Abstract. This paper examines ideas of food plenty as motivation for the Italian colonization of Libya in 1911-1912. It looks at the writings of three Italian journalists in Libya, and examines their ideas of agricultural production and food abundance as a form of utopia. The paper argues that food utopias were linked to notions of race, civilization and modernity, and helped motivate colonial ideas in Liberal Italy before fascism.
Biography. Or Rosenboim is a lecturer and Director of the Centre for Modern History at the department of International Politics at City, University of London. Her book, The emergence of globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939-1950, was published by Princeton University Press in April 2017. The book won the Guicciardini Prize for the Best Book in Historical International Relations (2018) and was shortlisted for the Gladstone Prize and the TSA/CUP Prize.