Migrants or settlers? The “agricultural courses for Italian colonizers” (1920–1926)

The “Agricultural courses for settlers” created after the Great War testify to the Italian government’s willingness to promote a “new emancipated citizenship”, even if in a colonial sense. Designed to prepare personnel to occupy high-level posts in the agricultural enterprises of coastal regions, the courses took place between 1920 and 1926 in Portici (for doctors in agrarian sectors being sent to English-speaking countries), Palermo and Padua (for young people preparing to emigrate to South America), San Ilario Ligure, Pisa, Catania, Scafati, Ponticelli, Robigo, Capannelle, Florence. The need to provide vocational training to high-level officers leaving Italy responded to the cultural perspective generated by the First World War. Whereas the Giolitti era had considered emigration an individual matter, to be protected with activities directed at the literacy of the popular classes (450 schools were opened in 1905, 200 in 1912) the 1920s shifted the emphasis onto the duo of national emigration and national interest, that is to say the need to organize the emigrating masses as a compact group, «guided by Italian technical elements, so that agricultural emigration is not a disorderly exodus of manpower, but rather assume the form of colonization». From emigrants to colonizers: it wasn’t a banal question of terms, it was an ideological question, of self-image in the world. The intention was to replace the image of a man defeated in life with the positive image of a man able to take care of himself and benefit his country. Here is an attempt to give young Italians of the educated classes the desire «heard of in Anglo-Saxon and in other Northern European countries, […] to leave for unknown lands, to build great wealth, victoriously struggling with primitive nature». The director of colonization’s appeal to technical skills, an appeal present in the Italian colonization of the late nineteenth century, in the Franchetti colonization plan in Eritrea (give land to the starving peasants and place their sector expertise on the Italian agricultural expansion service); but Florence, with Istituto Superiore alle Cascine, liberal Italy’s crown jewel, and Milan, home of the first faculty of Italian agriculture, also bear witness. Therefore, a high-level education was necessary, founded on the «combination of teaching and theoretical-scientific as well as practical-technical training» to train people for colonial work. A result to be achieved through three objectives: the creation of a technical-agrarian culture, familiarity with the destination countries, and training both physical and intellectual. Learning should be «objective and based on comparative observations», oriented toward practical activity and training in laboratories, to develop skills in «agriculture, the survey of land, animal husbandry, technology and administrative accounting». But the number of attendees was scant (15 students per course). If the intention was to compensate for the weak results of the Italian imperialist policy, the results didn’t meet such expectations: shortly thereafter, by beginning his population growth policy, Mussolini would go on to halt emigration, suppress the Commissary of emigration and interrupt educational projects for colonizers.