This book offers readers of English information and interpretations about Fascist Italy which are familiar to Italians but not to those unable to read Italian. It adopts a traditional approach, so it favors description over theory and objectivity over subjective perspective, and it offers tentative rather than settled conclusions.
Because the arguments and interpretations in this book are unfamiliar to readers of English, I have tried to give it a solid evidentiary base. For more comprehensive evidentiary bases, I refer the reader to the scholarly studies cited in the notes and listed in the Bibliography.
I have been reading and writing about Italy for more than forty years, with occasional forays into Croatian, American, and Yugoslav history. I have benefitted greatly from the advice and insights of friends and colleagues, who have influenced both how I “do” history and how I view Fascist Italy. I cannot list them all, but I would like to thank Robert von Maier for urging me to continue to write; Casimir Dadak and H. James Burgwyn for commenting on the chapter dealing with “fascist” economics; Frank de Zwart and Stanley Payne for improving my grasp of methodology; and Maria Spirova for showing me how to design a model and deal with theory. The Leiden University Library has been a precious resource, and I am grateful to Nina Ball-Pesut for correcting my grammar and my citations, to Marcella Mulder for shepherding the manuscript through the review process, and to the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions on how to improve it. Finally, I thank my wife and my daughter for their support and never complaining that I was spending more time with my computer and some old books than with them.
James J. Sadkovich
Leiden, July 2024