In February 1896, Primo Lanzoni, a professor at Venice’s Higher School of Commerce, set out for India with Gualtiero Fries, a representative of the company that operated Italy’s Adriatic railway network. They had been given a practical assignment: to study Indian imports and exports, identify goods Italy could sell, find firms worth dealing with, and determine how traffic between Europe and India might be channelled through Venice and the Suez route rather than rival ports. Less than a month after their journey began, an Italian army was defeated by the forces of Emperor Menelik II at Adwa in Ethiopia, East Africa. The two seemingly unrelated episodes unfolded almost simultaneously. While Italy was attempting to expand its territorial empire in Africa, Italian commercial planners were travelling through British India in search of markets and trading connections. One sought territory; the other, commercial access. By the late nineteenth century, Italy had acquired colonies of its own and was actively seeking greater influence overseas. Its position in colonial India, however, was more complicated. Here, Italy operated without territory, jurisdiction, or political control. This is the story of Italians in colonial India, caught between opportunity, enterprise and British control. Italian interest in India dates back to before unification, when Italy was not yet a nation-state. Along with China, India was among the most appealing destinations in the vast ‘Orient’, attracting travellers, merchants and missionaries. “Indian ports had an impressive attractiveness for Italian businessmen, politicians and experts of economy and commerce,” writes academic Marzia Casolari in Bengal and Italy: Transcultural Encounters from the Mid-19th to Early 21st Century (2024). Initially, Bombay was the main hub of Italian economic activity. Bengal, despite its thriving industrial sector in the mid-eighteenth century, declined in the face of competition from British manufactured goods. Calcutta, however, retained its political and cultural importance. Casolari notes, “If Bombay was the ‘gateway to India’, Calcutta was the gateway to the Far East.” Silk offers one of the earliest points of contact between Italy and the colonial Indian economy. Italy entered the Bengal silk economy before a unified Italian state existed. In 1769, the English East India Company decided to introduce Piedmontese methods of silk reeling into Bengal. Developed in Piedmont in north-western Italy during the seventeenth century, the Piedmontese method was designed to produce finer, stronger and more uniform raw silk. It combined specialised reeling equipment with closer control over production and became an influential model for silk manufacture elsewhere in Europe and, from 1769, in Bengal. Company officials wanted Bengal raw silk to meet the requirements of European markets more effectively. With the introduction of the Piedmontese silk reeling machine into the East India Company’s filatures, the recruitment of Italian silk experts became a common practice. In the mid-nineteenth century, the pébrine crisis in Europe led to a substantial increase in the presence of Italian silk traders in Bengal. Pébrine, a disease affecting silkworms, had devastated sericulture across parts of Europe. In 1859, Italian noblemen Giovan Battista Castellani and Gherardo Freschi organised a scientific and commercial expedition to India and China in search of healthy silkworm stock. Freschi travelled through Bengal, where he inspected local breeding establishments. Bengal, however, did not provide the solution he had hoped to find. He concluded that the disease was present there too. Although the expedition did not succeed, its premise was significant. An ecological and industrial crisis in Europe had turned Indian silkworms, breeding practices and environments into objects of scientific inspection. India had become a possible biological reserve for the repair of a European industry. Also read | How an Anglo-Scandinavian contractor turned Indian railway profits into a Swedish dynasty A few decades later, silk was moving in the opposite direction. Historian Santosh Kumar Rai, in his journal article Colonial Knowledge Economy (2022), found that India imported 43 tonnes of Italian silk yarn in 1907, practically all of it destined for Banaras. Local weavers encountered Italian suppliers who were difficult to bargain with because mill owners had formed a cartel and raised yarn prices. Attempts by the Banaras Silk Weavers’ Cooperative Association to approach European manufacturers directly ran into the agency arrangements already controlling the trade. With Italian unification in 1861, India began to occupy a larger place in Italian economic thinking and ambition.
