The Economic Policy of the Italian Administration in the Eritrean Colony in the Early 1920s. The Case of the Asmara Chamber of Commerce

This article analyses the brief history of the Eritrean Colony’s Chamber of Commerce in the early 1920s and the intertwining of that institution’s history with the advent of the Fascist regime. Upon taking power, Fascism did not immediately overturn Italy’s approach to colonial and foreign policy. At least in the early years of the regime, it limited itself to breaking the chains of prudent liberal politics. The Chamber of Commerce of Asmara, which was supposed to represent, in an independent form, the economic and commercial interests of the companies of Italy’s first-born colony, became a victim not of a new colonial policy but, rather, of the ideological straitjacket imposed by the regime. The Fascists had not formulated any programmes for the Italian colonies and would not devise a specific policy until the war with Ethiopia in the second half of the 1930s. This paper, drawing on both previously unpublished and already familiar documents in the Historical Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, investigates the social and economic context in which the Asmara Chamber of Commerce came to be established and the reasons for its premature dissolution.