Carthage the Deceitful and Perfidius Albion. The Phoenicians and the British in Fascist Italy

The analogic juxtaposition between ancient Carthage and the British empire is a common cliché in European scholaship since the XIX century. In Italy, such a comparison is made stronger by the shared idea of the modern Italians as direct heirs of the ancient Roman empire. It becomes still stronger during the Fascism: Italian scholars – expecially archaeologists and historians – make extensive use of this analogy in their academic essays; in the same years regime propaganda, by means of the magazine La Difesa della razza above all, pushes the match Phoenicians/British to explicitly racist positions, while pulling together, in a radical anti-Semit contempt, the ancient Semitic civilizations, the modern Jews and all the British people