Costanza Bonelli, “‘Some typically African risks:’ Safeguarding the health of Italian settlers during the fascist empire (1934-1941),” Centaurus, 65, 2023, pp. 121-152
The Society for Italian Historical Studies (SIHS) is pleased to congratulate Costanza Bonelli for winning this year’s prize for outstanding article in Modern Italian History with her piece “‘Some typically African risks:’ Safeguarding the health of Italian settlers during the fascist empire (1934-1941),” published in Centaurus in 2023. In this broadly conceived article, Bonelli examines the contributions of politically connected medical experts to the fascist colonial project, paying particular attention to their contradictory approaches to the question of “acclimatization” of soldiers, workers, and settlers to the Horn of Africa’s diverse landscapes. Bonelli follows these experts as they debate the risks and opportunities of “white” settlement in Ethiopia, propagandize their theories to a wider public, and influence the policies of social insurance institutions. The article exposes to great effect the experts’ contradictory attempts to reconcile the alleged racial superiority of Italians with their crushing experiences of vulnerability. These conceptual gyrations, Bonelli shows, informed the chaotic workings of hospitals, worksites, and government offices. Nimbly deploying the methodological toolkits of the history of science, environmental history, and policy history, Bonelli provides a compelling account of the biopolitical specificities of fascist colonialism and its reliance on the complicity of medical experts.