In the last decade Donna R. Gabaccia has spearheaded American efforts to compare and theorize about Italian emigrant workers in the Americas and Europe. In the 1980s she published two monographs that followed village-outward methods to examine the culture and politics of Sicilians in the United States. Her two books under review here, one edited with Fraser Ottanelli, are bursting with insightful comparisons and reflections upon Italy's “many diasporas.” They illuminate Italians' diverse roles in nation-building processes, how international and national commitments mingled, reinforced, or qualified one another, and how emigration shaped the history of modern Italy. Italian Workers of the World, the fruit of a well-coordinated international research project about the Italian working class on three continents, brings together essays that speak to one another across historiographical and linguistic traditions thanks to Gabaccia's and Ottanelli's editorial discipline. Italy's Many Diasporas showcases Gabaccia's gifts as a synthesizer of literature from many languages, and as a careful and concise historiographer. Both books are timely contributions that add empirical weight and measured theorizing to studies of transnationalism and international history.

Gabaccia and Ottanelli divide their collaborators' essays, originally presented at a conference in Tampa, Florida in 1996, into three chronological parts. Gabaccia and Fernando Devoto investigate the role of elite political migrants whose efforts to cultivate national solidarity before and during the wars of Italian unification (1830–1870) brought Italian laborers in Europe and South America into the revolutionary camp more quickly than their counterparts on the Italian peninsula. Gabaccia stresses the importance of Italian regions and cities as reference points for Italians-in-the-making abroad before the Risorgimento culminated in the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Devoto shows how, in Argentina, diplomatic agents of the Kingdom of Sardinia loyal to the House of Savoy helped convert republican supporters of Mazzini and Garibaldi into followers of King Victor Emmanuel and his leading minister, Camillo Benso di Cavour.

The five essays in part two address class, nation, and internationalism in the Americas during the mass proletarian migration from the 1880s to World War I. If republican or national ideologies had limited success transcending class boundaries among emigrants before the Risorgimento, the reworking of those ideologies by the 1880s severely limited ethnic solidarity as class factors took on increased importance in both rural and urban environments. Carina Frid de Silberstein's analysis of rural militants in the Argentine Pampas demonstrates the limits of italianità when the Federación Agraria Argentina, founded in 1912, eventually lost the support of the elite Italian reformists and reworked more radical symbols from Argentine civic life to reach other radical agriculturalists and not middle-class ethnic Italians. Similarly, Michael Miller Topp, in his exploration of the Lawrence strike of 1912, acknowledges that ethnic solidarity could be used to foster class solidarity. But cathartic moments when middle-class prominenti might support Italian mill workers were exceptionally rare. Topp explains how gender, class, and divergent notions of the Italian nation divided the ethnic community. In both Argentina and the United States radical ethnic brokers constructed conflicting visions of the meaning of the Italian nation and the true significance of the host society. While Carlo Tresca, for instance, left Lawrence with an intensified connection to a multiethnic North American working class, Edmondo Rossoni considered support for the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) and for an imagined, radicalized America mutually exclusive.

The four essays in part three of Italian Workers of the World analyze how working-class leaders and movements in the Americas and France forged an international antifascism during the interwar years. In Argentina and France national labor movements had encouraged multiethnic mingling in pursuit of universalist ideals and Italians in those nations melted into unhyphenated Argentines and Frenchmen, respectively. In the United States, however, a xenophobic mainstream labor movement committed to moderate reform had already consolidated workers into segmented labor organizations separated by race and ethnicity. Because antifascism linked Italian workers to Italy and to the countries where they worked, national and international solidarity were not in opposition. Pietro Rinaldo Fanesi explains how Italian antifascists in Latin America employed the Garibaldi tradition to both contest the legitimacy of fascism in Italy and ease their transition as new citizens of Italian origin. Ottanelli, like most of the authors in this volume, tracks leaders and activists. His essay on Italian American antifascism demonstrates how their class-conscious struggle against fascism renewed Italian American workers' sense of ethnic identity as it offered “a vehicle through which they were incorporated into US society” (179). Antonio Bechelloni takes up the important problem of sorting out types of antifascists in France, and he illuminates the vague boundaries between political and economic migrants from Italy.

Unlike previous edited volumes that bring together essays on Italians outside of Italy, Gabaccia and Ottanelli have more or less successfully nudged their contributors to engage common questions and themes, and their rich introduction helps the reader draw comparative conclusions. Thus, even though some of the authors synthesize work from already published books—such as Elizabetta Vezzosi on Italian American socialists, Topp on Italian syndicalists in the United States, and Nadia Venturini on Italians and African Americans in Harlem during the Ethiopia War—the volume successfully asks and answers difficult comparative questions about class, nationalism, and the position of labor movements in nation building.

Gabaccia's concise historiographical essay, Italy's Many Diaporas, written for the Global Diasporas Series edited by Robin Cohen, synthesizes a vast array of material into a readable and accessible analytic narrative. Attune to the diverse uses of terms such as “diaspora” and “transnational” in different social scientific contexts, Gabaccia herself is not quite convinced that the dispersion of people from the lands that would become modern Italy in 1861 constitutes a single diaspora. In addition, she is adverse to employing “Italy” or “Italian” as a stable and meaningful ascription of the people within the Italian state. After “hedging the terms ‘Italian’ and ‘diaspora’ with many qualifications,” Gabaccia explains, she “nevertheless believe[s] it heuristically helpful to imagine the possibility of a single Italian diaspora” (9).

Reaching back into the late medieval period, Gabaccia quietly aligns herself with historians who see continuities between early modern migrations and the monumental century of mass migrations that began in post-Napoleonic Europe. She investigates how elite early modern Italian artists, traders, and missionaries exported civiltà italiana as representatives of the cultural center of European civilization. Even as sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italy declined as an economic and political force when the center of power and commerce shifted toward the Atlantic from the Mediterranean world, migrants from Italy's many patrie, such as Venice, Rome, or Genova, exported civiltà italiana long before the mass proletarian migration of the nineteenth century. This civiltà italiana, however, was not a sturdy foundation for modern nationalism constructed by elites struggling to unify a politically fragmented peninsula into a modern state in the nineteenth century.

Chapters that follow investigate modern Italian nationalism during and after the proclamation of the Italian kingdom in 1861, and follow similar themes explored in the essays of Italian Workers of the World. Gabaccia argues that “neither Italy's creation nor the movement to define a new nation of Italians can be understood apart from the country's migrations and many diasporas” (35). Her synthesis of scholarship on the exodus of Italian workers after 1880, their transnational way of life, the mingling of national and international sensibilities among those workers of the world, the international struggle between fascism and antifascism in the interwar years, and Italy's postwar character as a receiving nation, reads primarily like the work of a labor historian discussing the relationship of class to nationalism. Gabaccia only offers passing notice to the presence of the hostile Vatican in Rome, its territorial claims to sovereignty over central Italy, and its exhaustive diplomatic efforts to weaken and unravel the Italian kingdom, activities that constituted the greatest threat to the new state before 1890. This “Roman Question” deeply conditioned Italian foreign policy and approaches to emigration. Italy's Many Diasporas does not do full justice to the problem of a revitalized and militant antimodern Catholicism in Italy and the many states receiving Italian emigrants. Furthermore, while I would agree that Italian distrust and even hostility toward the state was terribly important, I wonder whether Gabaccia makes too much of it when it comes to the diasporas where consulates often became significant players in “colonial” politics, and authentic symbols of the nation. These qualifications reflect, in part, the still underdeveloped state of scholarship on political Catholicism and migration, and on the role of consuls in Italy's diasporas.

Notwithstanding these reservations, Italy's Many Diasporas offers the best analytic survey of any single national group of emigrants viewed over the longue durée and framed within a global context.