Internal colonisation, hegemony and coercion: Investigating migration to Southern Lazio, Italy, in the 1930s

This paper investigates the Italian fascist regime's use of internal colonisation as part of a wider ruralisation policy aimed at promoting population growth, curbing rural-urban migration, staunching emigration, and halting the spread of industrial urbanisation. By focusing on the case study of the Pontine Marshes, the paper demonstrates how, through targeted selection procedures aimed at displacing defined social and political undesirables, migrants were chosen and effectively coerced into migrating to the “fascist” landscape of the marshes. The area, reclaimed and developed in the 1930s, was celebrated as a sign of the regime's engineering and social success. The paper utilises Antonio Gramsci's thought on hegemony, and argues that the overt use of coercion hints at the fact that fascism, although ideologically totalitarian and hegemonic, was contested. Although statisticians, demographers and state bureaucrats were organised and institutionalised in the construction of hegemony based on consent, fascism based itself more in coercion than in passive consent in the case of internal colonisation.