This paper takes as a point of departure Bruce Grant’s The Captive and the Gift to explore how the fascist Italian empire claimed sovereignty over its conquered Libyan bodies through a language of giving and imaginaries of gifts and barbarity. Grant sets up imperial space as a field of political and semiotic exchanges where the value of gifts is primarily performative, in the double sense of being both an utterance that changes social reality by enacting giving, and a visual public performance. Giving is encased within a spectacle of grandeur simultaneously interpellating the subjects of empire and its competitors, claiming sovereignty over the former and reminding the latter of its unsurpassable power and magnanimity. To think through the performative aspect of gift exchange within empire, this paper will examine how imperial cinema and official state displays of self-legitimation serve as the points de capiton of empire, consolidating and fixing meaning to create a consistent language of exchange within the Libyan context under fascist Italian colonialism. The paper will be looking at multiple circuits of exchange that reinforce one another. From the material gifts given by Mussolini, such as bronze statues of Caesar placed in central urban spaces in Italian colonies as well as gifts that Mussolini “received” from the Libyan colony, such as the sword of Islam, which was welded in Italy and ceremoniously given to Mussolini by Libyan collaborators, to the more symbolic ones teased out through a reading of two fascist Italian films set in Libya at pivotal points in the history of fascist colonialism: Mario Camerini’s Kif Tebbi (1928) and Augusto Genina’s Bengasi (1942). The paper will explore how the rhetoric of fascist affinity with Islam and protection of Libyan soil against the competitors of empire—here the Ottoman and the British - were deployed as a way to produce an exchange in which the colony becomes a laboratory of fascist masculinity. Italian soldiers are thus sent to Libyan soil to harvest the force of both Roman soldiers and indigenous “savages,” in the guise of protection and alliance, which is then constrained and sculpted to produce the Uomo Nuovo, the ideal man conforming to the aesthetics and ideology of fascism.

The liberal historiography of interwar Egypt has been marked with nostalgia for the supposed cosmopolitanism of (middle- and upper-class) Egyptian society, thanks to the presence of European foreign communities that enjoyed special legal treatment under the Ottoman Capitulations, as enforced by British military occupation. This literature holds Gamal ?Abd al-Nasir’s nationalization and sequestration of foreign property responsible for the end of this era and the associated social, cultural and economic ills of nationalism. This paper argues instead that the war forced the British to make progressive concessions to Egyptian administrators with regards to the regulation and policing of foreign residents to obtain its objectives in its war against the invading Axis powers far earlier than the Nasser era. In the aftermath of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the British signed a bilateral defense treaty with Egypt to legitimize its military occupation, which gave Egypt autonomy over domestic administration, secured its entry to the League of Nations, and paved the way for the 1937 Montreux conference, which scheduled an end to the Capitulations in 1949. Using diplomatic exchanges between the British and Egyptians, and police and judicial records from the Egyptian National Archives, the paper demonstrates that the war itself accelerated this trend towards Egyptian legal autonomy and sovereignty prior to 1949. The Egyptian government declared a state of emergency as required in its treaty with Britain, which gave it legal jurisdiction for the first time over all European nationalities in matters touching state security, a vague and expandable mandate. In 1940, the British requested that the Egyptians imprison the 15,000 military-age civilians of the Italian community, but the Egyptians negotiated to do this on their own terms. The Egyptian government sequestered Italian property set up a system of collective licensing and support of internees’ families and other foreigners that was analogous to their wartime welfare and economic programs for Egyptian subjects. As a result of this program and other war security measures, the Egyptian state emerged after the war with far more control over the legal status and economic activities not only of the Italian community, but also of its allies, the British, French and Greeks. Using published media, I demonstrate how this control played important material and symbolic roles in the nationalist movement against the prolonged British postwar occupation of the Suez Canal.

When it comes to Morocco’s illegal annexation of Western Sahara, three theories stand out to explain several decades of Moroccan expansionism: Diversionary foreign policy (after two failed military coups), geopolitical realism (to create a buffer zone vis-à-vis the regional rival Algeria) and resource-based colonialism (the main argument raised by Sahrawi nationalists). In contrast, this paper seeks to analyze Morocco’s rule over Western Sahara as a case of postcolonial state expansion. The phenomenon of postcolonial state expansion can be defined as the systematic and long-term expansion of postcolonial state institutions across contested borders and the resulting coercive rule over a neighboring territory and its population. Comparable examples might include the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank, China’s rule over Tibet and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. Based on insights from historical institutionalism, Morocco’s territorial expansion is thus explained as a long-term effect of colonial rule in the Maghreb. While the drive for Muhammad Allal al-Fassi’s ‘Greater Morocco’ is often depicted as an anachronistic case of imperial ambition, this aspect of Moroccan nationalism actually falls into a broader category of postcolonial irredentism typical for nation-states emerging from the artificial territorial divisions of colonial rule. Yet while Morocco’s slow-moving process of territorial recovery at first went unchallenged both in the North (the Spanish Protectorate in 1956) and in the South (Cape Juby in 1958, Ifni in 1969), Morocco’s claim to Western Sahara in 1975 clashed with another legacy of colonial rule, namely Sahrawi nationalism based on the internationally recognized Sahrawi right to self-determination. In order to contribute to comparative research on territorial expansionism by postcolonial states, the paper discusses both Moroccan policies of political integration as well as different Sahrawi strategies of resistance. The unique aspect about postcolonial state expansion is analyzed as a highly paradoxical opportunity structure for newly independent states emerging from European empire: While postcolonial irredentism and Cold War alliance politics made territorial expansion both domestically attractive and geopolitically feasible at first sight, in the long run these cases of state expansion conflicted with the fundamental normative shift towards self-determination that came to define the postcolonial era.