SUMMARY:

Caterina Scalvedi reflects on the challenges and possibilities inherent in the historian’s craft when studying colonial rule, particularly focusing on Fascist Italy’s empire in Africa. Drawing inspiration from the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s experiences, Scalvedi argues that analyzing colonial history solely through binaries like “colonizer” and “colonized” is uninformative. Instead, she emphasizes the importance of the “middle ground,” highlighting the centrality of unintended consequences, bargaining, and diverse agencies that existed within colonial societies, demonstrating that power relations were far from unidirectional and fixed. Scalvedi contends that acknowledging this complexity, found in the “great human stories” of historical records, empowers historians to move beyond simplistic moral judgments and develop new, more nuanced paradigms for understanding the past.