In the Introduction to this impressively researched and nuanced study, the author sets out clearly its objectives: ‘to investigate the workings of the Italian fascist regime to nationalise and fascistise Scotland’s Italian community for its political and ideological purposes’ (p. 1). The community in question was small, with an estimated 6,000 members, 3,300 of whom were children, the majority born in Scotland. Conventionally, its members have been regarded as primarily work-oriented and individualistic, resistant to collective initiatives. Petrocelli demonstrates effectively how Fascism managed to engage a substantial section of this community through the conscientious efforts of bureaucrats in Rome who supported over a long period Scotland’s emergent and eager fasci. Importing Fascism is about both Fascist intent and Fascism abroad and about how Italians and people of Italian descent used the political, social, cultural and economic opportunities offered by the regime for a multiplicity of ends.

After a useful overview of the Italian-Scots community before the First World War, the book follows the setting up of the various local fasci in Scotland, their social and political activities as well as their attempts to educate Italian-Scottish children. A chapter on the Ethiopian war details the enthusiastic fund-raising of fasci members in support of the campaign and how the invasion changed local perceptions of both Italians and Fascist Italy. The final chapter on Italian antifascists in Scotland identified in the files of the Casellario Politico Centrale adds an unexpected epilogue to Fascism’s interest in a minor transnational community. Petrocelli’s work is grounded in extensive research undertaken in the Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri and the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome as well as in archives in London and Edinburgh. He draws thoughtfully on Italian and English-language press sources of the period and more selectively on later biographical accounts of the prewar experience of the Italian-Scots community. The range and detail of his research results in a full account of the Fascist state’s project to transform the daily lives of Italian-Scots and challenges the obdurate belief that that the fasci were merely apolitical social clubs.

Petrocelli focuses on Glasgow and Edinburgh, where the majority of Italian-Scots lived. A substantial percentage also lived in small towns, especially in central and north-east Scotland, often thriving economically and socially in relative isolation. Petrocelli notes this ‘bimorph phenomenon’ (p. 69) acknowledging that his sources only effectively record the activities of the fasci in the two largest cities. Attempts to establish and maintain branches in peripheral areas had only intermittent success. The fasci in Glasgow and in Edinburgh were set up on the initiative of members of the local Italian community in late 1922 and early 1923 respectively. The founders were on the whole small business owners aged between 28 and 52. In Edinburgh, but not in Glasgow, they had all been involved in some way in the First World War. As the 1920s progressed, the Glasgow fascio in particular organised a range of social and recreational events that drew community members into its orbit. The Dopolavoro and later the fasci femminili offered opportunities beyond work and family. Films, books and journals including La difesa della razza were sent from Rome. The range of films included newsreels and major propaganda features such as Camicia nera and Il grande appello. Petrocelli probably overstates the claim that ‘fascist cinema … effectively “modernised” the Italian-Scottish diaspora’ (p. 58) given that other evidence does indicate that some Italian-Scots at least were keen consumers of American and British films. One of the abiding problems of understanding the life of this small and often dispersed diaspora is the nature of its relationship with the wider local community, including with a Roman Catholic Church that was largely dominated by Scotland’s much larger Irish immigrant population. If inter-marriage was rare, albeit by no means unknown, friendships and other intimacies as well as enmities with non-Italians add texture to the lived diasporic experience. The support given to the fasci by Scottish religious and civic leaders from their inception until the mid 1930s shows that the Italian-Scots diaspora never functioned as an enclosed community.

Importing Fascism builds on the work of historians such as Claudia Baldoli, Terri Colpi, Lucio Sponza, and Wendy Ugolini, complicating an uncertain story of consent, consensus, resistance, and sheer opportunism. Carlo Tronchetti and Mario Olivieri, two of the most dynamic fasci leaders, were exposed for using their influence for personal gain. The entrepreneurial Tronchetti ended up being expelled from the PNF in 1932, while Olivieri defrauded customers of the Italian Bank through which he funded many local fasci activities. Petrocelli convincingly shows that the activities of the fasci were political as well as social. Commemorations of the March on Rome, the very popular ‘raduni inter-coloniali’, active participation in the ‘grandi raduni’ or organised pilgrimages to Rome, the establishment of a Casa d’Italia in Glasgow in 1935, as well as the naming of children attest to some level of ideological engagement. Glasgow, always leading by example, had the first school in Britain organised by the fasci, yet although the material used to instruct Italian-Scots children in the Italian language carried a strong Fascist message, its success in ensuring loyalty to Mussolini is hard to demonstrate. Italians in Scotland continued to apply for British citizenship and to enlist in the British armed forces.

My one criticism of this very rich volume is its relatively thin index. It omits, just to give two examples, any mention of historians Emilio Gentile and Kate Ferris, who are referenced in the text, and whose work has left a clear imprint on the author’s understanding of how the regime worked and how people interacted with it. Otherwise, this is a fine contribution to the historiography of the regime and to diasporic culture. Petrocelli is honest in recognising that his archival sources do not always offer a factually reliable account and interpretation of events. Later accounts may show this archive in a different light, yet they will never obliterate its substance.