2025/05/27 by Michele Sollai · 2 voices
Social Sciences · #Historical Geography and Geographical Thought #Historical and Environmental Studies #Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s1740022825000105
openalex publication_date 2025/05/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract This article investigates the global history of dryland modernisation through the case study of southern Italy. From the early twentieth century to the fascist years, several intellectuals, scientists, and politicians reinterpreted the apparent and long-standing backwardness of this region as fundamentally due to its hydrology and climate: southern Italy was rediscovered as a dry land, formally part of Italy and civilised Europe and yet environmentally closer to extra-European spaces of empire. The article shows how Italian agrarian scientists mobilised this ‘environmental Otherness’ of the Italian south as the key to developing a ‘dryland’ science alternative to that of ‘humid’ northern Italy and continental Europe. Instead, this ‘dryland’ approach to modernisation grounded southern Italy within a vast transimperial network defined by the co-production and circulation of knowledge and technologies allowing the adaptation of modern and intensive food production to semi-arid regions. As such, the article argues that Italian agrarian scientists redefined the spatial order of the Italian south in a transimperial sense, embracing its environmental Otherness as a vantage point for its rehabilitation within Italy’s nation-building.