ABSTRACT
World War I (WWI) had been an imperialist war, a clash of empires – or, more accurately, a clash between one set of metropoles supported greatly by their colonial empires and their manpower and resources, and another set of metropoles. The demands of war mobilisation intensified colonial exploitation everywhere, and there were several anticolonial uprisings against conscription during WWI, in New Caledonia, and in Central Asia, for example. The Ottoman Empire could be considered a German informal colony. The Italian fascists focused greatly on colonising, internally and externally, in borderland areas and in reclaimed regions in the metropole, and in Africa, where the regime invested massively. The Italian fascists were particularly active and ambitious in their colonies. The Italian fascists also built a fence in the Libyan desert to separate insurgent anticolonial guerrillas from their provisioning sources, the first wall of the twentieth century.
