Hunting Empire: Big-Game Hunting, Safari Culture and the Making of Italian Africa

This presentation investigates the colonial and post-colonial relationship between Italy and African environments through the lens of big-game hunting, safari culture, and representations of wildlife in the Horn of Africa. 

While Italian colonialism has traditionally been studied through political, military, and racial frameworks, the role of nature and non-human animals in the making of empire has received comparatively little attention. Yet African landscapes and wildlife occupied a central place in the colonial imagination. From the late nineteenth century to the collapse of the empire and beyond, hunting expeditions, safari narratives, natural history collections, books and films contributed to constructing a particular vision of Africa as a space of adventure, conquest, abundance, and masculine self-fashioning. Animals became trophies, scientific specimens, economic resources, and powerful symbols through which colonial authority was asserted and legitimized. 

Drawing on travel accounts, documentary films, photographs, museum collections, and archival sources produced between the 1880s and the early 1970s, this talk explores how Italian representations of African fauna evolved across the transition from formal colonial rule to the post-colonial era. Particular attention will be devoted to the circulation of hunting imagery, the relationship between scientific knowledge and colonial domination, and the role of museums in preserving and reproducing colonial understandings of African nature. 

The lecture will also examine the paradoxical relationship between hunting and conservation. Practices that contributed to the exploitation and commodification of wildlife often generated some of the earliest discourses on environmental protection, shaping enduring ideas about wilderness, endangered species, and the management of nature. By tracing these continuities, the presentation highlights the long-term ecological and cultural legacies of Italian colonialism and reflects on the challenges involved in decolonising natural history collections and representations of African wildlife today. 

Beatrice Falcucci is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the University of Florence and the University of Houston, with a secondment at Addis Ababa University. She is also a lecturer in Modern History at the University of Florence. Previously, she was a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), a visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory (University of London). Her research focuses on the history and memory of colonialism and empire, material and visual culture, environmental history, and the post-colonial legacies of science and collecting practices. She has published on colonial museums, material culture, scientific expeditions and the environmental dimensions of Italian colonialism. Her work has been supported by institutions including the American Academy in Rome and the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR). She was awarded the Fondazione Spadolini Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in Italian history and the Association for the Study of Modern Italy Prize for Best Unpublished Article.