I was just wondering how Ethiopia would look like if the Italians won the first istalian Ethiopia war if 1896.
Around this time period Italians were immigrating on mass. If Italy had Ethiopia how many Italians would have immigrated to it?
IOTL Italy still had Eritrea. While serious schemes for Italian immigration there were seriously considered, the overall demographic impact of Italians in Eritrea was small. Eritreans resisted the Italian settlement policies quite emphatically, and the Italian farmers that were supposed to become settlers in those schemes proved rather uninterested in actually going there.
The point is that Italy had no cash to develop the area to turn it attractive to Italian settlers, who IOTL kept voting with their feet by going mostly to the US, Brazil or Argentina instead. Nevermind that it would have required evicting Eritreans, who predictably reacted badly at attempts to do that. And the ability to put the sort of political and military commitment needed to make it fly simply was not present in Italy at the time, in terms of costs required and general interest. Even the OTL's war was fairly unpopular, and public opinion somewhat mattered.
A full conquest of Ethiopia would have been costly for Italy, with the military side of things likely to suck any available resources. This suggests Italy resorting to some sort of indirect rule in many places, which is what they tended to do in Somalia at this point, and what they seem to have wanted to do in Ethiopia. Indirect rule means at least some token respect for native land rights. Full conquest would take time and money, the latter not easy to be given for the undertaking. Large scale immigration would be slow to take off, if at all, and probably localized. I would guess, mostly urban employees and workers. There is relatively little useful vacant land to be offered to settlers, and I don't see why settlers would want to go in the first place, since they did not IOTL when given the chance.
Of course, Italy holding a large colonial empire in Ehtiopia would have huge political and strategic consequences that would lead to very different decisions. But I think that the demographic impact would be relatively modest, perhaps comparable to British Kenya in proportions.