Colonialism can take many forms. This is unmistakably evident in Tullio Pagano's review of “travelers” from Italy who wrote about their experiences in South America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some textual analyses of travelogues and novels are spread across the six content chapters in this book. But the historiographical arguments about the nature of Italy's and Italians’ presence in Argentina and neighboring countries occupy the foreground. The results include insightful observations on Italian participation in the advances of settler colonialism in the absence of formal imperialism.
The duality between Italian liberals and nationalists is as long-standing as the modern conception of a politically unified Italy, predating the Risorgimento itself. Such ideological divides among Italians were not confined to national borders. They traversed transatlantic networks and manifested themselves in places where millions of Italians resided during mass migration. This book, thusly, demonstrates how liberals and nationalists viewed...
