Il problema monetario nella Colonia Eritrea: il tallero di Maria Teresa nella letteratura coloniale (1857-1941)

In 1869, Italian colonialism began in the Southern Red Sea region with the purchasing of the Assab bay for 6,000 Maria Theresa thalers, by the former missionary Giuseppe Sapeto, on behalf of the Rubattino company and with the approval of the Italian government. The Maria Theresa thaler was a silver coin circulating in the region since the end of the eighteenth century, being mainly employed in the coffee trade. It became the most widespread silver coin in the region by the end of the nineteenth century, and the Italians tried to replace it with a more manageable medium of exchange until the end of their colonial period in East Africa in 1941, in vain. Overcoming the “crisis of representation” produced since the influential essay on Orientalism by Edward Said, the chapter turns colonial document from being the means for historical and ethnographic research to being its objects. In the chapter, some of the most relevant colonial documents about the Eritrean monetary system are analyzed, as well as the debates that contributed to the designing of colonial monetary policies. The first references to the Maria Theresa thaler appeared in commercial pamphlets, when the Italians were trying to incentivize the regional trade, whose principal medium of exchange was the silver thaler. The first officer to propose to replace the Maria Theresa thaler was Ercole Petazzi, in 1911. In the following years, the monetary problem became a central political issue, and this is revealed by the senior grade of the officers who dealt with the subject before the First World War, such as the Secretary of the Royal Monetary Commission of the Ministry of Treasury, Giuseppe Carboneri (1912), and the ship commander and diplomat Carlo Rossetti (1914). The writings of these senior officers also unveil their attention for the broader European debate about colonial monetary systems: models and ideas produced in different imperial contexts were shared in international conferences like the ones organized by the Institut Colonial Internationale, in Bruxelles. After the First World War, political motivations for the introduction of a colonial currency in Eritrea prevailed upon economic ones. In the presentation of the new colonial silver coin issued by the Italians in May 1918, the tallero d’Italia, the archaeologist Lucio Mariani stated that the aim of the new coin was “to claim […] respect for [Italian] currency, [which is] the sign of [Italy’s] financial and moral power in the Red Sea”. A particularly strong urgency after Italy’s “mutilated victory” against Austria, the original issuer of the Maria Theresa thaler. The last publication analyzed in this chapter exemplifies the cultural prejudices which characterized all the previous publications. In 1941, the last governor of Italian Somalia, Francesco Saverio Caroselli, outlined an evolutionist ladder of colonial monetary systems, based on cultural as well as geopolitical factors, defining the Maria Theresa thaler as “commodity money”, one step above a “barter” system. The chapter ends with a description of the strategic use of the Maria Theresa thaler by both the Italians and the British during the East African campaign, and the persistence of the same tropes in the British writings dealing with the monetary problem, once they took over the former Italian East Africa. The chapter shows how colonial policies were not simply transferred from Europe. Colonialism is not only the imposition of a rule, but a process made by negotiations, conflicts and adaptations within the colonial contexts, but also within the group of the colonizers. The chapter also shows the existence of networks of knowledge allowing the trans-imperial circulation of ideas and models of colonial administration. Finally, the examples reported in the chapter confirm that the non-neutral nature of currency was acknowledged by the colonial officers themselves, which considered the introduction of a colonial currency as “spring for political influence”, and the building of a colonial monetary system as “an act of true and final colonial conquest”.