The Pioneer’s Feast: Colonial Menus in Italian East Africa

Abstract

This article examines colonial Italian menus used in interwar Ethiopia and Eritrea to understand how pr ivate companies sup- ported Fascism’s imperial projects. Feasts celebrated battlefield victories, steamship journeys, and settlement soirees. Menus pro- duced by shipping companies (Rex, Lloyd Triestino) and banks (Banca di Roma) for use by Italian colonists on Ethiopian settlements speaks to the economics of the regime , demonstrating how corporations used food to uphold and extend Fascist narratives of racial superiority. Herein lies a core contention of this article: the engine of fascist power lay in its financial supporters – that is, in industry.