How could Libya either become a majority ethnic Italian state or stay part of Italy?
Italy stays out of WWII and enthnicly cleanses the fuck out of it.How could Libya either become a majority ethnic Italian state or stay part of Italy?
Italy stays out of WWII and enthnicly cleanses the fuck out of it.
Avoiding World War 2 might be enough. Libya had a pretty small population and Italy planned to settle large numbers of Italian people there. By the start of WWII Italians were already 12% of the population. By the 1960s Italy planned to have half a million settlers in Libya. If enough Italians settled there before the decolonization era got going then they could form something like a third of the population. It would be pretty tough for the Libyans to win independence in those circumstances.
Italy had been trying to settle people there for decades and made little progress. That number seems too high, and I'll bet it includes military personnel. Only a few tens of thousands of people could be persuaded to go there. If you are going to emigrate, are you going to go to Libya, or the USA or Argentina? And if you love North Africa, wouldn't you prefer Tunisia or Algeria?
The number gets quoted a lot in discussions of Italian Libya, I think it comes from Italy's own census at the time. I can't vouch for how accurate that is but it is true that during the 30s Italy managed to get tens of thousands of settlers to go there. The half a million figure may not be a realistic goal, I guess my prior post was predicated on Italy's plans for Libya being successful, I don't know if they actually would have been or not
That is pretty much the only chance. Avoid the generalized massacres and take over the Ottoman Provencial administration then they _might_ end up establishing the place as Sicily south (the country would be effectivly bilingual but....)Also, cultural assimilation could be a trump card here.
Italy had been trying to settle people there for decades and made little progress. That number seems too high, and I'll bet it includes military personnel. Only a few tens of thousands of people could be persuaded to go there. If you are going to emigrate, are you going to go to Libya, or the USA or Argentina? And if you love North Africa, wouldn't you prefer Tunisia or Algeria?
... and the whole libyan coastline is littered of Roman ruins.
That was Mussolini’s argument in favour of Fascist expansion.
The Libyan coastline is also littered with Phoenician, Carthagean, Greek, and Ottoman ruins; all totally irrelevant.
It's not necessarily true that Italy had made big attempts to settle Italians in Libya until 1938. Only after Italo Balbo became Governor-General (and later First Consul) in 1934 did the Italian government make serious attempts at demographic colonization. The biggest push was with the construction of 26 agricultural villages in the late 1930s. In 1938 the 20,000 Italians arrived in Libya to be settled and in 1939 another 18,000 joined them in these villages. The stated goal of the Italian government was to have 100,000 agricultural settlers by 1942 and 500,000 Italian settlers in the agricultural settlements by 1960.
As for emigrating to the Americas, it wasn't as easy at it had been before World War I. In 1924 the U.S. capped annual Italian immigration with a quota of 3,845 people per year, so even if an Italian wanted to go to the U.S. it was very hard to get in. Keep in mind these quotas weren't abolished until 1965.
Brazil too imposed quotas in 1933 that capped the entrance of non-Portuguese immigrants. These would remain in effect until the 1980s. Because of this Brazil took in a mere 106,360 Italians in the 1945-1959 period.
In Tunisia the Italians made up the majority of the European population, however the French government was wary of Fascist Italy's meddling in the protectorate and limited the entry of new Italian immigrants whilst encouraging the naturalization of existing Italian immigrants. Algeria hadn't had much European immigration after World War I and by 1954 some 78% of the Europeans there were born in the territory.
Argentina took in Italian immigrants, however the worsening economic conditions in that country in the 1950s meant that few Italians were interested in emigrating there.
In contrast to the aforementioned destinations, Libya was considered part of Italy so moving there did not mean having to renounce Italian citizenship or culture. For landless peasants from Southern Italy, being offered free passage to a new house with 30 hectares of land wasn't unappealing. Going to Libya or Italian East Africa as a settler was simply a matter of applying to the government.
Below I've included a link to a 1938 Italian video showing the first of the 20,000 settlers disembarking in Benghazi and being brought to the new villages in trucks. As it mentions in the video, the land being cultivated receives more rainfall than parts of Sicily or Puglia and is fertile.
http://www.archivioluce.com/archivi...atograficoCINEGIORNALI&findIt=false§ion=/
Few? Few Italians were interested in emigrating anywhere, let alone Libya.
Yes, I've seen the propaganda film. It's incorrect. I'm extremely familiar with the agricultural potential of Libya. It's not more fertile than Sicily or Puglia, it's A FREAKIN' DESERT!