of the Maison Dilsizian Frères, which he was glad to see having ‘une place predominant dans le commerce general de l’Erythree’. This was an Armenian import-export company established in 1901 in Milan by the brothers Dilsizian and which had branches in several places across Northeast Africa, including Eritrea and Sudan, as well as in the United States. 12 Efthymiades was general agent of this company. The candidate could thus demonstrate that he had become a permanent colonist and wished to be legally considered an Italian citizen. The First World War is not mentioned in this handwritten document, although the Ottoman Empire had just entered the conflict in the fall of 1914, shortly before the date of Efthymiades’ request. This application was at first accepted, but then Italy's entry into the war in May 1915 slowed down the administrative process. As an atmosphere of fear and mistrust spread throughout the Kingdom of Italy, foreigners residing in the country, including people who had been well integrated for decades, began to be seen as outsiders threatening the nation – essentially as enemies. Even before the official declaration of entry into the war, a decree strictly dictated the way in which foreigners’ presence and travels had to be regulated, monitored and restricted. 13 Not surprisingly, in these circumstances the acquisition of citizenship through naturalization became a controversial political issue. The idea that foreigners, especially those born in enemy countries, could became fellow citizens was highly unpopular, as these individuals were seen as a source of danger and as potential saboteurs. Daniela Luigia Caglioti has meticulously investigated this issue and proved that the number of naturalization requests granted ‘dropped dramatically in countries that initially had adopted neither a ban nor specific regulations on the issue. In Britain, France, the Russian Empire, and Italy, new rules and a change in the attitude of officials and public opinion made it harder to change nationality or acquire a new one.’ 14
As far as Efthymiades’ application is concerned, the Ministry of the colonies, which had received the request, could do little more than inform the applicant of the Ministry of the Interior's decision to stop granting Italian citizenship until the end of the conflict. 15 Giacomo Agnesa, head of the Direzione generale degli Affari Politici, had introduced Efthymiades – accordingly to information he had collected – as a ‘person worthy of consideration and [who] enjoys esteem in the colony’. 16 However, the war, with its political and legal consequences, became a major factor when dealing with naturalization processes, both in the colonies and in the metropole. In applying for Italian citizenship, Efthymiades may have been driven by the intention to safeguard his business and his freedom of movement, both of which were jeopardized by requisition and restriction measures which did not apply to Italian citizens. After all, he was a citizen of one of the empires with which the Kingdom of Italy was at war and remained an ‘enemy alien’ throughout the conflict.
Another naturalization process, this too regarding an enemy alien residing in Massawa and ending in rejection, is worth reconstructing not so much for its outcome, which is unsurprising, but for other aspects it unveils. Around one month after Efthymiades’ application, on 25 January 1915, the import-export agent Senofonte Ferschell of Massawa submitted – via the Commissariato Regionale – a handwritten request addressed to the colonial government ‘to obtain Italian subjecthood’. 17 Ferschell was born in Athens in 1843, the son of a Hungarian father and a Triestine mother. When he was three years old, his family moved to Italy, where he was raised as an Italian: ‘I have always felt Italian in my heart and during my time in Trieste I belonged to the national party, to which I devoted my work both publicly and secretly’. At the time of his application, he had been living in the colony for 24 years since he had moved to Massawa in January 1891. He could not prove that he had relinquished his Austrian citizenship, apparently because the relevant documents had been lost. Up until the First World War, as he had been living ‘nearly always in an Italian country’ and felt he belonged to it, he had never felt the need to officially settle his citizenship status according to what he considered to be his real nationality. But as the war started raging and involving more and more countries, Ferschell realized that the time had finally come for him to become officially what he already felt he was: an Italian citizen. It may also be the case that he needed to prove his citizenship status when traveling to foreign countries.
This naturalization process, too, was cut short with a rejection by the Italian authorities. 18 However, the information forwarded to the colonial government by the Carabinieri reveals some interesting details about the mistrust and hostility which characterized the wartime handling of foreigner citizens. It was a standard rule to request a report of this kind in naturalization processes. The report about Ferschell casts the candidate in a rather negative light. Firstly, he did not seem worthy of Italian citizenship for special merits ‘since he had kept within the sphere of his natural duties as a foreign citizen on Italian soil’. 19 Secondly, he seemed suspicious on account of his frequent travels to Trieste and the close connections he maintained with his country of origin; while in Eritrea he kept selling Austro-Hungarian products with patriotic feelings. A third reason for disapproval lay in his private life. According to the Carabinieri report, Senofonte Ferschell was guilty of having intimate relations with a native woman and of raising a ‘mixed race’ boy, whom he claimed to be his own child, although rumours had it that the boy was the son of a deceased friend of Ferschell's. Three arguments, then, justified the rejection of Senofonte Ferschell's application for Italian citizenship. This aversion to the naturalization of foreigners and the suspicion that Ferschell was damaging the Italian economy were surely related to the political climate of the war. Given the priorities during the conflict, the candidate's flourishing economic conditions did not have any influence on the outcome of the process, as would usually be the case in naturalization processes in colonial and metropolitan contexts. Economic protectionism, nationalism and the maintenance of racial prestige drove the administration to turn down Ferschell's naturalization request. The national community of citizens had to be protected from many different sides.
If we set the two naturalization requests by Efthymiades and Ferschell in the wider context of the citizenship policies adopted by the Kingdom of Italy in Eritrea since the establishment of this colony, certain notable elements stand out. It has been shown that naturalization processes were an administrative procedure which did not really affect the native colonial population: for the period of ‘liberal colonialism’ only a dozen naturalization processes could be identified, in some cases through fragmentary traces, such as rare citizenship requests or references in administrative correspondences. 20 The majority of these processes regarded persons hailing from different regions of the Ottoman Empire, one request was submitted by a British subject of Indian origin and only one by a colonial subject born in Northern Ethiopia, whose story is closely analyzed in the next paragraph. On the one hand, naturalization was de lege permitted even for natives; on the other hand, natives were de facto excluded because citizenship was not considered a suitable legal status for them. Naturalization was an exceptional reward rather than an informal bureaucratic procedure. Most members of local society thus remained colonial subjects who added this formal belonging to other layers of religious, ethnic and political identity. 21 While a real periodization of the naturalization policy is difficult to draft due to the scarceness of the processes, it is still evident that the First World War period saw a significant number of requests submitted (six processes of naturalization took place between 1914 and 1919). The stories of Efthymiades and Ferschell, two non-native members of the colonial middle class with strong economic interests in the colony, demonstrate how the war drove many people around the globe to reconsider their belonging and regulate their legal status.
From Subject to Citizen: A Case of Naturalization
Citizenship policies in Colonial Eritrea during the First World War, but in other periods too, were strictly marked by the exclusion of the local population from metropolitan citizenship: naturalization did not really apply to the natives. The successful naturalization of Sengal Workneh, formally a colonial subject, which occurred just at the end of the war, not only reveals the very infrequent possibility to open up spaces within the rigid discriminatory frame of the colonial system, but also demonstrates the importance of the war for reshaping categories of belonging based on race and loyalty. 22 Sengal Workneh was an interpreter at the service of the Italian colonial administration and he spent his life between the colony of Eritrea and the Kingdom of Italy, working on different assignments. In 1919 he obtained Italian citizenship thanks to the Royal Decree issued on 13 July 1919, 23 shortly after the Treaty of Versailles marked the end of the war. Sengal Workneh's naturalization process began in 1917, when he submitted his naturalization request (which has not yet been retrieved). It may be assumed that he submitted this request to the Army Headquarters (Comando del Corpo d’Armata) in Naples, as proven by an exchange of letters between the Ministry of War, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of the Colonies. Sengal Workneh’s naturalization occurred despite the restrictions related to the war: the Ministry of War considered his request worthy of being granted because it represented a special case. Certainly, the usual procedure of gathering information about the candidate was fulfilled and the good reputation Sengal Workneh enjoyed both in the colony and the metropole made it possible for him to change his legal status from subject to citizen. A report by the Carabinieri royal company in Asmara portrayed him in very positive terms: for instance, it referred to his good behaviour and to the European dressing and eating habits he had adopted, thus abandoning the lifestyle of the natives, his fellow countrymen. 24 European bourgeois culture became the standard to measure the degree to which Sengal Workneh could be regarded as ‘civilized’. However, as will be explained below, the First World War played an important role in this transition. The naturalization which Sengal Workneh obtained in 1919 was the outcome of a long process begun in 1906, when he was working as an interpreter in Asmara and applied for Italian citizenship for the first time. Sengal Workneh was probably confident that his request would be granted without difficulty. But quite the opposite happened: he had to face a harsh rejection, which was justified by invoking the need to maintain the racial order in the colony. Archival sources document Sengal Workneh's disappointment and the disputes he had with the Italian authorities on this matter. 25
Sengal Workneh was born in 1880 near Adwa, in the northern region of the Ethiopian Empire, Tegray. 26 As a child he attended the Italian school in Massawa, which at the time was under Italian military rule, and then moved to Italy with an Italian teacher. From that moment onward, he lived his life between the Italian colony in the Horn of Africa and the metropole. In the Kingdom of Italy, he was allowed to perform military service from February 1899 to March 1903. This was an exceptional opportunity for someone who was not Italian, and especially for a colonial subject, given that colonial subjects were expected to serve in the colonial troops.
After his time in the army, Workneh moved back to Colonial Eritrea, where he worked as an interpreter in different offices. Yet, he found himself in Italy when the First World War broke out, as in the autumn of 1914 the Ministry of the Colonies transferred him from Asmara to Naples, where he was expected to teach Amharic and Tigrinya at the Istituto Orientale. From some letters in his personnel file in the university archives we know that life in the new city was all but easy for him, especially owing to the higher living costs which he had to meet to feed himself and his family 27 (at the time Sengal Workneh's family consisted of his wife, two daughters and one son). Just a few months after his relocation, with the Kingdom of Italy now entering into war, Sengal Workneh was recalled following the general mobilization of the army. According to a later source, he engaged in military service from 24 May 1915 to July 1919, but kept his teaching position at the Orientale. 28 The war had a significant impact on his life. On the one hand, it increased his worries about his family's material conditions. In June 1916, he asked the director of the Orientale to arrange the relocation of his family back to Eritrea, because he was expecting to be sent away from Naples for military reasons and was seemingly afraid to leave his family there without him. This request received a warm endorsement from Prof. Francesco Gallina, a distinguished scholar at the time. 29 On the other hand, during the war Sengal Workneh was given the opportunity to prove himself a true Italian patriot. He undertook military service in a variety of ways. From a report by his superior in rank, Captain Adolfo Gambardella, we know that he was assigned several civilian tasks (like training horses for cavalry squadrons, supervising air defence spots during night shifts, managing the supply of provisions, etc.). He did not fight on the front lines; 30 nevertheless, he earned the deep esteem of his superior, who described him in his final report as an ‘educated, intelligent officer, with high military and civic feelings, with a frank character, firm in his intentions yet at the same time disciplined’. 31 Moreover, Sengal Workneh's engagement on the Italian side extended to intellectual activities. He expressed his patriotic sentiments in a speech to the officers and troops which also earned a mention in Gambardella's report (the text of the speech is unfortunately lost). In order to inform the colonial subjects in Eritrea about the ongoing conflict and Italy's role in it, he wrote an anti-war poem in Tigrinya in which he vehemently accused Austria and Germany of starting the cruel conflict. 32
The biography of Sengal Workneh can rightly be compared to that of the Eritrean-Italian Domenico Mondelli, which has been reconstructed in a detailed book by Mauro Valeri. 33 Mondelli was most likely born as Wolde Selassie in 1886 in Asmara or in one of the surrounding villages. At the time, this region, the Hamasien plateau, was still part of the Ethiopian empire, whose subject Wolde Selassie was. However, he became an Italian colonial subject shortly afterwards when Asmara was conquered by the Italian troops: the Colony of Eritrea was formally established in 1890. The first years of his life are obscure: it is known that he came to Italy with an Italian officer, Attilio Mondelli, who then obtained custody of the child and gave him his own family name. During Domenico Mondelli's lifetime – and even afterwards – it could never be proved that he was the natural child of Attilio Mondelli and a local woman from Eritrea, although this rumour was circulated again and again. It is an established fact that he became part of an extended Italian family in Parma, where Attilio and his brother Emilio took care of him. Differently from Sengal Workneh, becoming an Italian citizen for Domenico proved quite easy. He obtained Italian citizenship in 1907, when he turned 21 and came of age: for despite being the son of unknown parents, he had lived for 15 years in the Kingdom of Italy and fulfilled his military service. It must be said that Domenico had attended prestigious military schools in Rome and in Modena and had mostly received excellent reports and honours. In the following years, he pursued a military career and occupied important roles in the Italo-Turkish War for the conquest of Libya and in the First World War. However, the colour of his skin did not go unnoticed in a country with a strong racist attitude. For example, despite the medals of valour he had earned, he was forced out of the army more than once. Similar episodes of racial discrimination occurred throughout his life and career. He was only able to attain the highest military degree, that of general, as a reward for a life fully spent in the service of the Italian army. All in all, apart from his birth, his early childhood and his war experience in Libya, all the events in his life unfolded in the metropolitan context.
The cases of Mondelli and Workneh are interesting in different ways. While the former is an interesting example of a black Italian whose (early) legal inclusion did not correspond to full social inclusion in the Kingdom of Italy, the latter's story is paradigmatic in that it illustrates how a racialized form of citizenship was implemented in the colonial context and how the First World War heavily contributed to shaping individuals’ sense of belonging and challenging the established racial order.
Becoming Italian-Libyan Citizens
At the beginning of the First World War, Eritrea was not the Kingdom of Italy's only colony. Following a heavy nationalistic campaign, which enjoyed much support from Italian public opinion, Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti attacked the Ottoman Empire in an effort to expand the Italian colonial empire in North Africa. The military conflict was resolved in favour of Italy, which gained the provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica as two new colonies. When in October 1912 these provinces came under Italian sovereignty, citizenship policies on the imperial level became more nuanced. The local inhabitants, who had been Ottoman subjects until that moment, received a specific legal status which tied them to the Kingdom of Italy: this was called the ‘subjecthood of Libyan natives’ (sudditanza degli indigeni della Libia) and was regulated by the royal decree no. 315 of 6 April 1913. Sabina Donati has rightly underlined the differences in legal status between the colonial subjects in the Horn of Africa and those in North Africa: the latter could not only enjoy a particular personal status and related civil rights according to their religion, but also fill certain public offices.
34
In 1919, this colonial subjecthood gave way to a new form of colonial citizenship for the Libyan territories under Italian rule, which was named ‘Italian citizenship in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica’ (cittadinanza italiana in Tripolitania e Cirenaica). A definition of this legal status was provided in the so-called Statutes, a colonial constitution granted by the Kingdom of Italy in the aftermath of the war and in the spirit of a liberal colonial policy that left particularly generous room for negotiation.
35
The history of this legal text deserves some attention. It is well known that anti-colonial resistance began as soon as the Italians invaded North Africa in October 1911.
36
Resistance continued over the next months with the support of thousands of people.
37
The Italians adopted a twofold strategy: on the one hand, the military conquest of the hinterland; on the other, a policy of collaboration with traditional chiefs and notables (the so-called politica dei capi) in Tripolitania, and a policy of negotiation with the Sanusiyya in Cyrenaica. Both strategies turned out to be a failure and above all revealed the Italians’ lack of familiarity with the local context. With the outbreak of the First World War, the anti-colonial resistance gained momentum and soon put the Italian troops in a difficult situation. While Italian rule grew increasingly fragile owing to the fierce anti-colonial struggle, the repression of revolts became particularly brutal. Faced with the failure of their colonial policies and the new international context, in which other colonial empires too were changing their approach to their colonial subjects,
38
the Italians opted for greater collaboration with the native population during the last phase of the First World War. The involvement of natives in the political sphere and respect for Muslim culture and religion were promoted, whereas the former assimilation policy was dismissed. In this respect, neighbouring French Algeria was seen as a failed experiment, at least by the author of a short article published in Rivista Coloniale that compared the native policies in the Italian and French colonies in North Africa. The new forms of citizenship regulation in the Libyan colonies were considered far more successful compared to French policies. In Algeria, by virtue of the law of 4 February 1919 natives were allowed to decide whether to keep their personal status or not, and this created two classes of subjects: those who accepted giving up their personal status and so obtained full citizenship rights, and those who were not ready to relinquish this status. This divide had a great impact on native society. Instead of an assimilation policy of this sort, the Italian colonial authorities – as will be explained in greater detail below – did not touch natives’ personal status but created a legal status that applied – with some substantial differences – to natives and settlers alike: all can be subjects, both settlers and natives, with equal rights and treatment; but the concept of subjecthood does not exclude the coexistence of two kinds of citizenships, a metropolitan and a ‘Libyan’ one; in the latter, which we have expressly defined as sui generis (i.e., one of a kind), the native can find – with no detriment in terms of equality – his full and real freedom and his full political rights, namely those which correspond and conform to the degree of development of the social environment in which he lives, to his necessities, his means, and his institutions, without the need to sacrifice his own laws and mentality.
39
As a matter of fact, being an Italian metropolitan citizen according to the Statutes meant something different than being an Italian-Libyan citizen: the Statutes envisaged the possibility for Italian-Libyan citizens to apply for Italian metropolitan citizenship. A list of conditions, presented in Article 32, made naturalization a far from easy task overall. To achieve it, the applicant needed: (1) to be at least 21 years old; (2) to be in a monogamous relationship or unmarried; (3) not to have received any conviction for criminal acts entailing the loss of political rights; and (4) to have resided in Italy or Tripolitania for at least five years. Furthermore, there were some additional, special conditions that needed to be met: having served in the Italian army; having an Italian school degree (at least elementary school); filling or having filled a public government office; having received an honorary title or decoration from the Italian government; having been born of an Italian-Libyan citizen who became an Italian metropolitan citizen when the applicant was over 21 years old. The acquisition of Italian metropolitan citizenship for Libyans meant the loss of their personal status because naturalization meant that they had to obey Italian laws. As a matter of fact, this naturalization policy represented a means for the colonial state to integrate part of the local middle class into its ruling system. 40
Unfortunately, no research is available on the naturalization processes in the colonies of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica after the issuing of the Statutes. Up to now, archival documents have not delivered evidence of any request of naturalization from the North African colonies. A useful source for historians is the large collection of registers of the Consiglio di Stato, the consultative body expected to vet every naturalization request addressed to the Italian state (as per Art. 4 of the Legge 13 giugno 1912, n. 555 Sulla cittadinanza italiana), stored at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome. The limits of this source are the large number of registers and the scarceness of information they entail. A systematic survey of the registers would deliver a picture of the citizenship applications submitted in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica and discussed by the Consiglio: this laborious research still needs to be done. For this article, a glance at the registers has allowed us to grasp some interesting details concerning a few cases of naturalization which occurred in the 1920s. In November 1924, the Consiglio di Stato delivered a positive opinion on the (metropolitan) citizenship request submitted by the cittadino italiano libico Elia Fargion, a ‘well-off business owner of the Jewish colony of Bengasi, honoured with the title of Cavaliere d’Italia [and a] Member of the Parliament in Cyrenaica’. 41 In 1925, other Libyan Jews, specifically from Tripoli, requested and obtained Italian citizenship. For example, two of these, Felice and Vittorio Nahum, were cittadini italiani libici and met the requirements of the Statutes: the former was enrolled at the Military Engineering Corps in Tripoli (impiegato presso la Direzione del Genio Militare di Tripoli); the latter, who had resided in Tripolitania for over five years, had attended the Italian technical school (Scuola tecnica italiana) in Tripoli. As both enjoyed a good reputation and raised no moral or political issues in their records, the process of naturalization went smoothly. 42 This was also the case with the application submitted by Cesare Hassan, who had been born in Tripoli, had attended Italian school and had worked as an interpreter for the Governo della Tripolitania. 43 Several rulings regarded British subjects, in some cases of Maltese origin but born in the colony, and employed by the colonial administration. Despite the incompleteness of the available data, two elements emerge from the survey which can illustrate naturalization practices in colonial Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. Firstly, applying for citizenship was apparently an administrative step frequently taken by colonial inhabitants who were members of a colonial middle class that was not exactly local and quite often was of European origin; there are no traces of requests made by native Arab inhabitants. Secondly, Libyan Jews would appear to have claimed Italian metropolitan citizenship in this period as a means to strengthen their Italian belonging and their ties to the Kingdom of Italy. 44 Traditionally, relations between the local Jewish communities and Italy had been quite close, and Italian culture and customs were popular among local Jews already before the Italian occupation. In his history of Jews in contemporary Libya, Renzo De Felice notes that during the Italian-Turkish war the Jews in Libya almost invariably sided with Italy. 45 Moreover, quite often Jews fulfilled an important function as intermediaries between the local Arabs and the Italian colonizers. ‘The metropolitan inhabitant finds himself more in touch with the Jew than with the Arab, and through the Jew almost all relations between the metropolitan and the native take place’, said Elia Arton, who had been a rabbi in Tripoli between 1920 and 1923, in a later congress on colonial studies. 46 Here again, it is useful to draw a comparison with French Algeria, where local Jews received special legal treatment: in 1870, the French state allowed them to acquire full French citizenship, whereas native Muslims, who represented the majority of the population, maintained their personal status and were not subject to metropolitan policies. 47
In the citizenship policies adopted by the Kingdom of Italy in its colonies of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica after the First World War, it is possible to detect traces of the heavy anti-colonial conflict that justified the creation of new political regulations. The new Italian-Libyan citizenship too must be framed within this context: this new form of citizenship, with its liberal profile, reflects a strategy of inclusion allowing access to fully metropolitan citizenship only to a colonial elite (preferably of European origin). Looking at Algeria, Donal Hassett has shown how post-war scenarios were marked by significant plans to redefine imperial citizenship. 48 The political input of the Wilsonian moment was just one of the several factors to consider in this regard. A key topic in the debate about a new form of citizenship for the native inhabitants of Algeria, and an important element invoked by the natives, was Algerians’ military contribution to the French Republic's victory in the First World War. For the blood they had spilled for France, native Algerians claimed to deserve compensation in the form of citizenship rights. A similar claim could not be made by the inhabitants of the Libyan colonies and the redefinition of colonial citizenship there took on the character of a metropolitan concession rather than of a colonial claim.
If we were to attempt to make an assessment of naturalization policies in the North African colonial territories, we might say that the situation was quite similar to that in Colonial Eritrea: here too naturalization emerges as a kind of an administrative process reserved for the colonial middle or upper class. The local Arabs, who were Italian-Libyan citizens despite their will and who mostly opposed foreign rule, had little interest in applying for metropolitan citizenship. Indeed, they are quite absent from the records. 49 Much as in the Horn of Africa, citizenship policies were based on the principle of the superiority of the Italian colonizers in terms of civilization and race. The native population was not deemed equal to the Italian people, and this was reflected in its legal status.
Meticci and Soldiers 50
Access to citizenship was not achieved through naturalization alone. Female inhabitants of the Italian colonies could also become Italian citizens via marriage. The number of formal marriages remained rather low. Nevertheless, temporary relationships, mostly between Italian men and local women, in the form of concubinage, were quite popular. While these topics have been extensively studied in relation to Eritrea, Cyrenaica and Tripolitania have yet to be explored in this regard. 51 However relationships between Italian men and local women may be classified – as liaisons, unbalanced and abusive colonizer-colonized relations or temporary marriage-like relations – the offspring of Italian men and ‘native’ women constitute undeniable evidence of the existence of this phenomenon. The so-called meticci in Colonial Eritrea represent – particularly for a study of citizenship during the Great War – an interesting indicator of a policy fluctuating between colonial racism and military utilitarianism.
During the early years of Italian colonialism in Eritrea there were no specific rules to define what legal status meticci had by birth and whether they could receive Italian citizenship or not. 52 Children of couples that were legally married in the eyes of the Italian state were Italian citizens de jure according to the patrilinear principles of the Italian Civil Code. 53 In such cases, filiation was recognized via registration of the newborn at the registry office (stato civile). Children born outside of a legal marriage (for example in a concubinage) could be recognized by the father and the mother immediately after birth or later. Quite distinct from this was the act of legitimation (legitimazione), which according to the Civil Code made children born outside of a legal marriage legitimate (legittimi). It could be ensured by marriage after the child's birth or by a royal decree. In Colonial Eritrea, a child who had been born out of wedlock and had not been recognized was a colonial subject. According to Giulia Barrera, children born in a concubinage relationship were mainly abandoned by their Italian fathers: acknowledgment was the exception. 54
The term meticci appears for the first time in an Italian legal text of 1914: a royal decree issued to reform the regulations for civilian personnel working in the colonial administration. The text (Art. 9) excluded meticci from pursuing a career as colonial officials. 55 This made it clear that working for the colonial administration and thus tackling core issues in the colonial project entailed a racial requirement that meticci could not fulfil. As they were assumed to entertain close relations with the natives, they were not seen as fit to work for the administration.
When the First World War loomed on the horizon for the Kingdom of Italy, the prospect of an impending conflict had a significant impact on the small community of meticci in Colonial Eritrea. In December 1914, the meticcio Ernesto Luigi Bianco declared himself ready to fulfil his obligations as a citizen when the cohort he belonged to was called to arms. The Comando del R. Corpo di Truppe Coloniali had his name on the conscription lists (liste di leva), but they did not recruit him because both the Ministry of War and the Ministry of the Colonies chose to consider him a colonial subject rather than an Italian citizen. This reopened the long-standing question of the legal status of the young man, which had been on the colonial administration's mind for quite some time. A rich file of documents illustrates the correspondence between different state authorities in the metropole and in the colony. Among them, two interesting reports written by the Commissario Regionale di Cheren and addressed to the colonial government help to reconstruct this peculiar case. 56 Ernesto Luigi Bianco was born in February 1895 in Keren to a native woman and an Italian man, who never acknowledged him. The report stated: ‘this cannot be proved through the documents, but it is well known through the grapevine and information, and can be deduced from the skin tone of the young man; and it is the truth’ 57 . An intricate succession of events followed: a few months after his birth, in November 1895, a judgment from the Tribunale Civile e Penale di Massaua authorized an Italian man, Luigi Bianco, to record Ernesto's birth at the registry office in Keren. This authorization was only fulfilled in December 1900: the Italian man became the guardian (tutore) of the young boy, who received the name of Luigi Ernesto Faletti. Luigi Bianco then requested to give the young man his family name and his request was granted. The young boy Ernesto Luigi Bianco was thus formally an Italian citizen. As a matter of fact, we do not know whether racist arguments were behind the two ministries’ decision not to recruit him or whether this decision was simply due to a mistake. In the summer of 1915, the matter came to an end when the young man's name was newly added to the conscription list (lista di leva). 58
Other colonial households had to face similar problems at the outbreak of the war. Spiridione Nastasi, a shopkeeper who had been living in Asmara for several years and who belonged to the group of the old settlers, wrote to the colonial government to inquire whether his almost 20 year-old son, whose name has been recorded in the registers of the registry office, was under the duty to present himself for military service together with the members of his cohort. 59 The short letter alludes to the fact that the son was a meticcio by saying that his mother was not Italian. Indeed, Spiridione Nastasi's son was soon requested to visit the Ufficio leva del Comando del R. Corpo di Truppe Coloniali in order to fulfil what was deemed ‘every citizen's first duty’. 60
Spiridione Nastasi was also one of those Italian settlers, like Giuseppe Conciatori and Giuseppe Camminito, who applied for the legitimation – by royal decree – of the children born to them by Eritrean women. The application submitted by Conciatori attracted the attention of legal scholar Adelgiso Ravizza, who had been a judge in the colony and, once back in Italy, had contributed to the academic debate on colonial law and colonial administration.
61
Conciatori, a clerk in the colonial court and a notary, had begun the process to enable the legitimation of his three children as early as 1910.
62
Despite negative rulings by the Corte d’Appello and the Consiglio di Stato, the Ministero di grazia e giustizia, which Conciatori addressed in 1915, finally granted the legitimation by royal decree on 15 April 1915.
63
This was the first time some meticci had received legitimation although their mother was still alive. As a consequence, similar requests were immediately filed by other settlers, like the above-mentioned Nastasi and Camminito. The cases of these two requests were actually very similar: the Carabinieri in the colony, when asked to provide information about the applicants’ conduct, wrote good references for these families, stressing that the legitimation of the children would make a good impression.
64
In both cases, the children received a good education from their caring Italian fathers, and eventually attended school in Italy and served in the army. An important difference lies in the fact that young Camminiti's mother had died in the meantime. Since the legal institution of legitimation served to lend a legitimate status to a child born out of wedlock, the (native) Eritrean mother carried particular weight. Unlike acknowledgment, legitimation thus also took the mother's role into account; moreover, it made legally valid – and acceptable – a family formed by an Italian citizen and a colonial subject. This is why Ravizza strictly opposed the Ministry's decision on the Conciatori case. In his opinion legitimation had to occur only in special circumstances, for example when an Italian father left the colony and moved back to Italy, or remained in the colony but was no longer living with the native woman who had borne him a child. Otherwise, there was a risk that concubinage would proliferate, and with it mixed-race offspring. Ravizza's words were filled with disdain for meticci: [T]he mixed-race child is growing up without manners, without education, disobedient, mean, poisoned by the thought of the better destiny that he might have enjoyed, as the son of an Italian, and driven by hatred towards the Italians, who are abandoning him, as well as towards the natives, to whom he believes himself to be superior and by whom he is deemed inferior.
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Conclusions
Rather than looking at metropolitan political debates regarding the impact of the First World War on the regulation of citizenship in the colonies, or on colonial rule more generally, this article has focused on specific cases in which the war impacted colonial citizenship and its practices. Considerable attention was paid to the way members of the local population – regardless of their religious, social and ethnic background – faced the First World War and its impact on their legal status. Colonial societies were multifaceted and complex, and the conflict made life in the colonies – as elsewhere – neither easier nor freer. Especially women and men who lived and worked across national and imperial borders had to face new regulations, limitations, and struggles. Writing the history of colonial citizenship from the perspective of those who were legal subjects, rather than lawmakers, has enabled us to recognize not only the impact of the First World War on these individuals, but also possible areas in which citizenship was negotiated, claimed or challenged. All the experiences discussed in this article reveal that during the conflict the utilitarian principle became the true point of reference for the Kingdom of Italy in colonial matters. This did not contradict, but rather reinforced, the principle of difference that the Kingdom of Italy implemented with regard to citizenship policy during the years of so-called liberal colonialism. From the very beginning of its colonial expansion, the Italian state – no differently from other European colonial empires – made metropolitan citizenship in the colonies a privilege of the colonizers, by assigning the majority of colonized subjects only a subordinate legal status. The cases of the Ottoman and Austrian subjects in Eritrea, whose naturalization requests were rejected on the eve of the war, demonstrate that this idea was dominant, and that nationalistic economic protectionism was the other side of utilitarianism. Connecting the colonial elite to the Kingdom of Italy, as the post-war legislation in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica did, was a strategy adopted to maintain power after serious anti-colonial uprisings. Although some channels for political communication were indeed opened, the liberal character of the 1919 legislation should not be overemphasized. Both Sengal Workneh's biography and way in which the Kingdom of Italy dealt with the meticci underline the difficulty of accessing metropolitan citizenship for people living physically – or metaphorically – on the border between the society of the colonized and that of the colonizers. In the former case, Sengal Workneh was perceived to have offered too great a service to Italy during the war for the Kingdom to deny him the Italian citizenship he so longed for. In the latter case, military utilitarianism trumped racial prejudices through the practice of mass enrolment. In the end, Minister Colosimo's words have proved telling – providing the historian with a useful compass to navigate the problems surrounding citizenship in the Italian colonies during the First World War.
