Imperialism and Irredentism in Liberal Italy

For Italian nationalists, the nation was still incomplete after unification in 1861; they embraced the irredentist goal of incorporating Trento and Trieste, still in Austrian hands. The Triple Alliance which tied Italy to Germany and Austria-Hungary in a defensive pact made it hard to directly pursue this objective. Meanwhile, Italian ambitions to build a colonial empire began in the 1870s with the acquisition of Eritrea and Somalia in East Africa, before meeting a set-back with the crushing defeat by Ethiopia at Adwa in 1896. Liberals embraced an alternate, uniquely Italian vision of empire, built on emigrant colonies around the world. Advocates of traditional settler colonialism instead turned their attention to the Mediterranean and specifically to the so-called ‘Fourth Shore’ of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. Considerable consensus emerged around attacking the Ottoman Empire in 1911; after a year of war, Italy officially acquired Libya and the Dodecanese Islands. But irredentist hopes, and ambitions in the Balkans, were not sated by this expansion.