On Mussolini's Propaganda Abroad

I’m sorry, but this is just not a very good study. Fortunately, since its time of publication, it has been surpassed by Fascist Italy and the Middle East, 1933-40. This is a pretty general study of Italian Fascist propaganda in Middle Eastern portions of the British Empire. Williams argues that Fascist propaganda was an expansion of Italian foreign policy during the interwar years in order to spread the Italian Empire throughout the Mediterranean. The end goal was to persuade colonized subjects to overthrow their overlords while expanding Italian influence to those same peoples (while, hopefully, allowing Italy to establish those regions as colonies). Williams has trouble grasping these contradictory aims, and I’ve had the same problem in my own research, as they are so far at odds as to be an illogical foreign policy.

I think the primary problem with this study is Williams’ choice of source material. The bulk of the sources here are from British archives or are secondary sources in the English language. There are some published Italian primary sources, and it looks like the author did spend some time in Vincennes, but a lot of her answers would likely be found in the archives of the postcolonial countries that she studies. I don’t know much about the state of Palestinian archives, but the Egyptian archives have a quite dynamic record left by more local colonial agents and local police officers. Patching these together, it’s possible to get a good impression of the état d’esprit developed by foreign propaganda and foreign influence. I know from my own experience that French police officers wrote quite a bit about the impact of Radio Bari on Tunisians, and I’m nearly certain that the British did much of the same and these materials could be found in Egyptian archives. There’s also a ton of material that French and British officials produced about the case of Palestine which can be found at the French colonial archives in Aix-en-Provence. By thinking more closely about source material used, Williams could have put together much better and multi-dimensional answers to the questions asked in this text.

I can’t, in all honesty, recommend this text to anyone. Perhaps it might be useful for those interested in the spread of propaganda for its own sake. However, a work like this needs to dive deeper and probe the experiences and expectations of people who actually lived in a space, especially, in this case, colonized subjects who lived in the Eastern Mediterranean. While sources found in surveillance archives need to be handled with care, they could surely be used better than this.