A Mobius strip lacks a clear orientation; it has no clear beginning or end, no up or down. As such, it serves as an apt metaphor for Stephanie Malia Hom's innovative approach to thinking about imperialism. Much like a Mobius strip, Hom contends, ‘imperial formations disorient those caught up within them’ (p. 6), thrusting colonial subjects into a precarious state of limbo. The Mobius strip also illustrates Hom's rare ability to bring Italy's imperial past to bear directly on her analysis of contemporary efforts to control migration and access to citizenship status. Combining ‘ethnographic reportage with archival research’ (p. 16), Hom examines the spaces and physical structures that define Italian ‘mobility regimes’ (p. 5), past and present. The net result is a stark image of the power differentials between those who travel freely in the world and those who do not as a core function of continuous imperial control. Hom thus proves the necessity of examining the direct connections between Europe's imperial past and its contemporary immigration crisis.

Rather than a series of smaller chapters, Hom presents her analysis in three long essays, each centred on a particular kind of space used to control human movement: the island, the camp, and the village. ‘The Island’ takes us first to Lampedusa, ground zero for the trans-Mediterranean migration crisis of the past two decades. Hom analyses Lampedusa as an illustrative site of confrontation between two radically different kinds of mobilities: tourism and crisis migration. This is an island where boutique hotels coexist with facilities that until 2009 bore the ironic name of Centri di Permanenza Temporanea (Centres of Temporary Permanence). Historically, Hom links these centres to the ‘carceral archipelago’ (p. 37) of the nineteenth century. Starting with the repression of violent opposition to national unification in the South, the Italian state used a string of islands off the southern coasts as locations for domicilio coatto, or forced domicile. After the invasion of Libya in 1911, those same islands would become sites of truly horrific imprisonment for Libyans suspected of anti-imperial activities. Hom's analysis of the historical connection with Italian imperialism emphasises the coercive nature of migrant centres in Lampedusa, further illustrated by a series of demonstrations that the ‘ospiti’ (guests) of the centres have staged to protest their conditions.

The second essay, ‘The Camp’, connects Ponte Galeria, a detention centre on the outskirts of Rome for those defined as ‘illegal immigrants’, to the notoriously deadly concentration camps that the Italian administration constructed to intern nomadic and semi-nomadic populations as part of its efforts to eradicate anti-imperial resistance in Libya in the late 1920s and early 1930s. For Hom, contemporary migrants represent ‘the new Bedouin in a cage’ (p. 112), with the limbo of forced immobility as the state's weapon of choice against the threat of nomadism. In many ways, the third essay, ‘The Village’, should be read as a continuation of the second essay. The villages under consideration are state-organised spaces for human settlement or resettlement, what Hom refers to as ‘the spatial aftereffect of the camp’ (p. 121). The contemporary version Hom analyses is the area known as La Barbuta, one of seven villagi attrezzati, or ‘equipped villages’ constructed on the outskirts of Rome to house thousands of Roma (often referred to pejoratively as ‘gypsies’), one of Italy's most prominent internal Others. Hom traces the development of La Barbuta from the forced removal of Roma and Sinti people from semi-permanent camps in the mid-1990s to the declaration in 2008 of a nomad emergency decree intended to confine these supposedly nomadic populations in clearly-defined spaces. Hom links this confinement to villages established in Libya in the 1930s, some to house Libyan workers (villaggi musulmani) and others to house Italian settlers (villaggi agricoli). For Hom, both the forced resettlement of Roma populations and the villages in Italian Libya represent different versions of a civilising mission, based on the idea that ‘sedentarization leads directly to civilization’ (p. 159). Yet both instances simultaneously ‘spatialized ethno-religious segregation’ (p. 162), thus foreclosing colonial subjects or Roma people from Italian citizenship.

Empire's Mobius Strip lives up to its promise of offering a multidisciplinary approach to studying the past and the present at once. Hom moves almost seamlessly through a variety of temporal frameworks and a wide range of sources – including deeply personal interviews – to connect the different spaces under consideration. At first glance, some of the examples connect more successfully than others; the ties between forced settlement of Roma populations and the agricultural villages developed for the benefit of Italian settlers, for example, are less immediately obvious than the relationship between the detention of migrants and the earlier internment of anti-colonial Libyans on southern Italian islands. But because she focuses on the types of spaces that states use to define regimes of mobility, Hom successfully demonstrates continuities in the use of mobility as an assertion of power and restriction of mobility as a tool of exclusion from power, thus tracing the presence of imperial formations in the present. Hom ends the book with a Coda that notes echoes of a similar history of mobility regimes closer to her home when she wrote the book in the American West. Control over the movement of people, she suggests, has been – and continues to be – a fundamental aspect of imperial power the world over. As a result, Empire's Mobius Strip would be a welcome addition for courses on migration and the legacies of imperialism in the Mediterranean and beyond.