Seminars

Abstract

Abstract: I will present the first chapter of my manuscript-in-progress, Industrious Skies: The Chemistry of Fascist Nature The book is a cultural history of Italy’s interwar initiatives to fix atmospheric nitrogen – that is, to take unreactive nitrogen gas from the air for use in fertilizers and explosives.I show that the promise of these technologies—that of making bread from air—defines fascist strategy from the very outset of the regime. The availability of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, explosives, and chemical weapons powered major fascist initiatives, beginning with the Battle for Wheat in 1925, and including the draining of the Pontine Marshes, the demographic campaign, and imperialism. Attending to the materiality of industrial processes and products of nitrogen capture as well as more abstract elemental and atmospheric poetics, my study will offer a new perspective on Italian fascism and will shed light on a critical shift whereby discourses of global scarcity give way to ecological crisis better understood through attention to structural violence and injustice. The chapter focuses on the period between 1919-1925 and draws on research I conducted last semester at the National Archives in College Park, MD, and the Othmer Library of Chemical History in Philadelphia. Declassified reports at the National Archives attest to extensive intelligence collaboration between America, France, and the United Kingdom in efforts implement the German Haber-Bosch process during and just after the war. Italy was left out of this intelligence-sharing and was largely disregarded in reports of national progress toward nitrogen capture. In the pages of the Giornale di chimica industrial e applicata, between 1919-1924, Italian scientists including Giacomo Fauser, Arturo Miolati, and Carlo Toniolo discussed the absence of government investment in fixed nitrogen despite the strategic importance of synthetic fertilizers for the national economy.