A good deal of scholarly attention was rightfully devoted in 2018 to the history and legacy of the Fascist racial laws, to mark the eightieth anniversary of their enactment. Through conferences, exhibitions, journal special issues and other media, scholars set out some of the latest thinking on the nature, implementation and impact of the racial laws themselves, as well as on the broader Fascist racial-nationalist-imperialist project, often noting as they did the novel and disturbing experience of reflecting on this discriminatory legislation in the present-day context of an Italian political scene marked by Salvini's Lega. It is apposite that Eden McLean's book should also have been published during this anniversary year, dealing as it does with the investment of Italian primary education with Fascist notions of racial difference, and the deployment of the school system and other instruments of education to impart these notions to Italian children between 1922 and 1940.

McLean's book fits into the category of works that elucidate the place of race in the Fascist project to remake Italy and the Italians. Whilst the 1938 racial laws are discussed in some detail, they are part of a broader chronological remit that documents the ‘increasingly totalitarian policies and restrictive racial rhetoric’ (p. 181) that inflected school textbooks, pedagogical rhetoric and literature and other communicative media over the course of the ventennio. In McLean's reading, 1938 (or 1935-6, for that matter) did not constitute any sharp, pivotal moment of ‘racial turn'; rather she presents us with the long-term ‘racial accumulation’ or, as she also puts it, the ‘accretion’ of ideas of racial difference and discrimination in the Fascist education system, tracing these from Gentile's 1923 reforms to Bottai's 1939 School Charter. She tells us that ‘racism was always a central tenet of the Fascist project to create New Italians’ as an integral part of the bonifica umana which, if it were to successfully mould new Fascist men and women, would need to pay significant, if not most, attention to the country's children. Fascist ideas on youth, race and national regeneration were inextricably intertwined.

Despite the argument that racism was ‘always’ a part of Fascism, the book follows a chronological structure in order to set out the process of ‘accumulating’ racism within Fascist education as well as to show how ‘as the state increased its totalitarian reach, it narrowed its definition of the Italian race’ (p. 224). The book's introduction feels a little ‘scattergun’ in its presentation of key historical, historiographical and theoretical influences and lines of inquiry but is notably wide-ranging and stands out for its very useful outlining of the distinctions (but also often contemporary elisions) between the Italian terms stirpe and razza: the former denoting a vertical connection between progenitors and descendants, the latter a horizontal connection uniting a group of contemporaries through shared, heritable qualities. (In deploying both terms, Mussolini and others often stressed these as ‘spiritual', rather than ‘blood', connections, though they were still understood as heritable and innate.) Following this, four pairs of chapters set out the incremental development of ideas on race as these intersected with ideas about empire, gender, language, culture, biology, geography and landscape, history, and climate and were presented to Italian children via school textbooks, radio programmes, exhibitions, holiday camp and outdoor school programmes across four discrete – and quite familiar – time periods: 1922–1929; 1929–1934; 1934–1938; and 1938–1940.

Mussolini's Children: Race and Elementary Education in Fascist Italy is undoubtedly a very useful contribution to the field. It is impressive for its meticulously detailed and thorough exposition of Fascist pedagogical thinking and tools, particularly school textbooks, though it is also excellent to see these analysed as part of a suite of communicative and formative ‘tools’ including regime-organised exhibitions, radio broadcasts, Fascist Saturday and other out-of-school activities, children's magazines and postcards. Also notable, and very welcome, is McLean's ability to range widely across, but also to connect, a variety of formative institutions and venues – not only the formal schooling system, its classrooms and its texts, but also the instructive activities directed at mothers by the Opera Nazionale Maternità e Infanzia (ONMI), the colonie estive and climatiche, and the early-years-to-adulthood groups of the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB) that politicised children's ‘free time'. In addition, readers are treated to a detailed account of the ways in which selected key episodes in Italian history – most notably those of ancient Rome and, more recently, the wars of Risorgimentalist and unified Italy – and contemporary events such as the League of Nations’ sanctions and Ethiopian war were imagined and instrumentalised in relation to race. All of these aspects mean that the book is likely to become a principal and regular reference point for both students and scholars of Fascism, particularly for those working in English.

Certainly, Mussolini's Children is very much a top-down history of the presence of ideas about race in Italian elementary education. As a historian who approaches the history of the Fascist dictatorship from the ‘bottom up', and from the perspective of how its policies and values were received, experienced, lived and practised, I would have liked the picture of Fascist racism in its education system to be completed with discussion of how these ideas emanating from on high, and imparted via textbooks and other media, were interpreted and received not only by Italian children but also, just as crucially, by the people who mediated between textbook and child: Italian teachers. Of course, all readers read in and out of books the things that most interest and concern them: we historians are no different. It is impossible to meet and satisfy the concerns, curiosities and expectations of every reader. Still, the glimpses of ‘reception’ that we are afforded – the quaderno entry that opens chapter 4, the school diary entry and schoolchild's letter to General Graziani in chapter 5 and the mention at the opening of chapter 8 of ‘Miss D'Astore's’ speech about ‘autarky and race’ to her class in Soleto, near Lecce, in October 1938 – suggest not only that such source material exists, though sparse and with its own interpretative challenges, but also how richly its use enhances the analysis. How much, and how, Italian children absorbed, appropriated, accepted, modified or even subverted and rejected the tenets of Fascist racism that were thrown at them in their schooling and other formative experiences strikes this reader as an important corollary and development of the argument presented here. How Italian teachers themselves understood and mediated the messages on race contained in regime pedagogical rhetoric and in textbooks, how they actually taught race, would also be a vital piece of the jigsaw. We know, for example from Scotto di Luzio's work on children's literature and libraries, among others, that Italian readers, to paraphrase, ‘imperfectly appropriated’ the ideas about Fascism that they encountered in the books they read; it would be fascinating to know how imperfectly Italian teachers and their pupils appropriated the myriad notions of race, racial difference and superiority that McLean so ably demonstrates they were bombarded with, in increasingly pointed and consequential ways over the 20 years of Fascist rule.