Autore: Scalvedi, Caterina
Titolo: A Printing Record? Italy’s Colonial Schoolbook Market (1890-1960)
Periodico: Contemporanea
Anno: 2025 - Volume: 109 - Fascicolo: 2 - Pagina iniziale: 237 - Pagina finale: 255

This article retraces the history of schoolbooks purposefully targeting student audiences located in Italy’s African colonies. From Benghazi to Addis Ababa, colonial schoolbooks aimed to erase pre- or anti-colonial loyalties and replace them with an Italy-centred imagined community. The diverse actors (teachers, students, state officials, writers, publishers, booksellers) and motivations (political, pedagogic, religious, commercial) involved in the creation and circulation of colonial schoolbooks changed over time. In the period 1890-1930, teachers, both secular and missionaries, locally co-authored and printed schoolbooks for and with the help of their students. In the years 1930-1941, the Ministry of the Colonies and the Florentine publisher Bemporad took over the colonial schoolbook market and col laboratively launched four broad publication projects for schools across Italian-ruled Africa. Circulating across different world regions, Bemporad schoolbooks shaped Italy’s empire into a «connected system». While the British banned their use in the Forties, these books significantly informed the creation of primers for the students of the United Nations Trusteeship of Somalia (1950-1960). Broadly, the article invites historians to address colonial schoolbooks not only from a linguistic and textual analysis perspective, as previously done, but as mobile holistic objects that were at once political, cultural, social, and economic.




SICI: 1127-3070(2025)109:2<237:APRICS>2.0.ZU;2-R
Testo completo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.1409/117717
Testo completo alternativo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1409/117717

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