National Culture and Imperial Conquest: The Dante Alighieri Society in Abyssinia and the British Council in Egypt
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Dante Alighieri Society and the British Council were closely involved in Italy and Britain's imperial ambitions around the Mediterranean Sea and its outlets. An analysis of the Dante in Abyssinia and the Council in Egypt shows that, in the growing conflict between Italy's expansionist ambitions and Britain's aim to maintain its empire, organizations for the promotion of national culture abroad played a role in consolidating imperial power, with varying degrees of success. Looking at the nuts and bolts of the cultural activities these two organizations were engaged in reveals the actual practice of cultural policy: what instruments they had at their disposal and to what extent they acted in unison with their respective governments. In the 1930s, Italy tried to establish firmer control over its colonies in Libya and strengthened its ties with its numerous co-nationals living throughout the Mediterranean area. As of 1935, it embarked further afield in its ambitious colonial expansion by conquering Abyssinia, nowadays known as Ethiopia. The conquest of Abyssinia marked a definite turning point in Italy's image abroad, especially in popular opinion. Upon Italy's invasion of the country on 5 October 1935, the League of Nations could not but condemn this act of aggression against a League member, and in November economic sanctions were imposed. These sanctions, however, were doomed to be ineffective. Vital resources such as oil were exempted, and the British did not deny Italy access to the Suez Canal. The British and French governments still hoped to maintain the semblance of good relations with Italy, as formalized in the Stresa Front agreed upon in April of that year. Both governments held on to the belief that Mussolini could be a potential ally in containing Hitler's power. A deal was made, the Hoare-Laval Plan, which would hand over a major part of Abyssinia to Italy for it to control as some form of protectorate, provided that Italy would end the war immediately. When news of this deal leaked out to the general public in France and Britain, the outrage in popular opinion was such that the British Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare and the French Prime Minister Pierre Laval were forced to resign.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".