Excising Ethiopia to Save Imperialism: The International Effort to Repatriate Italian Settlers from Ethiopia in WWII

At the height of World War II, Axis Italy and Great Britain collaborated to repatriate 28,000 Italian women, children, elderly, and wounded from Ethiopia on convoys of ‘White Ships,’ that sailed between 1942 and 1943. This was the first and largest single migration of Italians from Italian Africa. At the time, the press lauded this humanitarian mission to save innocent Italians from violent, vengeful Ethiopians. Although the feared violence never materialized and the Italians were repatriated at great risk and expense after a peaceful year under Anglo-Ethiopian rule, historians have left unquestioned the mission’s humanitarian impetus. Instead, I place the mission in the context of the crisis of empire unfolding with World War II, as Europe’s claims of racial, economic, and ‘civilizational’ superiority were discredited, and yet, Europe’s survival depended on support from imperial territories and people. I argue that the repatriation was a joint effort by warring Western powers to stabilize the fragile imperial world order. By removing the Italians and their property, the British and Italian governments hoped to ‘deindustrialize’ Ethiopia, maintain the global color line, and hinder the rise of a rival African empire in East Africa. Granting Ethiopia nominal but weak sovereignty served to project European benevolence to colonized peoples, while preventing any further upending of European imperialism’s global racial and economic hierarchy.

My work challenges decolonization’s teleological script by illustrating how the warring Western powers collaborated to manipulate the migration of goods and people to preserve imperial hierarchies and structural inequality between Europe and Africa.