The fascist temptation: British and Italian imperial entanglements in the Eastern Mediterranean

Abstract

This article reveals how, in the interwar period, British colonial authorities in Cyprus borrowed from the combination of political authoritarianism and economic development characterising Italian rule in the neighbouring Dodecanese, as both a solution to Greek irredentism and an administration suitable to ‘Mediterranean populations’. British authorities shunned, nonetheless, the chronopolitics and biopolitics buttressing fascist governance, which aimed at the political and cultural assimilation of Dodecanesians into the Italian national community. In conversation with the literature on imperial formations, the article therefore highlights the forms and limitations of the circulation of administrative practices and ideas across European colonial boundaries.