Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The stories of animal and plant breeding told in this part of the book will take us into the colonial practices of the three fascist regimes. Whereas coffee, rubber, and cotton were colonial cash crops produced by local natives, the story of the Karakul sheep draws attention to white settlements on frontiers. Thus, these chapters follow the traditional division of plantation and settlement stories. This structure will enable comparisons and connections between the three fascisms as well as to refer to what was being done in other empires. The breeding of animals and of plants is particularly relevant for such an exercise since, as I argue throughout this book, the fascists’ imperial ambitions were materialized largely through agriculture undertakings. The different breeds organizing the narrative reveal intentions, challenges, realities, and failures of the fascist imperial new order.

5 Coffee, Rubber, and Cotton: Cash Crops, Forced Labor, and Fascist Imperialism in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Eastern Europe

This chapter uses coffee, rubber, and cotton, three commodities characteristic of colonial studies, to explore Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia, Germany’s imperial rule in eastern Europe, and Portugal’s colonialism in Mozambique.[1] These commodities were chosen because of the high hopes fascist leaders had for boosting their production in their respective imperial possessions. Coffee promised to turn Mussolini’s takeover in eastern Africa into a profitable operation, Hitler dreamed that the eastern European steppes would produce rubber for the Nazi war machine, and Salazar envisioned masses of Mozambique native cultivators sustaining Portugal’s textile industry. The history of those three commodities under fascism is one of control of native people through limited colonizers’ presence and coercive labor regimes—a typical colonial history. The three empires promoted a self-description that differentiated their push for settlement in search of Lebensraum from other empires capitalist exploitation of colonized subjects. In Mussolini’s terms, his was a proletarian empire, not a plutocratic one. In the next chapter I will discuss the violent stories of settlers and fascist expansionism. Here, I emphasize instead the mobilization of indigenous people’s work for commodities production, emphasizing the continuity of fascist colonialism with other European post-slavery imperial experiences, contrary to fascist propaganda insistence on the new nature of the undertaking.[2] I delve into the role of plant breeders in the building and sustaining of such labor regimes, making the case that their technoscientific organisms embodied different colonial relations. Labor history, a major subject in colonial studies, is interwoven here with the history of fascism and (through the work of plant breeders) with history of science. The scientific institutions in question are the network of experiment stations established by the agriculture services of Italian civil administration in Italian East Africa (Ethiopia, Italian Eritrea, and Italian Somaliland), which were staffed by personnel trained at the Colonial Agriculture Institute in Florence; the agriculture experiment station at Rajsko, a satellite camp of Auschwitz; and the Cotton Scientific Research Center in Mozambique, which was controlled by the Portuguese Cotton Export Board (Junta de Exportação do Algodão).

Auschwitz is always a delicate subject for historians. To place it side by side with other historical realities such as the ones dealt with in this chapter is to invite criticism from those who insist on seeing the infamous concentration camp as a historical oddity bearing no significant relation to any other human experience.[3] In fact, the violence unleashed at Auschwitz bears no comparison with the deeds of Italian and Portuguese colonizers in East Africa and Mozambique. The violent stories of the latter are on an entirely different scale than the elimination of 1.1 million people at Auschwitz in the years 1940–1945. However, there are sound historical reasons, as I hope to demonstrate throughout this chapter, to treat the three under the same colonial framework. In what follows I don’t mean to suggest that all that happened at Auschwitz had to do with colonialism, or that colonialism caused Auschwitz, but I do want to suggest that by ignoring colonialism one misses a substantial part of what happened there.

Coffee and the Colonization of Italian East Africa