ABSTRACT
In a letter from prison in 1927 Antonio Gramsci wrote that his mind was in a state of frozen calm, like Nansen’s ship drifting imprisoned for months in the polar ice. With a thirst for information extending to the other continents, and hence to Europe’s relations with them, it would scarcely have been possible for Gramsci not to be drawn to the subject of imperialism. In his brief years of active politics Gramsci never missed an occasion to draw parallels between the exploited peasantry at home and the colonial peoples abroad; and he identified colonialism, for instance in a speech in the Chamber of Deputies in 1925, with export of capital. In examining the Risorgimento, Gramsci was acutely conscious of the gulf between northern and southern Italy, a dichotomy akin, as he said, to that of town and countryside. Gramsci’s underlying aim was to reach an understanding of what Japanese intellectuals stood for.
