Search

This article provides an assessment of the British perception of Italy's reality during the period of non-belligerence and of British political, diplomatic, and military responses from September 1939 to June 1940. It analyses the alternative options available to British political and military officials and evaluates the decisions they took during the period under consideration. It concludes that British political and military officials accurately understood Italy's situation and Mussolini's desire to join the war on Germany's side. However, they rightly reasoned that Italy's entry into the war depended on the outcome of the Western campaign. It was only if and when that campaign had been decided that Mussolini would make his move. Given this, the choice to concentrate British forces against Germany rather than dispersing them by opening new fronts or expanding the existing battlefield was reasonable. Had the Anglo-French allies managed to repel the offensive in the West, the threat of Italy's intervention would have been averted. It can therefore be argued that London's decision to refrain from engaging Rome militarily was not due to a lack of awareness regarding Italy's vulnerability, but rather to a strategic doctrine aimed at defeating Germany through a long war of attrition. This decision showcased a shrewd understanding of the prevailing situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of only four men to represent Britain as ambassador in Rome during the interwar period, Sir Percy Loraine's tenure in the Italian capital lasted just over 400 days and ended with Italy's entry into the Second World War. This analysis explores three areas of Loraine's ambassadorship in Rome, showing that he was a reliable, robust, and respected representative suited to dealing with Italian Fascism. First, it examines Loraine's views towards Italy as he worked to promote cordial Anglo-Italian relations prior to the outbreak of the war and during the period of Italian non-belligerence. Second, it explores how Loraine dealt with Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator – whom he met only twice officially – and Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, with whom he built a strong rapport. Finally, it considers Loraine's relationship with his Foreign Office colleagues, which was strong and demonstrates a continued agreement with and respect for the ambassador's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vast exhibition of Italian art held at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1930 was treated by Francis Haskell in his last book, The Ephemeral Museum (2000). However, the general questions raised by this Anglo-Italian collaboration prompt deeper consideration. The time period covered by this exhibition, the mediums included, and the Renaissance examples chosen all bear further scrutiny, both against the background of public collections, exhibitions, and art pedagogy in England, and especially in terms of the Fascist regime in Italy and its evolving policies regarding Italian art and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Italian Hospital in London was a voluntary hospital founded in 1884 to provide medical assistance, on a charitable basis, to the Italian community in the UK. Research conducted in local archives, contemporary newspapers and book literature, reveals the importance of the Hospital in the context of Anglo-Italian relations, whose developments it closely mirrored. An interplay between social, political and medical factors shaped the Hospital's fortunes until its closure in 1990. These factors include: the presence of a large community of poor Italian immigrants in need of the Hospital's services, its role as a symbol of UK - Italy cooperation and later as a political tool used by the Italian fascist regime, and the impact of the foundation of the National Health Service. With post-war prosperity, integration of the Italian community within British society and availability of free healthcare, the raison d'etre for the Hospital ceased. Today, only the elegant building in Queen Square remains to testify to the past of this institution and its importance for Anglo-Italian relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of balancing are under assault. On theoretical and historical grounds, realists and non-realists challenge the claim that states balance against shifts in aggregate material capabilities. In addressing these claims, this article presents a more granular and finely tuned theory of balancing. It contends that states do, in fact, balance effectively. While foreign policy leaders regularly ignore aggregate power developments, they do disaggregate power to identify threatening states and target their balancing against specific threatening elements. Targeted-balancing theory explains why some historical cases coded as under-balancing are really instances of appropriate balancing; why a more powerful state's military buildup, or alliance formation against a weaker state, can constitute balancing; and why some instances of non- or missing-balancing against a more powerful state do not undermine balance-of-power theory. I provide support for my claims through an analysis of Britain's balancing against Germany and Italy between 1936 and 1939. Rather than under-balancing, or failing to balance altogether, London target-balanced against the specific threatening elements of German and Italian power. Given that power is rarely fungible across elements, London ranked other components of their power as secondary, and even last, in terms of Britain's rearmament priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of British relations with the states of pre-unification Italy is a neglected field of enquiry. The research that has been undertaken has tended to focus on the generally good relationship Britain shared with the Kingdom of Sardinia, the state which presided over Italy's national unification between 1859 and 1861. By contrast, the extent to which Britain's poor relations with the Papal States, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and the impact that negative perceptions of those countries had upon the development of British sympathy for Italian nationalism, are little understood. This article on British reactions to what the Victorians perceived as religious 'persecutions' in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany begins to redress this imbalance. Tuscany was in many respects one of the more progressive states in the Italian peninsula. Its government was moderate compared with those at Naples and Rome, it was affluent and it invested in a modern communications infrastructure. However, during the years following the revolutionary upheaval of 1848-9, the Tuscan state's policy of religious retrenchment led to a sequence of events - some of which involved British subjects - which were perceived as examples of religious 'persecution' in Victorian Britain. British reactions to these events illustrate the extent to which religion could affect British foreign policy during the mid-nineteenth century, and they help to explain the emergence of British sympathy for the Italian nationalist cause during the 1850s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1960s the debate on the technological gap between Europe and the United States inflamed both shores of the Atlantic. In this scenario, two countries stood out with their proposals to overcome the issue: Italy with her "technological Marshall Plan" and Britain's project for a European Technological Community. Although different in scopes and limitations, both proposals originated from the desire to exploit the issue of technological gap for political purposes. The article addresses the political reasons behind these converging strategies and their effects on Anglo- Italian relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the image of Empire developed in public discourse in Italy during the late Liberal period and Fascism by placing it in the context of representations of the British Empire, with which Italian imperial ambitions were compared. There is a continuity in seeing the British Empire as the expression of industrial and commercial modernity and its resultant strength, but what in the Liberal period was seen as an unparalleled superiority became under Fascism a supremacy acquired in a particular period but now exhibiting signs of decline, which Fascism should contest and surpass. Admiration of the British was mixed with disparagement: key figures expressed a competitive resentment towards Britain and its dominant international position, seeing it as the epitome of ‘modern’ imperial power against which Fascism was destined to be measured. In the 1930s signs of the British Empire's decline were sought, developing the idea in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that British domination would also rise and fall, and announcing the replacement of the ‘British order’, founded on commercial modernity and the strength of money and capital, by Fascism's new civilisation, with its authentic heritage of imperial romanità. This competitiveness towards Britain, which historiography has principally seen as a component of foreign policy (as was clear over Ethiopia), has additional significance when seen as an element of political culture that relates to the concept of the State. The autonomy and strength of the State were an important feature of Fascism's self-representation and of its legal culture, and in this light the possession of an empire came to be seen as an essential aspect of statehood and power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the views of English historical works on the history of conflict between Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and city-states in the Lombard region of Italy in the period from 1152 until the 1210s. Topics discussed include the reasons for English interest in the Lombard region, the political relationship between England and Italy during this time, and the sources of English historical information on Italian city-states.

By the close of the twentieth century, the Italian presence in Scotland had become increasingly romanticised and glamorised. This paper illuminates the ways in which Italian immigrants who arrived in significant numbers in the late nineteenth century were subject to racialising discourses, which laid the groundwork for the overt and aggressive manifestations of hostility endured when war was declared between Italy and Britain in 1940. By analysing interwar narratives of childhood ethnicity, this paper illustrates the extent to which the alienation of the war years built upon a pre-existent sense of not ‘belonging’ amongst second generation Italians. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper maps the UK itineraries of Garibaldi panoramas from the liberation of the South, in 1860, to Garibaldi's visit to London, in 1864. Garibaldi panoramas’ initial fortunes stemmed from the marketing impresarios’ ability to harness the potential of a form of spectacle that drew its content subject from the accounts of the extraordinary events unrolling in Italy, reported in the press. The paper shows that, while the popularity of the genre reached its peak in early 1861, this rapidly waned, despite the marketing efforts sustained by travelling panorama impresarios. In linking the decline of this entertainment genre with the spread of the negative press surrounding the newly established Italian parliament, this study contends that the decrease in popularity of the Garibaldi panoramas amongst British audiences found root in the growing, prosaic press accounts on Italy which came to undermine the newsworthiness of these spectacles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an account of British poet Samuel Rogers's poem "Italy" within in context to the Britain's post-Waterloo visual?verbal culture. It examines the ways in which Rogers responded to developments in the commercial print market like growing popularity for keepsakes and annuals, dependency of the publishing market on word-image constellations and changing relationship between Italy and Britain. Also talks about the growing purchasing power of female audience.

This article examines the changing attitude of the Sicilian statesman Francesco Crispi towards Britain between the 1850s and the end of the century. While Crispi had enormous admiration for Britain, and recognised that Italy had much to learn from its political system, he also acknowledged that the British constitution was the product of a long process of historical evolution and could never be imitated slavishly in Italy. From the end of the 1870s in particular, Crispi felt that Italy could not concede the degree of freedom permitted in Britain until the state had completed its work of what he called ‘political education’. As prime minister in the 1880s and 1890s Crispi looked to an aggressive foreign policy to strengthen Italy's beleaguered institutions, and he counted on British support to achieve this. The refusal of Britain to back him in the way he hoped left him perplexed and ultimately disillusioned about what he had felt was a special friendship between the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the British perceptions of contemporary Italy and Italian politics. Through the use of a number of sources (parliamentary debates, governmental documents, newspaper articles and interviews) it argues that Italy is not perceived, within Great Britain, as a great power within the European system nor it is viewed as a peripheral actor. Rather, it suggests that Italy seems to have finally found in the post-Cold War scenario its proper role-a European middle power, with important responsibilities within a regional sub-system. A frequent request-and expectation-coming from British politics and society is that Italy should take on more international responsibilities, even in the sphere of defence-as the different readings of Italy's role and leadership in Afghanistan and Lebanon reveal. However, Italy's ability to play this role is believed to be hampered by several factors: its uncertain political situation, its unwillingness to engage in military operations, its reluctance to respect international commitments and its structural economic problems. As a result, further possibilities of cooperation with other international partners as well as its potential for autonomous action on the international stage are, in several cases, precluded. Moreover, if the relations between Italy and the UK are usually seen in a positive way, and Italy is viewed as a reliable partner, the nature of the cooperation between the two countries is often considered to be fragile and based on short-term common interests and strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Peace Treaty of 1947 required Italy to renounce sovereignty over its former colonies. Italy and Britain, although NATO allies, bitterly disputed the disposition of Tripolitania and Eritrea. The Italian government sent agents to Tripoli and Asmara to influence local populations in favour of its policy of independence for both regions. The agents ran espionage operations: developing networks of agents, purloining documents, bribing officials, and channeling illegal funds to local political parties. Dr Matteo Gallimberti, the Italian agent in Tripoli, faced accusations that he was embezzling funds. After he committed suicide in January 1950, local British military authorities discovered the full range of his illegal activities. Rather than publicly embarrass the Italian government, British Foreign Office officials coerced concessions from the Italian government in exchange for keeping the potential scandal concealed. The affair demonstrates the fractious nature of Anglo-Italian relations within the framework of the NATO alliance and the respective foreign policy-making elites' differing and self-interested approaches to development and security issues in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the 1863 Anglo-Italian Commercial Treaty as a case study for a wider analysis of the relations between the newly unified Italy and Britain. The importance of this treaty lies chiefly in its peculiarity, mainly due to the fact that the British proposed the inclusion of a religious clause in its text. This clause was meant to protect Protestant missionaries operating in rural parts of Italy, where religious intolerance was still frequent. The resulting confrontation showed the extent to which lack of communication between the Board of Trade and the Foreign Office hampered the pursuit of British policy aims, reflecting the then fashionable combination of free trade and Protestantism to promote a form of 'anglicized globalization' in Southern Europe. This resulted in the frustration of British commercial interests as defined by the Chambers of Commerce. The present article throws new light on the multi-layered nature of the British engagement with Italy, which involved different economic and religious pressure groups, and confirms Peter Marsh's thesis about the inadequacy of the British commercial approach to continental Europe in the age of free trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of Florence, Italy, in the period from 1917 to 1940, with reference to the British Institute of Florence, historian Harold Goad, and his work "History of the British Institute of Florence," and the history of Fascism in Florence and in Italy. Topics discussed include the foundation of the British Institute, and the political and cultural background of the Institute, other cultural institutions and cultural trends concurrent with the founding of the Institute, and the history of the British-Italian League for intellectual, political, and economic ties between Britain and Italy in 1916.

The article summarizes the doctoral theses "The United Kingdom and the European Community's Common Fisheries Policy, 1971-1983" by Martin Lukas Gellermann and "Italy and Great Britain During the Sixties, Regarding the First Enlargement of the European Community" by Stefania Rampello. Topics discussed include the supervisors and juries for the respective dissertations, exploration of British exceptionalism in Gellerman's thesis, and basis of the thesis by Rampello.