| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Manuela A. Williams. Mussolini's Propaganda Abroad: Subversion in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, 1935–1940. (Studies in Intelligence Series.) New York: Routledge. 2006. Pp. xii, 238. $120.00.
Manuela A. Williams has produced a competent and succinct survey of her topic. She splits her book into four segments: an introduction to interwar Italo-British relations in the eastern Mediterranean broadly defined; more precise focus on the situation successively in Palestine and Egypt; and, finally, an account of British reaction to Italian pushing, along with a last chapter examining Italian intelligence as a whole. Sometimes this division is strained. Williams delineates Nazi policy as well as the Fascist Italian line and, on occasion, records developments in places as far apart as Algeria, India, Thailand, and Italian immigrant "communities" in the United States.	1
On her first page, Williams remarks confidently that "during the last two decades there have been significant advances in the field of intelligence history and propaganda studies, which have been generally held to have revolutionized our understanding of the approach, outbreak and subsequent course of the Second World War." But her research, though useful, scarcely entails a "revolution." We learn that Italy was an ambitious and even wayward power in the diplomatic practice of the moment, and that its intrusiveness was greatest and at its most annoying between the attack on Ethiopia in October 1935 and the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. During those months Italy spent lavishly on its own information (or disinformation) services and was generous toward any Arab or other Islamic nationalists who sought its care (Williams produces her best character portrait in a book that is too brief to indulge much in such depiction in the case of the Syrian journalist, Shakib Arslan).	. . .

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