The Unscrupulous Prospector, the Ethiopian Elite, and Italy’s Frustrated Imperialists:

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So good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to

our winter speaker series at the Center for

European and Russian Studies at UCLA. And also,

happy Valentine's Day! I'm Laurie Kain Hart,

Faculty Director of the Center and professor

of anthropology and global studies.

So thanks to our audience for joining us

today and to our wonderful speaker and

respondent whom I will introduce in a moment.

As is our custom here at UCLA, I want to

acknowledge that we are here on the unceded

territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples

who are the traditional land care takers of the

Los Angeles Basin and South Channel Islands.

As a land grant institution occupying

this ground, we pay our respects to the

ancestors, elders and all relatives and

relations past, present and emerging.

I'd also like to thank our Center's

Executive Director Liana Grancea,

and Outreach Director Lenka Unge, for

their contributions to today's event.

We at the Center are especially interested

in understanding the global, transnational

and of course, imperial and colonial past and

present of Europe's global context and impact.

Today's lecture on the evolution of 20th

century Italian imperialism in Ethiopia,

in the context of both liberal and fascist

governments, speaks directly to that mission

and we're grateful to professor Turtur

for sharing her research with us.

So let me introduce her. Dr. Noelle Turtur is

Eugen and Jacqueline Weber Postdoctoral Scholar

in European History at UCLA. Her research

focuses on the relationship between migration,

business and imperial power. Her manuscript

“Making Fascist Empire Work: Italian Enterprises,

Labor, and Organized Community in Occupied

Ethiopia, 1896 to 1943” analyzes the role

of Italian enterprises in the Italian

colonial project in the Horn of Africa.

She received her doctorate in history

from Columbia University in 2022.

So we are also grateful to have with us

respondent, Professor Hollian Wint. Professor

Wint is assistant professor in the Department of

History at UCLA. Her work spans the Indian Ocean

from East Africa to the Indian subcontinent.

Her first book project took her to archives

in Zanzibar and mainland Tanzania, Gujarat and

Bombay, as well as London and Washington, DC.

She teaches on Africa and the Indian Ocean,

the history and anthropology of money and debt,

global history and the history of Islam.

In both her teaching and research,

she explores the intersection of gender,

political economy and material culture,

as well as innovative historical methods.

So my thanks to both of you for being here.

A note on logistics. Audience members

can put their questions into the chat box,

not the Q&A, but the chat box at the bottom of the

screen at any time during the talk or discussion.

And we'll ask the speakers to respond to

as many of them as possible after the talk.

So with that, I will turn the podium over to

our speaker for The Unscrupulous Prospector,

the Ethiopian Elite and Italy's Frustrated

Imperialists: Alberto Prasso, and the Evolution

of Italian Colonial Strategy in Ethiopia

from 1905 to 1935. Thanks, professor Turtur.

Thank you, everyone, for

being here today.

At 22 years old, Alberto Prasso, like so

many Italians, set off to seek his fortune

first in America. His life up until then had been

nothing extraordinary. We know that he was

born in May 1871 in Mongardino

d'Asti, a Piemontese hill town of about

and Prasso obtained a sixth-grade education.

He left from La Harve and arrived at Ellis Island

in December 1892, en route to join some relatives

in Santa Cruz, California. Although Prasso arrived

a few decades late for the California Gold Rush,

there is no doubt that prospecting for gold became

Prasso's lifelong obsession. After California,

he went to Alberta and then to Alaska. In 1898, he

was prospecting in the Transvaal in South Africa,

and three years later he traveled up to Rhodesia,

to Katanga in King Leopold's Congo Free State.

A few years later, he arrived in Addis

Ababa, taking the caravan from Djibouti,

and he traveled along with an British officer

who introduced the feverish prospector to the

Ethiopian imperial court. According to Prasso's

shine to the Italian adventurer. He appointed Ras

Wolde Giyorgis, the governor of Kaffa and general

in Menelik's southwestern campaigns, and Ras

Tasemma Nadaw, the Amhara governor of Iluu Abbaboor,

born to be his baldaraboch, or his

patrons and intermediaries with the court.

Between 1903 and 1905, Prasso accompanied

Ras Wolde Giyorgis to Kaffa and throughout the newly

conquered western regions of Ethiopia on a mission

to lay down the telegraph and telephone line

linking these regions to Addis

Ababa. Over the next few years,

Prasso took several trips to western Ethiopia

to identify potential mineral deposits. While

the Italian Legation in Addis would have certainly

noted the arrival of another Italian in the city,

by then, the population had dwindled substantially

to just a few dozen, following the release of

most Italian prisoners of war taken at Adowa, the

Italian Consul Count Colli di Felizzano considered

him just another speculator who, to paraphrase,

was neither particularly cultured nor bright.

Yet Colli sat up with attention when

Prasso walked into his office in March

had been awarded by Emperor Menelik.

The concession, according to Colli's

letters to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,

granted Prasso the right to search for

precious metals in southwestern Ethiopia.

The area is marked in red on the map, which

Colli drew for the Ministry's reference. The

concession, known as the Baro Concession, was later

estimated to cover over 70,000 square kilometers.

Colli doubted that Prasso would be able to turn

that concession into a profitable enterprise.

Likely, he even doubted Prasso would survive

his prospections. The low-lying, water-logged

regions were rife with tsetse flies and

malaria, making the region difficult

to traverse and inhospitable to both humans

and pack animals. Further process would have

to ingratiate himself to local authorities and

people as Menelik's concession made clear that

the court would not intervene on Prasso's behalf.

Menelik's control over the region at this

period and time was limited at best. There was

frequent conflict between the lowlander Anuyaa,

the Oromo living in the high plateau,

some of whom were strategically allied

with Menelik's government for periods and

the Amhara military governors appointed to

rule rebellious people and exact tribute

locally to support their imperial armies.

Even if Prasso survived his prospections, the

agreement granted him a mere three years to

locate any precious metals and demonstrate that he

could exploit them. A virtually impossible task.

Nevertheless, the concession

caught Colli's interest for its

sheer size and strategic position.

Lying along the contested border with

the newly proclaimed Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and

south of Lake Tana, Europeans' geographical

knowledge of the region remained scant.

The British military and the Italian

Geographical Society had both sent missions to

study and map the region and its many rivers,

including the Baro and the Birbir, that fed Lake

Tana, which was the source of the Blue Nile.

Moreover, these rivers produced new trade

routes. The Baro river known as the Sobat

in Sudan was navigable during the rains, and

as a result, goods in southwestern Ethiopia

could now travel to Khartoum and then

up the Nile to the Mediterranean rather

than overland across Ethiopia into the Red Sea.

The importance of these rivers to the Nile and

this region's potential wealth in minerals,

as well as ivory, coffee, rubber and

people made them particularly interesting

to Emperor Menelik, as well as the British,

who would do anything to ensure the steady

flow of the Nile waters. The Italians and French,

by contrast, understood that Britain's laser focus

on the Nile waters offered up opportunities to

carve out concessions for themselves in Ethiopia.

In 1906, the three European powers made a treaty

dividing Ethiopia into zones of influence. The

British surrounding Lake Tana. You can see...

British surrounding Lake Tana, which would be

this region here. The French controlling the

rail line from Djibouti to Addis Ababa and the

Italians were given kind of vague promises about

Western Ethiopia. Prasso and this concession

were thus of great interest to the ministry.

Prasso, for one, for his knowledge of the region, its

resources, politics and people in its concession

as a concrete example of Italy's economic

and political interest in its so-called

zone of influence. In his missive

to Rome, Colli warned his superiors that it would

"be a shame for the concession to fall into

foreign hands." However unlikely, if

Prasso ever managed to discover mineral riches

in the area and then succeeded in obtaining a

permanent concession to mine them, he would

have immense tract of territory at his disposal.

True, the concession was granted to Prasso as

a private citizen and not as a representative

of Italy, but to Consul Colli that was tantamount

to obtaining a small slice of Ethiopia for

la grande patria just a decade after Italy's

failed attempt to occupy and colonize Ethiopia.

Over the next 30 years, the Italian Foreign

Ministry and its representatives in Addis

hungrily eyed Prasso's concession

and the companies he formed from it.

Colli deemed Prasso to be an unscrupulous and

single-minded operator whose only goal was to

exploit his concession. In other words, the man

could not be trusted to further Italian imperial

interests. Time and time again, the ministry

attempted to secure Prasso's concession in Italian

hands by trying to arrange for Italian investors

to buy a controlling share of Prasso's company.

With each disappointment, their appetite

only grew. Studying Alberto Prasso and his

strategically located concession from 1905

to 1935, I trace the evolution of Italian colonial

strategy in Ethiopia, from the immediate wake

of the Italian defeat at Adowa in 1896,

to the eve of the Italian invasion in 1935. Within

these years, I identify three phases in Italian

imperial strategy. The first I called emigrant

imperialism, and dated roughly from 1896 to 1927.

The second I referred to as economic

penetration. And this was the language

used precisely by the regime itself, and it dated

from around 1927 to 1934. And the third phase,

of course, was the violent occupation.

And this began more or less in 1934 and 1935.

Drawing on historian Mark Choate's concept of

emigrant empire, I argue that emigrant imperialism

relied upon small Italian entrepreneurs and

adventurers like Prasso using their own

resources, as well as local contacts and knowledge

to develop enterprises in parts of the world

like Ethiopia, Tunisia, Brazil and Argentina.

From the perspective of the Ministry of Foreign

Affairs, supporting such enterprises required

little attention and public resources. At worst,

their legal troubles and various demands were

headaches for the Italian legation. At best,

an enterprise like Prasso's could bring an immense

tract of territory under Italian influence and

produce scarce gold for Italian state coffers.

However, emigrant imperialists were unreliable.

The government always doubted if their loyalties

lay with the Madrepatria or if these men were

more attached to their countries of settlement,

or in Prasso's case attached to Ethiopia,

or if they were only allied with their own kin

and themselves. While emigrant imperialism was

characterized by the Italian government aiding

Italian entrepreneurs, emigrant entrepreneurs,

and their varied and uncoordinated

industries in hopes that these resulting

enterprises might benefit the metropole,

economic penetration was state-sponsored

coordinated investment in distinct regions.

Economic penetration differed from emigrant

imperialism on two major points. First, the

fascist regime sought to aggressively draw in

the capital and interests of Italian capitalist

classes. These people and their capital,

according to the regime's ideology, would provide

the spiritual as well as economic and political

basis for colonization. Second, the

regime sought to strategically and intentionally

target specific regions for exclusive

Italian economic and political influence.

Ultimately, economic penetration was

intended to lay the groundwork for

imperial expansion broadly defined.

Thus many commercial enterprises connected to

this policy were involved in infrastructure

projects such as roads and port facilities, and

these companies engaged in espionage and built

relationships with local elites in order to erode

the central power of the Ethiopian imperial court.

Finally, the Italian imperialists frustrated with

their efforts, resorted to a violent invasion and

direct occupation. Studying Italian colonial

strategy in Ethiopia from the post-Adowa period

to the eve of the fascist invasion also reveals

certain continuities. First, Italian colonial

strategy in the Horn of Africa was largely

carried out by the same group of nationalists and

experts affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign

Affairs and the Italian Geographical Society.

These men were the experts on both the

region, in both academic

and diplomatic circles. For the most part, they

were committed nationalists and imperialists who

had no qualms of accommodating themselves

within the fascist regime and pursuing the

same policies more vigorously. Second, Italian

colonial strategy in all three phases relied

upon the labor, capital, and expertise of African

Italians and members of the Ottoman diaspora.

Italian imperialists in the Ministry of Foreign

Affairs believed that Italian enterprises in

Ethiopia, like Prasso's, could be financed

through a combination of state and private

capital and ultimately used to secure

Italian interests and engage the Italian

population in colonial projects. The rest of

my book manuscript reveals these same kinds

of common combinations persisted throughout the

Italian occupation of Ethiopia from 1936 to 1941.

Third, while illustrating the Ministry of

Foreign Affairs' persistent interests in Ethiopia

and the escalating force they are willing to use

to achieve their aims, I do not understand this as

evidence of the regime's long-standing intention

to invade and occupy Ethiopia. Rather, I argue

that the Italian regime developed many strategies

to destabilize and exploit Ethiopia and its people.

They understood a military occupation as one

among many of these strategies. Thus, as dead as

this debate may be in Italian history, I think

it is worth repeating, especially in the imperial

context, and given current circumstances that

the fascist regime and its strategy in Ethiopia

did not represent a break with the policies

pursued by the liberal Italian state. Rather,

the fascist regime built on these strategies

and was willing to carry them out with greater

force and intention than its predecessor.

I am thus emphasizing the Italianness of

this imperial strategy as opposed

to its fascist particularities. So

how did an Italian from Mongardino d'Asti

obtain an extensive concession in western

Ethiopia just a few years after the Italians'

failed invasion? I argue that Alberto Prasso

obtained its concession by the mere luck of being

in the right place at the right time. But he was

able to maintain his concession over many years

by effectively tacking between his identities

and connections with Ethiopia and Italy.

He was, in my opinion, the quintessential

emigrant imperialist. Prasso spent his first

years in Ethiopia conducting mineralogical

surveys in the southwest, which Menelik was

in this time attempting to incorporate into

his empire through both brute force and strategic

alliances. As a surveyor, Prasso frequently sent

news and accounts of the people

he met, the resources he saw,

and the places he traveled to Ras Tasemma,

the Amhara governor of Iluu Abbaboor,

and Ras Wolde Giyorgis, the governor of Kaffa.

He even sent news to court. This information

likely helped each of these men coordinate and

conduct raids to extract tribute and punish

local people who resisted their authority. Thus,

from his first years in Ethiopia, Prasso likely

served as an agent of the Ethiopian Imperial

bureaucracy and its rule in southwestern Ethiopia.

Similarly, I understand Menelik's decision to grant

Prasso a concession, another strategy for

extending the Ethiopian imperial rule into

southwestern Ethiopia. Menelik granted numerous

concessions, including to foreigners in this

region in these years. Granting a concession

gave substance to the Empire's territorial

claims and allowed the court to collect new

tax revenue without necessarily forcing the

emperor to dedicate soldiers or to wage war.

Concessionaires alone would be responsible for

negotiating with people locally and rendering

their enterprises profitable. It cost

the emperor little to grant a concession,

but if the concessionaire were

successful, the emperor could

rely on a secure flow of tax revenue from

a region formerly outside of his control.

While luck may have secured

Prasso's concession initially, it was

his skill as an emigrant imperialist that

allowed him to keep it for the next 30 years.

Like many Italian emigrants, Prasso cultivated

ties with key people in his country of settlement,

namely the emerging Ethiopian imperial

bureaucracy, while maintaining his identity and

status as an Italian and a European. His ability

to engage with all three groups allowed Prasso

not only to keep his concession in the midst

of immense political turmoil within Ethiopia,

but also to manipulate a succession of financiers, who

were eager to obtain a share of Ethiopia's riches,

but ultimately ignorant of the country.

The first person who tried to remove the

concession from Prasso's hands was the Italian

Consul in Addis, Colli. Count Colli repeatedly

tried to interest reliable, patriotic Italian

investors in becoming majority shareholders in the

company, which Prasso formed to finance a survey

missions and eventually exploit the concession.

As majority shareholders, the

company in this concession

would remain in Prasso's hands in name only.

But Colli's aspirations were quickly dashed.

Italians were reticent to invest in imperial

ventures. Indeed, most Italians did not trust the

banks, let alone the stock market, and preferred

to invest in family businesses or real estate.

To address this problem, the Ministry of

Foreign Affairs and Italian imperialist

developed various investment vehicles

such as the Società Coloniale Italiana,

which was founded in 1907. Backed primarily

by capital from the Ministry of Finance,

these companies were created to invest in

concessions in Ethiopia and allow Italians

to expand their commercial and political

influence relative to the British and French.

Colli's attempts to interest these

groups, however, were to no avail. No

matter how reassured they might have been

by government offices, first and foremost,

they aimed to profit for their shareholders. Each

time, these enterprises declined for two reasons.

First, they could not invest the capital that

Prasso demanded. And second, they deemed the

investment too risky. They were unsure of the

potential mineral resources in the region,

and they were not convinced that Prasso could

secure a permanent contract. In the Ministry of

Finance and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

ultimately did not have the leverage or if they

did, the willingness to use it to force these

companies to invest and process enterprise.

Unable to attract Italian investors, Colli

reluctantly realized that the legation had

little choice but to support Prasso in

his many legal battles with successive

financiers. Between 1907 and 1921, Prasso's

financiers included a Greek banker based in

Alexandria named George Zarvudachi, the Italian

Panelli brothers, likewise based in Alexandria,

who were suspected of smuggling arms and

other things in southwestern Ethiopia,

and a group of British investors that included

Miles Backhouse, the former governor of the

Bank of Abyssinia, and John Ramsden, one

of the largest plantation owners in the

Straits Settlement, now known as Penang, and in

British East Africa. Each of these partnerships

quickly soured. Prasso financiers accused them of

spending money irresponsibly, of overselling the

concessions potential and of never using the money

invested to actually begin mining operations.

By all accounts, Prasso's included, he

accepted this money but never began mining,

let alone making the promised fixed capital

investments needed to create an efficient,

modern mining operation. Each in their turn sued

Prasso for failing to abide by their agreements.

In these legal battles, Prasso used his

knowledge of Ethiopian law and his

connections in Addis to secure favorable outcomes.

But he did not rely on his Ethiopian allies alone.

He also kept the Italian legation duly informed

about his legal battles, which in turn defended

Prasso against his foreign investors as a means

of extending Italian influence. For example,

when Prasso's first business partners, the Greek

banker and the Italian smugglers, filed a lawsuit

against him in the Mixed Tribunal in

Alexandria, Italy's local diplomatic

representatives were alerted to the case

by friend Ferdinando Martini, an important

Italian statesman, diplomat in the Horn, and the

former governor of the Italian colony of Eritrea.

Afraid that the concession might

"fall into foreign hands,"

Martini encouraged the Italian authorities to,

and I paraphrase here, interest themselves in

the case, such that the concession, once freed

from pending legal matters, could be placed in

the hands of Italian capitalists. While there

is no proof that this political intervention

influenced the outcome of Prasso's lawsuits

in Alexandria, it is worth noting that in

both cases, the court sided with Prasso.

But the tribunal's decision once handed

down was moot. The Ethiopian court had, in the

intervening years, nullified Prasso's concession on

the grounds that no work had been undertaken. With

the contract nullified, Prasso requested a new

concession covering the same area, which was

granted. This maneuver thus freed Prasso of his

legal obligations to give to his financiers, while

also allowing him to develop the same concession.

The episode reveals that Prasso was able to

draw on his connections to the Italian Legation

and the Ethiopian Imperial Court to defend his

interests when challenged by foreign investors.

Perhaps Prasso's emigrant imperialism can best

be exemplified by his own family. In his memoirs,

Prasso recounts being “given” a

woman, who he calls Uoletta Miriam,

although that certainly would had not been the name she

was born with, who had been taken captive

by a subordinate of Ras Wolde Giyorgis in a

raid in the Omo delta in southern Ethiopia.

Ouletta Miriam more or less remained with Prasso for

the remainder of her life, serving as guide,

translator, caretaker and concubine.

She bore him a son, Adolfo, around 1906.

Likely, Prasso saw his son's mixed heritage as

an asset in that, Prasso believed, his cultural

competencies and his heritage entitled him to

an insider status in both Ethiopia and Europe.

Unlike many Italians at the time, Prasso

immediately registered Adolfo as an Italian

citizen. He had also educated

first in Addis Ababa in Alexandria before

sending him to Europe to study in Turin and

then at the Royal School of Mines in London.

Prasso designated Adolfo as his heir, had

him trained as an engineer and appointed

him to direct the mine, as well as

negotiate with European financiers.

Over time, Prasso's ties with the Ethiopian

imperial court appear to have grown stronger, even

after his initial patrons, Ras Tasemma and Ras

Wolde Giyorgis died and southwest Ethiopia became

more closely enmeshed in the Ethiopian empire.

In November 1922, Prasso obtained a second

concession, known as the Birbir Concession.

This concession was much smaller, but much more

wealthy. It included the mineral-rich region of

Jubdo. In his memoirs, he credits Ras Tasemma's

son, Dejjach Makonnen Endelkachew, with securing the

concession on his behalf. At this point, Prasso

must have felt quite secure in his influence.

Dissatisfied that the concession only allowed

him to survey, and not exploit, he enjoined

the Italian minister in Addis, Vivalba, to

raise the matter with Ras Täfäri himself.

Prasso also lobbied the court personally,

and he eventually won his concession with the

right to exploit whatever minerals he found. Thus,

in these years, we see that Prasso

single mindedly sought to secure and

exploit his concessions in Western Ethiopia.

To that end, whenever he needed to make a new

business deal or renew his concession, he used

his knowledge of Ethiopia, its languages,

customs and law, and his connections with certain

members of the elite to his advantage. Likewise,

Prasso was also aware of the strategic location

of his concession and its importance to his

native Italy. He thus counted on the Italian

authorities to repeatedly intervene on his behalf.

As many emigrant imperialists before him,

Prasso tacked between his identity within

Ethiopia and within Italy to secure

his concessionary rights, which,

if unintentionally, maintained Italy's claim

to the Foreign Ministry in Western Ethiopia.

Fascist regimes seizure of power in 1922 did

not ultimately bring wholesale change to the

Foreign Ministry or the Ministry of Colonies.

The political appointees such as the Minister

and the Undersecretary would change, but the

offices were largely stacked with experts,

such as the ethnologist Alberto Pollera, the orientalist Enrico Cerulli,

and the diplomat Jacopo Gasparini, whose

knowledge and contacts made them irreplaceable.

Moreover, there was little need to replace these

men. They were mostly patriotic nationalists

who shared the fascist regime's ambition to

solidify the nation's independence and power

abroad by building an empire. As the fascist

and the established diplomatic corps

accommodated one another in Rome, they

largely pursued an intensified version

of the Liberal government's policy, using the same

companies such as the Società Coloniale Italiana.

Mussolini relied on nationalists such as Luigi

Federzoni to direct foreign and imperial policy.

As Minister of the Colonies, Federzoni

called on “the courage of private capital” to

undertake “audacious overseas enterprises”.

Federzoni and others believe that Italian

capitalists would provide the economic and

political foundation for the colonization,

as well as a kind of spiritual leadership.

Prasso and his mining concessions received renewed

attention from the ministries after he arranged

for his company to be presented as an investment

opportunity to the Italian Geographical Society,

Italy's most important imperial lobby presided

over by Federzoni in early 1924. The concessions

were made retain their strategic value, while their

mineral value, material value increased as the

Birbir Concession began to produce important

quantities of platinum for the global market.

The concession thus remained valuable to Italy,

but Prasso remained a liability. The ministry

spent the next years trying to make the

Italian electrochemical giant, the firm

Montecatini, the majority shareholder

in Prasso's company. They argued that the

firm had the resources and expertise to

exploit the mineral deposits and secure the

concession rights on behalf of the regime.

Montecatini was Italy's largest copper, pyrite, and

fertilizer producer. In addition to fertilizers,

the company operated hydroelectric

power plants in Italy and Tunisia,

a French protectorate with a large Italian

population. At the same time, Montecatini

as securing an alliance with Mussolini

that would make the firm the primary fertilizer

for the nation during the Battle for Grain,

the regime's campaign for food autarky.

While the regime was working to

aggressively interest Montecatini,

Prasso was busy pursuing other investors.

He dispatched Adolfo to negotiate with Paribas

bank, which frequently collaborated

with the Italians on foreign investments

and charged him with forming a stock company

with French investors to develop the Birbir

Concession. Adolfo was also sent to London to

see if he could interest investors there as well.

Perhaps considering how his prior investors had

withdrawn so quickly, Prasso wanted to form

multiple companies on his concessions, dividing

it into multiple zones with respective rights in

order to have a more conservative, secure footing.

Yet, Prasso responded enthusiastically

when Colli informed him of Montecatini's

intention to invest in Prasso's operations.

He wrote to Colli that he was rushing to Rome

to meet with Montecatini's representatives,

delightfully weighed down by the 12 kilograms

of metal he had mined that year. But news of

Prasso's travels quickly dried up. Apparently, the

Baro and Sobat river river became too shallow

to navigate, effectively stranding

him in Jubdo. Colli and the Italian Legation,

however, assumed Prasso would cancel his

dealings with the French and the British

as they had instructed and make an agreement

with Montecatini. To ensure Prasso's concession

was not canceled, Colli intervened directly with

on Prasso's behalf with Ras Täfäri,

informing him of the work Prasso

had undertaken and the company that

Prasso was about to form.

Prasso, however, had other plans.

He went ahead and formed his French company,

approving it with the Ethiopian Minister of

Mines, all the while keeping the Italian Legation

in the dark by strategically bribing a postal

worker in the Legation's telegraph office. The

whole episode thus is largely reminiscent of

Colli's attempts to interest companies

in Prasso's concession a decade earlier.

Except in this case, Prasso effectively

served to deceive the Italians.

While this time the regime was able to strongarm

a suitable firm into investing, Prasso continued

to operate as an emigrant imperialist, drawing

on his connections and resources in Ethiopia,

as well as the competition between European

powers for economic influence in the region

in order to make the most favorable deal.

And the Italian investors were simply not

offering the best deal. Prasso in addition to

his company with Paribas made agreements with two

British companies and by 1932 was rumored to be

in talks with Consolidated Goldfields, an immense

British mining company with operations in the

Transvaal, Australia, Siberia and the Americas.

So this whole episode marks a turning point for

Italian imperialists, at least with

respect to the relationships to Prasso.

They grew increasingly convinced that the

Ethiopian government was intentionally favoring

the French and the British over

Italian, but Federzoni sought to cool their

heads. He argued that it remained in Italy's

interest to work quietly through companies rather

than create a diplomatic route. Frustrated by the

fact that the Italians could not raise enough

capital to finance concessions like the British,

French, Germans and other imperial powers,

an official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,

likely Count Luigi Orazio Vinci-Gigliucci,

the future minister in Abbis, proposed in

commission to study economic enterprises in

Ethiopia and to systematically present enterprises to

Italian investors. But such a commission would

be able to kind of sift through requests and

identify enterprises worthy of such investment.

And here you can see some of Prasso's mining

operations. Tracing how the Italians obtained

possession of Prasso's concession reveals a

subtle, yet significant transformation in Italian

political strategy. The liberal and early fascist

regime's desultory efforts to encourage private

investment in imperial enterprises, developed

into a muscular action plan that brought together

skilled men from Italy's diplomatic corps in the

financial class and specially designed investment

vehicles, which combine public and private

capital, all backed by the state's course of force.

Referred to by Italian diplomats

themselves as economic penetration,

this policy aimed to use Italian

investment to strategically and

systematically target specific regions and

resources for exclusive Italian influence.

They engaged more Italian capitalists in

undertaking and managing these enterprises.

And finally, economic penetration served to

erode the power of the Ethiopian imperial

state. Many commercial enterprises connected

to this policy aimed to construct and control

key infrastructure such as roads and ports.

They also served as political cover for Italian

agents to sow division between regional

elites and the Ethiopian Imperial Court.

This new imperial strategy and its relationship to

previous strategies is best illustrated by Jacopo

Gasparini, the central architect of the fascist

regime's economic penetration and geopolitical

action in the Horn of Africa. In

his obituary, written by his fascist colleague,

he is described as a man who was "born to

the colonial politics of old Italy" and

was still "attached to some

ideas of the surpassed

tactics of the colonial administration."

As such, Gasparini could articulate

the differences between the fascist Italy's

new colonial strategies and that of its

predecessors. This he summarized up as

"I worked for 20 years having

only weak governments at my back and an Italy

that didn't want any problems. Now we have at

our backs a strong government and a strong Italy.

We all know how to take vigorous political action."

Gasparini thus argued that Italian

colonial strategy under the fascist regime

did not differ from the liberals in terms of its

content, but rather in terms of the resources, the time,

men and money that they were willing to dedicate

to pursuing their ambitions. Under Gasparini's

leadership, the fascist regime's Ministry of

the Colonies and Ministry of Foreign Affairs

developed even more powerful companies such as the

Società Anonima Patto Italo-Etiopico, simply known

as SAPIE. Backed primarily by state capital,

like their predecessors, these companies also

engaged private investors and entrepreneurs from

Italy's dynamic industrial class. In the case of

SAPIE, Gasparini brought in Antonio Marescalchi,

a manufacturer of seaplanes who participated in a

large consortium of manufacturers, banks,

and airlines aimed at making Italy an

international hub for air travel. Together,

Gasparini and Marescalchi represented the new

Italian imperialism, which merged Italy's dynamic

industrial and financial class with its cunning

liberal diplomats and bureaucrats who knew how to

operate with little capital and little spectacle.

Gasparini quickly dispatched Marescalchi to Paris,

where he was to befriend Prasso, who was again in

legal troubles with his French financiers and

convince them to invest with the Italian SAPIE.

Meanwhile in Rome, Count Vinci, soon to become

the Italian Minister in Addis Ababa, sought

to secure funding that SAPIE would need to

buy the majority stake in Prasso's company.

Vinci made two interrelated political and

economic arguments. First, he argued that neither

the British nor the French had abided by the 1906

agreement, which he claimed had assigned Western

Ethiopia to Italy. He argued that the British now

were no longer interested in Lake Tana

alone, but also in all of the Trinity tributaries

feeding into the source of the Blue Nile.

He suggested that Prasso's British partners

were agents of the intelligence services.

Secondly, he argued that Italy needed to secure,

through immense financial extensions and force,

if necessary, concessions like Prasso's in order

to combat Britain and France's domination of

the global economy. In particular, Britain's

privileged place and its access to gold had

produced financial capitalists to a degree

unseen in Italy, which then invested in

concessions like Prasso, which in turn brought

more gold and more platinum to British shores.

Citing the amount of gold acquired in the past

two years by the British and French banks,

Vinci argued that they were insulating their

economies against global turbulence. Writing

just a few weeks before Italy left the

gold standard again in December 1934,

Vinci's arguments about Italy's persistent

structural disadvantages in the global economy,

even in its own zone of influence in remote

Western Ethiopia, must have made Mussolini smart.

State financing to push a private stock company

to purchase a mine in western Ethiopia must

have appealed as an apt solution to the problem

that Vinci presented. Vinci concluded,

"It is necessary to act if we do not want also

this area of our interest to be irremediably

compromised. We can no longer content ourselves

with pieces of paper and the rights that these

pieces of paper give us.

But we must look

to give them substance by

taking action. Like all other powers do,

where they can and as they can, especially the

British." Vinci's reports reveal the degree of

resentment that many Italian officials, be

they nationals, fascists or liberals, felt

towards the British Empire. They argued that

the British Empire size and resources created a

structural inequality amongst the European powers,

especially Italy, and that the British sought to

obscure this under the mantle of individual

rights, free trade and private enterprise.

The thinking was that this inequality allowed

Britain to take more than its fair share of the

globe's resources, including gold and platinum, and that only

an active, dynamic policy of coordinated public

and private investment could

shift the scales in Italy's favor.

Fully persuaded, the Ministry of Finance

authorized increasing SAPIE's financing,

not once, but twice in order to allow

it to secure Prasso's French company.

Ultimately, it was not the British firms that

stood in SAPIE's way, but it was Prasso and

his friends on the board of the French company.

Twice, Marescalchi and Gasparini tried to obtain

a majority share position in Prasso's French firm,

and twice they failed. Only in 1935 did SAPIE manage

to obtain the majority share first, because one of

the British firms created as a subsidiary of the

French company, had decided to end its contract.

And secondly, because Prasso's French investors,

whatever their affection may have been towards

Prasso himself, decided it was safer to go with

the Italian group, seeing the escalation of

conflict along the border between the Italian

colony of Eritrea and Ethiopia. The experience,

however, confirmed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

long held belief that Prasso, even now in his

sixties, could not be trusted to place national

interests over his single-minded pursuit of gold.

Moreover, Prasso's close ties to the Ethiopian

government made him a threat to the company,

which had been bought at such a high price and to

the Italian invaders. A few months after SAPIE

seized control of his company, Prasso was secretly

arrested and imprisoned for two years. All of

his business correspondence was sent through SAPIE's

representatives in order to hide his arrest and

ensure that Prasso did not manage to

resecure his concession again, say by having

Haile Selassie declare the concession void in

re-awarding the same concession again to Prasso.

As it happened, dozens of times within a year,

the Italian army was pushing to occupy Prasso's

concession using their informants and Jubdo,

who included Prasso's son, to negotiate with

the Ethiopian resistance comprised of the

Western Oromo Confederation and the Ethiopian

Provisional Government in Illu Abbaboor.

Ultimately tracing the evolution of Italian

colonial strategy from the turn of the century to

the occupation of southwestern Ethiopia in late

little. What did change under the fascist was

the Italian government's willingness to dedicate

unprecedented resources and to use coercive

force to substantiate claims to Ethiopia's land,

people, and real or potential resources. In the

immediate wake of Adowa, Italy used emigrant

imperialists or concessionaires like Prasso to

extend its commercial and political influence.

Emigrant imperialists provided

interpersonal connections, local knowledge

and linguistic and cultural competencies which

were invaluable to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

as it attempted to extend Italy's reach into

overseas markets and its political influence.

Yet the imperialists were dissatisfied with

the kind of material and political gains that

could be made using the strategy, especially in

Ethiopia. In diplomatic treaties and negotiations,

they perceived that their interests and

so-called rights were constantly being

subordinated to those of the British and French.

This was matched by the fact that the Italians,

even with the support and active engagement

of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, could

not force a marriage between an Italian

capital and concessions like Prasso's.

In response, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

sought to rewrite Italy's perceived structural

disadvantage through economic penetration of the

Ethiopian market or the targeted investment of

specific regions and industries, backed by immense

state financing, partnered with experts from both

the ministry and private enterprise, as well as

the convert coercive force of the fascist state,

both within Europe and in Ethiopia.

The fascist regime was willing to use

ever more men, money and force

to achieve this end. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Noelle, for that

amazingly interesting and intricate landscape

of imperialism and commercialism in Ethiopia.

And Hollian, let me turn to you for the

commentary at this point. Thank you. Sure. Well,

thank you, Noelle, for that fascinating exploration

of the various stages, strategies and tensions

of Italian Empire in the Horn of Africa.

I'm going to keep my comments somewhat brief

because I'm hoping that we'll have some great

questions. And I'm going to warn everyone that

I'm coming at this as an Africanist rather

than a Europeanist. So I'm sure that some

of the questions that I'm going to pose

are going to be somewhat different from

some of the Europeans' in the room.

I'll start with one of the things that I

thought was most compelling about the paper,

which was actually the methodology. And so

I think this is a really excellent example

of how biography can produce micro histories of

global dynamics. And so through this kind

of rather juicy story of Alberto Prasso, I think

it's actually more juicy in the written version,

the chapter that I've read. But through

this story, you are able to trace

both the financial networks and the often very

intimate politics that formed what you're calling

emigrant imperialism. So that's a new concept

to me, this idea of emigrant imperialism.

And I think it would be fruitful for us

to unpack that a little bit further in our

discussion today. And so in particular, when I

was reading your paper and in listening to the

presentation today, I found myself comparing

the dynamics described to imperial contexts

that I'm perhaps a bit more familiar with.

So I'm thinking here of work on various company

states in South and Southeast Asia, and the

sort of Creole societies that we've got in

Batavia, for example. But also more recent work

on international investments and European family

firms this use of the term family firms, in

intersecting Atlantic and Indian Ocean trades,

including the financing of the

Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades.

And also, to a certain extent, these new

histories of capitalism, a new histories

of infrastructure and extractive economies

in Africa. And so I guess my first kind of

overarching comment or question really is about the

utility and necessity of thinking across empires.

So I think this is a particularly pertinent

question for the Horn of Africa. As you show,

this was a site of intense imperial competition.

So this is really a key space from which we

might be able to counter or at least nuance the

British-French bias of much of the scholarship

on European colonialism in Africa. And so

I'd like you to say, I'd like to invite you

to say a little bit more about the position

of Italian Empire in that historiography,

and also to open up a broader discussion

of the character of continuity between

liberal and fascist empire that you're drawing.

And I've noticed in the beginning of your talk, you

made a point that this was a sort of,

these were Italian strategies, you're

really quite specifically talking about Italian

Empire. But I do see comparisons across that. So

I'd like to ask you to sort of say a bit more about

how you are situating Italian Empire more broadly.

I also thought it is very interesting that

towards the end, you're really kind

of emphasizing the particular limits to Italian

capital that maybe the British did not experience

in the region. So that comparison, I think,

is very useful in thinking across empires in a

connected way as well as in a comparative one.

But of course, the whole was not just the site

of European empire, of competing European empires.

Perhaps in some ways the most important player in

Prasso's story was the Ethiopian Empire. And you

also allude to the Ottomans in the region, the

long history of the Ottomans in the region. So

I'd love to hear a little bit more about that.

So, you know, we've been discussing this recently,

the sort of Ethiopian exceptionalism, right?

The idea of the Ethiopian Empire

and also the sort of infrastructures that

it put into place in the region are

really at the heart of this, still

I would say, somewhat pervasive idea of Ethiopian

exceptionalism in the regional scholarship.

So it's obviously been long celebrated as a rare

African holdout against European imperialism.

But this more recent scholarship has

also investigated Menelik and his successors

as their state, as an agent of colonialism

itself, right? As a form of colonialism that

is in some ways comparable to the European

empires that are competing in the region.

And my understanding

of this is, this is particularly

a scholarship that is concerned with

Western Ethiopia, Southwest Ethiopia in

terms of the region of expansion, but also

a region of kind of continuing tributary

relationships with existing states

and local elites in the area.

And so I was also interested in, you suggested,

you made a comment about the relationships that

the Italians were trying to establish

with these local elites in Western Ethiopia.

And so I think that would be something that would

be interesting to hear more about. And also,

I would like to invite you to kind of explain a

little bit more about how you're intervening on

complementing these histories of African empire

or non-European empire in the region.

So I think there are two themes that really

stand out in your paper that help us to think

about empire in useful ways. The first is

what Fred Cooper et al.

have termed "the tensions of empire". And, you know,

when I was writing this before, I was thinking

that the Alberto Prasso's story really draws our

attention to these tensions between the incessant

mobility of capital and the imperatives of

territorial control. But there's also a sort of,

you know, that quote that you had on pieces

of paper really got me thinking about also the

kind of tensions one might have between kind

of speculative capital and colonial capital.

And so kind of these, I mean Prasso, he's

such a interesting character. He's quite a

naughty historical character in many ways. And

he's sort of in tension with sort of conservative

capitalists in the metropole as well.

So there's several kind of tensions that I think

his story brings out. The second is this question of

intermediaries, which is a topic that's

received quite a lot of attention in studies of

indirect rule in Africa, or I think you allude

to this idea of informal empire and this

resurgence of interest in the informal empire.

And obviously, Alberto Prasso, he relied very heavily

on various kinds of African and possibly even

Ottoman intermediaries. And it was

these connections with patrons,

rulers and enslaved Ethiopians, and the woman

that he had a child with was very interesting

to me. Obviously, these various kinds of

relationships are really at the heart of

his tense relationship with the Italian state.

But I also thought it was very interesting

to kind of turn that question of intermediaries on

its head somewhat and think about how if we unpack

the imperial strategies of the Ethiopian state

in perhaps a sort of a longer historical view,

we can maybe think about how Prasso was also

acting as an intermediary for the Ethiopian

Empire and that is maybe a way into kind

of thinking about the nature of the Ethiopian

state and the ways in which it is interacting

with other imperial projects in this moment.

So that kind of returns me to method. I think, I

mean, you've excavated a really impressive array

of sources to build this picture of Alberto

Prasso's life. And I do think that there is,

I'm sure there's something to be said about

what sources are available for writing this

history from a different perspective,

maybe more of an Ethiopian perspective.

And I know this is not necessarily what you are

most concerned about, but it is something that

I'm interested in. And so one of the things that

I guess I could, I want to ask you finally is to

what extent can we maybe use a micro history

of Prasso's life as a lens through which we

can actually foreground more consistently the

actions and opinions and conceptual frameworks

of the Ethiopian actors, with

which he is interacting. I am thinking there

in terms of, there is some, at least in your, in

what I've read, reference to his relationship to

Ethiopian laborers, but also I got a sense that

maybe he's also working with Ethiopian traders as

well. And so just sort of trying to use

this micro history in a way that gets at

these varied actors in a different way.

I'll leave it at that. Shall I respond?

Thank you so much, Hollian. I want to discuss

all of this more with you and have some book

recommendations I'll ask for. But I think the

best place to begin is kind of with more of a

background on Ethiopia itself, which I kind of

cut from this talk in part because of length.

But Ethiopia and I think perhaps the most

important historiographical source I was working

from, as I was writing this case study,

is actually [. . .] PhD dissertation

and he writes precisely following the

publishing of Neocolonialism and

British Gentlemanly Capitalism

and Overseas Expansion. And he's looking at

the Gambella concession, which is a British

trading post operated on the Baro River,

but also comes up in his account because he's

actually such a fake figure that because of his

role as this intermediary, as you say, between

the Ethiopian imperial state and this periphery

and his status as a European, which in a sense

gives him access in the way that other Ethiopians

were not given access to European financiers

and political circles. He's kind of continually

brought up. So I also thought it was important

to actually tell his story incomplete rather than

necessarily have him always as this

figure on the background.

So Ethiopia at this point in time, if we go

back in history, you know, the 19th century,

Egypt and the Ottomans are basically expanding

down the Red Sea coast. And when the

Ottomans basically fall back, the Italians come

in and take over these posts. And so this is

really much how the Italians become involved

in East Africa, they see these ports

like, it's just port cities, it's Massawa, it's

Mogadishu, they see them as opportunities and

then they slowly and slowly encroach further

and further and towards Ethiopia.

It's hard to say that was ever even, depending

on who was in power, there was more or a more

explicit and or a less explicit intention for

conquest. 1896 is led by [. . .] and he

has this idea of conquest, but it's very kind of

anomalous within the Italian state, which I think,

you know, the concept of the emigrant empire here

kind of comes in. And I returned to that in a minute.

So when the Italians arrive, when Prasso arrives,

kind of the most important people in Ethiopia

are, not the most important people, but

the people who are kind of creating networks

linking the Horn to wider European markets, and

the Indian Ocean, and wider African markets, are a

number of people who have kind of come with the

Ottomans and are part of the Ottoman diaspora.

So this includes a lot of Greek, Jewish, kind

of Leventine traders, Syrians who end up a kind

of operating strategic posts within the Ethiopian

government and within kind of Ethiopian commercial

society as bankers, as custom house owners,

including in regions like Illubabor.

And so these are the people that Prasso is in a

sense most akin to when he arrives in Ethiopia.

And you can see that actually Prasso's

predecessor and a predecessor concessionaire

is the man who was a Manchester-born

Syrian named Hasid Ydibli,

who is operating basically as its own

personal fiefdom, this region.

And he eventually gets transferred to [. . .]

to manage the tax revenue there. But

it's really a way for the Ethiopian state, which

doesn't quite hold these regions at this point.

As you know, direct occupational control to extract

tax revenue from them. And so this is kind of a

way in which Menelik who understands kind of the

limitations of his forces after 1896, is trying

to hold on to this territory, as the British

are claiming it, as the French are claiming it,

by actually substantiating that

territory through granting concessions.

And if you look at Ethiopian law, kind

of the very act of granting a concession is

a claim to imperial sovereignty because of

the way in which under Ethiopian law, land

is basically all public domain that

is then granted by the sovereign

to be used in more or less in different

indefinite periods to various individuals.

So it's really this act of extending sovereignty.

So Prasso comes in as this intermediary. I do

think he's very alike the Greeks and the Armenians

and these various Ottoman intermediaries. And

that's actually something that I bring up in

my next chapter is how the Italians try to

distance their settler population from these

kinds of intermediaries, because that's very

similar to Italian emigrant imperialism,

what I call emigrant imperialism.

I think it's very helpful to kind of go

back to the oldest history, the old renaissance

history of Italian merchant capitalism. And in that

Italians are migrant populations of a Genovese,

they kind of travel around the world. They

establish merchant houses and customs houses

in various port cities. They're not necessarily

interested in controlling vast amounts of land,

particularly because they just don't have the

resources, but rather in controlling kind of

nodal points and trade that allows them to either

make profits or to exact tax revenue.

So that's really kind of the role that these

immigrant imperialists are playing. They're

establishing businesses, they're placing

themselves as kind of networks that link the

Metropole to various parts of the world. And it's

not necessarily required a lot of state backing,

no state risk involved, but it does generate state

income in that these people send remittances. They

establish companies that are engaged in trading

with Italy and they kind of become important

people locally like Prasso, who if Prasso had been

so inclined, could have advocated for Italian

interests with the Ethiopian Imperial Court. I

actually have no idea whether he did or he didn't,

simply because those archival records

from the Ethiopian perspective are, to my

knowledge, entirely... I think they

exist, but I don't think they're available.

Of course, there's maybe another way I can get

about this, and I'm looking at published memoirs

and papers and things like that to kind of

understand who we interacted with, because he

interacted with incredibly important people.

Ras Tasamma, in the last year of his life as the

regent of Ethiopia after Menelik's death.

So there should be archival evidence

there. I just need to get through it.

So I want to kind of speak to these kind of

broader tensions and maybe I'll just kind of

answer one of your questions and then we'll

see if I can move on to Q&A, if there is any.

I think it's really important to kind of lift the

British and French bias and to also think kind of

across empires and think about these continuities.

And that's kind of one of the exciting things

about studying the Italian empire, is that

precisely because of these capital shortages,

it operates in a very different way. And in a

sense it doesn't confine to our neat geographical

borders. You know, this is the British Empire or

this is the French Empire, and in a sense shows

the certain porousness that might,

in my opinion, reflect a greater

reality of what imperialism was and is.

And so that's why I like to look at capital

and I like to look at businesses and I like to

look at people. And so I think thinking about Italy

and thinking also about Prasso's role in

kind of substantiating and expanding as an

intermediary of the Ethiopian empire really

changes the kind of narrative of British

and French contest over this region as kind of

the headquarters of the Nile and responsible for

feeding all of the Egyptian delta and

important agricultural investments there.

So I'm going to stop there. If there's any

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