ABSTRACT
Virtue’s chapter applies the new analytical methods of transfer history to re-examine Teodoro Sala’s hypothesis that Italian methods of rule and violence in Yugoslavia during World War II had colonial origins. Focusing on military actors in Ethiopia and Yugoslavia – two cases of occupation only five years apart featuring significant personal and institutional continuities – Virtue examines the Italian army’s recruitment of indigenous irregular forces, its terror-based repression strategy targeting non-combatants and its application of race-thinking to legitimize extreme violence. Drawing from doctrinal texts, unit war logs and printed propaganda, he concludes that, while phenomenological similarities with the imperial occupation of Ethiopia reveal the presence of classic colonial dynamics in occupied Yugoslavia, evidence of knowledge transfers between the two cases tends to be indirect. The chapter emphasizes the role of structural factors and contingency – in particular the technical challenges posed in both instances by guerrilla warfare – in guiding Italian military decision-making. Virtue suggests that military culture, more than colonial ideology, was the primary agent of transfer between Africa and the Balkans.
