An Imperial Education for Times of Transition 145

Chapter 7 An Imperial Education for Times of Transition: Italian Conquest, Occupation and Civil Administration of the Southeast Aegean, 1912-23

Valerie McGuire

Rhodes to us … Do you want to give it to us? The prisoners hurried to cede Rhodes to us. The gunner, crossing his arms and staring at each one of them in their eyes, spit out the syllables: – Constantinople for us … a rush of dismay swept over the crowd of listeners … These Italians are becom- ing truly insatiable!1 ⸪ In 1912, a spate of chronicles by Italian nationalists made its way into the popu- lar press propagating a narrative that was only partially true: decisive victory over the Turks in Libya and the island of Rhodes was going to vindicate hun- dreds of thousands of Italian emigrants who had been forced into diaspora across five continents by giving them a homeland in the overseas spaces of the Mediterranean.2 In his popular and well-known account of the Aegean inva- sion, Luigi Federzoni represented the Italo-Turkish war in the thick dialect of a Neapolitan gunner spitting out Italy’s victories to Turkish prisoners of war. The list of conquered territories did not end with Tripoli, Homs, and Tobruk, or even Rhodes and other Aegean islands, but went all the way to Constantinople and the vast territories of ‘Asia Minor’. It was proof that Italy’s historically back- ward ‘South’ could also be a beacon on modernity in a fabled ‘East’.

1 ‘-Rodi a nuie … Ci ‘a vulite dà? I prigioneri intimoriti si affrettano a cedere anche Rodi. Allora il cannoniere, incrociando le braccia e fissandoli a uno a uno negli occhi, spiccica le sillabe: -Custantinopule a nuie …un moto di sgomento corre nella folla degli uditori … Questi italiani sono diventati davvero incontentabili!’ Giulio de Frenzi [Luigi Federzoni], L’Italia nell’Egeo (Rome, 1913), p. 108. 2 Enrico Corradini, Sopra le vie del nuovo impero (Milan, 1913), p. 127.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004363724_009 146 Mcguire

By taking the Dodecanese in 1912, Italy forced the Ottoman Porte to concede defeat in North Africa and to sign the Treaty of Ouchy. Fringing the coast of Anatolia, the thirteen Dodecanese islands provided a strategic pivot for Italy’s larger imperial ambitions. Federzoni’s celebratory account of the Italian vic- tory in Rhodes was prescient of projects to come in the aftermath of the First World War. In 1919, when Ottoman collapse unleashed the Greco-Turkish War and a new scramble for territory among European powers in the eastern Mediterranean, the Italian government dispatched part of its navy stationed in Rhodes to make a bid for an enlargement of Italian territory in such famous cosmopolitan port cities as Constantinople, Izmir and Antalya. Although Italy’s Asia Minor campaign failed when the Turkish army succeeded in repuls- ing the advance of both the Italian and Greek armies, the longer term conse- quences of the invasion were to place Italy in a position of considerable bargaining power three years later. In 1923, when the Second Treaty of Lausanne was signed to resolve the fate of all former Ottoman territories in the Aegean, Italy achieved permanent sovereignty over the thirteen so-called Dodecanese islands, and further, the tiny island of Megisti or Kastellorizo, which had been under French control since 1915. Annexation of the islands to Italy occurred despite one treaty, never ratified, in which Italy promised to deliver the Dodecanese to Greece, and an active press and letter-writing campaign by Greek nationalists who pled the cause for the integration of the islands on the basis of Woodrow Wilson’s tenets for the rights of national self-determination. Annexation of the Dodecanese to Italy did not come as much from left field as Greek historiography has typically maintained.3 It was the result of two mutually informing processes: on the one hand, Italy’s longstanding commitment to promote its imperial interests in the Mediterranean, and on the other hand, the decline of the Ottoman empire, which had meant the partial introduction of the European capitulations for the non-Muslim natives of the islands. This had created a situation in which imperial governance was normative and, in many ways, advantageous for the local population. Scorned early on as ‘ragamuffin’ (the term is Lenin’s), the Italian empire has typically been perceived as idiosyncratic. In their first critical assessments, major postcolonial theorists observed that Italy’s ‘subaltern’ empire, focused on establishing favourable economic conditions for Italy’s emigrants, was

3 For a recent example of how Greek historiography has treated the Italian invasion as the start of an unwanted tyranny, see Zacharias N. Tsirpanlēs, Italokratia sta Dōdekanēsa, 1912-1943: allotriōsē tou anthrōpou kai tou perivallonto, prologos Ēlia E. Kollia (Rhodes, 1998)