Angelo Caglioti published an article in Past and Present on the origins of Italian settler colonialism in the perspective of the environmental history of European imperialism.

Angelo Caglioti published an article in Past and Present on the origins of Italian settler colonialism in the perspective of the environmental history of European imperialism.  It argues that the Italian project to turn the highlands of the Horn of Africa into a settler colony was an “imperial mirage”: the perception that the momentarily depopulated landscape of Ethiopia, produced by “natural” disasters that were in fact the social products of colonial warfare, would be available to Italian settlers in the future. This mirage was based on a domino effect of environmental catastrophes connecting climate history, animal disease, and the politics of European imperialism. Thus, the article explains the battle of Adwa (1896) as the result of willful ignorance and wishful self-deception that fueled Italian colonization projects.