Mussolini, Abyssinia and British Imperialism

In his recent book The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars, Richard Overy writes that the mid-1930s ‘seem to have represented a watershed in British perceptions of the inevitable slide to war’ and cites the conflict following the Italian invasion of Abyssinia as one reason for this. Yet his book, and much of the broader historiography on 1930s Britain, fails to tease out the full significance of the invasion, which took place 75 years ago this month. 

In the late 19th century imperial Europe carved up Africa for its own benefit in what has since become known as ‘the Scramble for Africa’. Abyssinia was one of only two territories on that continent – the other being Liberia – free from European rule at this point, having fought off an attempted Italian invasion in 1896. By 1934 the Italian leader Benito Mussolini, eager both to draw attention away from domestic political difficulties and to avenge the Italians’ earlier humiliating defeat, decided the time was ripe to launch a renewed assault. In December 1934 a territorial dispute between Italy and Abyssinia gave Mussolini the excuse he was looking for to ready his troops and prepare for war.

With a sense of mounting crisis, Anthony Eden, the Lord Privy Seal, travelled to Rome in June 1935, offering the Italians control of the port of Zeila in British Somaliland and the sizeable Abyssinian region of Ogaden in return for a peaceful resolution to the conflict. But Mussolini, in the words of A.J.P. Taylor, ‘wanted the glory of a victorious war, not a mere adjustment of territory’. When the Italians launched their invasion on October 3rd, 1935 from both Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, the League of Nations imposed notional economic sanctions on Italy. However, these made little difference due to the Soviet Union continuing to supply the Italians with oil and Italy’s well-developed domestic munitions factories. With the Ethiopians thoroughly outgunned and unable to respond to the Italian’s illegal use of poisonous mustard gas, many thousands of Abyssinian military personnel and civilians were killed. The Abyssinian emperor Haile Selassie finally fled the country in defeat in 1936, taking refuge in Britain until his return in 1941.

A political storm

Under Article X of the League of Nations Covenant, that body had a responsibility to uphold the territorial sovereignty of all member states, of which Abyssinia was one. The failure of the League of Nations to act decisively over Abyssinia was one of a number of incidents which weakened it in the run-up to the Second World War and historians still view the episode as one of the final nails in the coffin of an already ailing institution. In Britain, Abyssinia had long been seen as a troublesome state and anti-slavery activists had persistently campaigned against Ethiopian slave-trading. In France, meanwhile, the government was eager to placate the Italians in order to earn their support in any forthcoming conflict with Germany. Britain and France thus sought to appease the Italians offering them in December 1935 the Hoare-Laval Pact, a deal which amounted to little more than a refined version of Eden’s earlier proposals for territorial concessions.

The crisis provoked a political storm in Britain. A number of individuals and groups supported the Italian military assault. The British-Italian Council for Peace and Friendship, for example, published letters in the national press justifying the invasion and stressing that the motives of the conflict were primarily humanitarian, aimed at ending slavery in Abyssinia. Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists ran a poorly-supported ‘Mind Britain’s Business’ campaign in support of the Italian forces, while Evelyn Waugh, then correspondent for the Daily Mail and author of the 1936 book Waugh in Abyssinia, also supported the Italians, though he later claimed only to have done so to be contrary. Both the Daily Mail, then owned by the pro-Mussolini Lord Rothermere, and the Observer broadly supported Italy in the conflict. In the House of Commons, Sir Arnold Wilson, who sympathised with both Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, defended the Italians as ‘liberators’. On the political Left, George Bernard Shaw described the conflict as a natural opposition between ‘Tribalism’ and ‘Capitalism’, blaming the League of Nations’ failure to act, rather than the militaristic advances of the Italian fascists.

Yet Britain also witnessed a more profound opposition to the Hoare-Laval Pact and to the Italian invasion in general. The Labour MP and feminist Eleanor Rathbone voiced the concerns of a number of MPs when she denounced in the House of Commons British inaction as ‘treachery’ and ‘a betrayal of Abyssinia’. Rathbone and others, such as the Conservative MP Vyvyan Adams, were launched into a fully-fledged opposition to British appeasement on the back of the Abyssinian invasion and were among the many protestors to force the resignation of Sir Samuel Hoare from his post as foreign secretary over the matter before the end of 1935.

On the more radical left the invasion motivated the activist Sylvia Pankhurst to found her newspaper The New Times and Ethiopia News, a hub of anti-fascist journalism and commentary in the coming years, which actively campaigned on behalf of Abyssinia. Undoubtedly, however, the crisis had its most radicalising impact on members of Britain’s black population. Both the moderate London-based League of Coloured Peoples and the Communist-inspired Negro Welfare Association passed resolutions stressing that Italian militarism represented ‘a deeply seated conviction in the minds of most European peoples that African peoples were ordained to be their serfs’. The Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James wrote of the incident that ‘Africans and people of African descent, especially those who have been poisoned by British Imperialist education, needed a lesson. They have got it … Let the lesson sink in deep’. James formed the International African Friends of Abyssinia, a pressure group based in London (which later became the International African Service Bureau), established specifically to campaign for Abyssinian freedom and to raise a fighting force of interested black peoples to join the combat in Abyssinia, similar to the International Brigades which would later participate in the Spanish Civil War.

This black British radicalism was emblematic of a broader unrest among black peoples on a global scale. African-Americans spoke out against the Italian invasion and in the British Caribbean it was one of several motivating factors for a period of striking and rioting which continued until the late 1930s. In Africa, the outrage was so strong that, at a meeting in Kenya organised by the Kikuyu Central Association, attendees vowed to ‘march to Ethiopia to defend their brothers’. Emphasising the global outcry of African and African-descended peoples over the Italian aggression, the London-based Trinidadian activist George Padmore (1903-59) wrote in the African-American periodical The Crisis that ‘the struggles of the Abyssinians is [sic] fundamentally a part of the struggles of the black race the world over for national freedom, political, social and racial emancipation’.

The colonial dilemma

The Abyssinian crisis precipitated considerable soul-searching in British political circles over how best to deal with fascism’s expansionist tendencies. However, as well as a Fascist assault the invasion was also a colonial one and this proved problematic. While many Britons were critical of the Italian actions and even of the British Government’s response, few were prepared to view Mussolini’s aggression as more broadly representative of the rapacious urges of European colonialism. Indeed, many British defenders of the Italian invasion, such as Sir Arnold Wilson and Sir Leo Money, argued that supporting Abyssinia was an expression of the solidarity of ‘white’ people. Others, including Lady Kathleen Simon and her husband, Sir John Simon – foreign secretary for the first half of 1935, after which time he was moved to the Home Office – condemned the Abyssinians as slave traders and supported the Italian invasion as an expression of European humanitarianism.

A minority in Britain insisted on connecting anti-fascism to anti-imperialism, however. George Padmore was foremost of this group. A close friend of C.L.R. James and member of his International African Friends of Abyssinia, Padmore hoped that the conflict would force ‘public opinion in America and Europe to realise for the first time the close relationship which the colonial question bears to modern wars’. He developed the notion of ‘colonial fascism’ to describe the behaviour of imperial powers in the colonies (a concept that  Jawaharlal Nehru was articulating at around the same time) and insisted that the only way to defeat fascism once and for all was to give independence to colonial possessions. Writing in the periodical International African Opinion, Padmore stated:

Imperialism, whatever its high pretensions to philanthropy, cannot be anything else but fascist in its actual operation … Empire and Democracy are not compatible; in the end one must give way to the other.

Padmore and his associates did their best to focus British attention on Abyssinia and to insist on the need for the anti-fascist movement to embrace anti-imperialism. Unfortunately, events in Europe were moving at an alarming pace with the Spanish Civil War looming distractingly and the increasing threat from Nazi Germany. As Richard Overy notes, the crisis in Spain would become ‘for much of British society the touchstone of the future of European civilisation’, displacing attention from Abyssinia. 

As a consequence the opportunity to unify anti-fascism and anti-imperialism presented by the Abyssinian invasion was largely missed, despite the best efforts of Padmore and others. Indeed, anti-Fascists could often be found legitimising imperialism in the 1930s because colonial possessions made British forces both economically and militarily stronger in the war against Fascist forces. As the historian Susan Pennybacker has argued, ‘the most ardent defenders of empire after Hitler’s assumption of power were often Nazism’s bitter enemies’. When Mussolini began his murderous campaign against Abyssinia, the majority in Britain put its faith in the League of Nations to resolve matters but even politicians like Eleanor Rathbone, quick to denounce Italy and the British response, did not link anti-fascist sympathies to anti-imperialist arguments. Padmore and his associates found themselves outnumbered in the debate over how best to confront fascism.

Losing this argument had significant consequences. The Italian war on Abyssinia demonstrates the catastrophic failure of the British policy of appeasement. For critics like Padmore and C.L.R James, this failure was apparent early on. These activists, becoming deeply immersed in a broader campaign against imperialism, understood appeasement in Abyssinia as an attempt to use African people as bargaining tools for intra-European politics. The concept of colonial fascism enabled them to criticise both Italian militarism and British imperialism without contradiction at a time when the bulk of public opinion supported the League of Nations and British imperialism as the only bulwarks against fascist militarism.

Daniel Whittall is studying for a PhD in Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He also sits on the Executive Committee of the Black and Asian Studies Association.