After the end of the war with Ethiopia, that is from 1936 to 1941, Italian colonial officials – military and civil – had to manage the administration and daily lives in the territories both of previous and recent conquest, dealing with armed resistance until the collapse of the empire. This volume, using written and iconographic documents from the archive of the colonial precinct of Agordat, reconstructs the systems and practices of the management of power in a part of the empire, the Eritrean western lowlands, which was part of the trade network between the Red Sea and the Sudanese interior. Interpreting the “mini-stories” of daily life and the administrative notes found in personal histories, also accompanied by individual photographs, the research analyses the contradictory and volatile relations with the subordinate powers, in the person of political and religious leaders, and also with local office-holders and interpreters, necessary figures of an ambiguous mediation between colonisers and colonised.
