Download Free The Abyssinian Crisis Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Abyssinian Crisis and write the review.

Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 marked a turning point in interwar Europe. The last great European colonial conquest in Africa, the conflict represented an enormous gamble for the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. He faced a challenge not only from a stout Ethiopian defence, but also from difficult logistics made worse by the League of Nations' half-hearted sanctions. Mussolini faced down this opposition, and Italian troops, aided by air superiority and liberal use of yprite gas, conquered Addis Ababa within eight months, a victory that shocked many military observers of the time with its speed and suddenness. The invasion had enormous repercussions on European international relations. In the midst of a national election campaign, the British National Government had felt constrained to support the League, despite fears that sanctions through the League could lead to war with Italy. The concentration of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean Sea alienated Mussolini and placed the French government on the horns of dilemma; should France support its military partner, Italy, or its more important potential ally, Great Britain? French attempts to mark out a middle ground did little to placate the Duce, and the crisis seemed to develop a deep rift between Fascist Italy and the Anglo-French democracies, while at the same time creating a crisis in Anglo-French relations. Mussolini turned towards Nazi Germany in an attempt to end his diplomatic isolation during the sanctions episode, although Hitler considered the Duce's friendship a mixed blessing. The question of American adherence to sanctions increased ill will between British politicians and the Roosevelt administration in Washington, as each tended to blame the other for the failure of oil sanctions and the collapse of collective security. The international crisis posed similarly thorny problems for the smaller powers of Europe, and for Japan and the Soviet Union. The crisis impeded common defence against Fascist expansionism while giving impetus to claims of the revisionist powers. Despite the tremendous importance of the international crisis, however, little new work on the subject has appeared in recent decades. In this volume, an international cast of contributors take a fresh look at the crisis through the lens of new evidence and new approaches to international relations history to provide the most comprehensive coverage of the crisis currently possible, and their work provides new frames of reference for exploring imperialism, collective security and genocide.
Scoop, Evelyn Waugh's bestselling comedy of England's newspaper business of the 1930s is the closest thing foreign correspondents have to a bible -- they swear by it. But few readers are acquainted with Waugh's memoir of his stint as a London Daily Mail correspondent in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) during the Italian invasion in the 1930s. Waugh in Abyssinia is an entertaining account by a cantankerous and unenthusiastic war reporter that "provides a fascinating short history of Mussolini's imperial adventure as well as a wickedly witty preview of the characters and follies that figure into Waugh's famous satire." In the forward, veteran foreign correspondent John Maxwell Hamilton explores in how Waugh ended up in Abyssinia, which real-life events were fictionalized in Scoop, and how this memoir fits into Waugh's overall literary career, which includes the classic Brideshead Revisited. As Hamilton explains, Waugh was the right man (a misfit), in the right place (a largely unknown country that lent itself to farcical imagination), at the right time (when the correspondents themselves were more interesting than the scraps of news they could get.) The result, Waugh in Abyssinia, is a memoir like no other.
2005 marks the seventieth anniversary of Italy's invasion of Ethiopia - final humiliating step in Europe's colonisation of Africa; bloody symptom of the collapse of collective security in Europe; harbinger of the world war to come. In this issue of Socialist History our contributors offer provocative reassessments of this key episode, set in its broader contemporary context by the issue's editor, Allison Drew. Exploding the myth that Italian fascism was not marked by the racism of Nazism, Willie Thompson's article describes the stark brutality displayed in Abyssinia by Italian troops and the key role which the conflict played in Mussolini's domestic and international calculations. The conflict also had a significant impact upon the international left and the challenges simultaneously posed it by the rise of fascism, the reconfigurations of democracy and imperialism and the uncertainties of Soviet foreign policy. In his article, Christian Hogsbjerg explores the major impact which the Abyssinian struggle had on the Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James, who was then in Britain working on his masterful study of the Haitian Revolution The Black Jacobins. Britain, and the predicaments of this socialist anti-war movement are evaluated here by Andrew Flinn and Gidon Cohen. If socialists and internationalists seemed preoccupied with the issue, the same cannot be said of the wider British public. In our final feature, David Howell shows that in the 1935 general election voters were generally far less interested in Abyssinia than either politicians or political activists. Perhaps, Howell suggests, the same cannot be said so confidently of the last general election and the impact of Iraq. The issue concludes with a discussion of the contemporary Moscow arts scene by Margarita Tupitsyn and our usual reviews section.
In October 1935 Mussolini ordered the invasion of Ethiopia from Italian-held Eritrea and Somaliland, thinking that he would easily crush an ill-prepared and badly equipped enemy. The Italians, in the face of widespread condemnation from the League of Nations, spread terror and destruction through their indiscriminate use of air power and poison gas against an enemy more used to medieval methods of warfare. David Nicolle examines in detail the units, equipment and uniforms of the forces on both sides of this conflict that unrealistically bolstered Il Duce's colonial ambitions. A great read ably supported by Raffaele Ruggeri's detailed full-page colour plates.