This is a very well-researched and well-written account of what Prof. Gabrielli of the la Sapienza University, Rome, once described as ‘one of the briefest empires in the history of the world’. Fascism's short-lived European empire consisted of territories which were conquered or otherwise acquired between March 1939 and June 1941 around the Mediterranean – in south-eastern France, Corsica, parts of present-day Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzogovina, Montenegro, Albania, a part of Kosovo, and most of western and central Greece – and which Fascist Italy occupied until the fall of Mussolini in July 1943.

Rodogno convincingly argues the case that, despite its brevity, this should be seen as a period of imperial rule rather than a short-term military occupation, which is how it has largely been described by historians hitherto. In particular, he argues that Italian dominion over parts of France, Corsica, Albania, as well as Yugoslavia and Greece, was an aspect of a clear plan for a ‘new order’ in its spazio vitale (living space), which was strongly influenced by Fascist ideas of Italian racial superiority. Within this emerging ‘Second Roman Empire’, the various nations and peoples would each have their place according to clearly defined racial criteria, in varying degrees of subordination to the ‘imperial race’, the Italians. The Fascists had an integrated plan for the future of the Mediterranean, including countries not yet conquered, like Egypt, Spain, and Turkey. And their confidence that, despite defeats in North Africa, they would be able to stabilize their imperial rule on the back of German military power, is borne out by their plans for the urban transformation of the town of Menton in France and the changes which they made to the urban landscape of Ljubljana, now the capital of Slovenia. That said, Rodogno probably underestimates the degree of improvisation on the part of the Rome government in its administration of the empire.

Rodogno recognizes that Italian rule in the Mediterranean territories, as well as being influenced to some extent by the Liberal and Fascist colonial experience in Africa – Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, and Somalia – was also conditioned by the forcible ‘Italianization’ policies pursued by the Fascists in the terre irredente (‘unredeemed lands’) acquired from the Habsburgs under the terms of the Versailles Peace Settlement, Trentino Alto-Adige with its German-speaking minority and the Istrian peninsula and other coastal territories and the islands off in the Adriatic with their Slovenian and Croatian minorities. More important than either of these factors, however, was the proximity of and dependence upon the German military forces that dominated the Balkans after May 1941. It had been the Germans who saved Mussolini after his October 1940 invasion of Greece went wrong, and it was the German invasion of Yugoslavia in May 1941 which led to the breakup of that state and the allocation of its Adriatic coast and generous portions of the hinterland to Italy.

One of the key revisionist elements in Rodogno's account is his challenge to the italiani brava gente thesis, that the Italians, in their treatment of the peoples of their occupied territories, and especially the Jews who fell under their rule, did not behave like the brutal, ‘bestial’ Nazis, but were gentle and sympathetic to their plight because, unlike the Nazis, the Italians, officers and men, were decent human beings, that they in fact participated in the rescue of Jews. This thesis fits into the historiographical school established by the late Italian historian Renzo De Felice, who makes a sharp distinction between German National Socialism and Italian Fascism, claiming that they were quite different ideologies and movements. The case for Italian humanitarianism has been argued strongly by both Hannah Arendt and Leon Poliakov, and most recently by Jonathan Steinberg in his book All or nothing: the axis and the Holocaust, 1941–1943 (London, 1990). Rodogno firmly rejects this view. He argues that while it is true that thousands of foreign Jews in Italian-occupied territories were interned rather than handed over to the Germans, a significant number ‘were either expelled or escorted to the border and handed over to their persecutors – and also in certain circumstances they were delivered up to the German’ (p. 416). He also dismisses the idea that the Italians were prompted by mainly humanitarian motives, arguing that considerations of personal, political, and military advantage were the chief motivations (p. 404). On the other hand, he concedes that though the long-term policy of the Fascists was to exclude the Jews from the Mediterranean and that most Italian officers and bureaucrats saw the Jews as racially inferior, they harboured no exterminatory intentions towards them (p. 406).

In chapter 10, the author paints a grim picture of the very often brutal Italian repression of partisan activity and the harsh treatment of civilians in the occupied territories. This, and Rodogno's findings on the Italian policy towards the Jews, fits in with the general thrust of much recent historiography on Fascist policy in the African colonies, which has highlighted the atrocities and war crimes committed during the subjugation of Libya and Ethiopia especially. The Fascists could be as ruthless and brutal as the Germans in their repression of partisan activity and their use of ethnic cleansing for the purposes of racial ‘engineering’ in their new empire. Like these studies, Rodogno's study of Italian occupation in Europe is scholarly and thorough, and taken together, they all suggest that the Italiani brava gente thesis is no longer sustainable.

This is an important and original work that casts a great deal of light upon a not very well-known chapter in Italian history during the Second World War. One has few criticisms but a couple of gripes: given the book's importance, it is incomprehensible why neither the author nor the publisher saw fit to provide a proper, analytical subject index and, since this book deals with the complexities of the division of conquered territories between the two occupying armies, it is a pity that neither Map 5 nor the text makes the demarcation between the German and Italian zones of Greece very clear.