Mussolini believed that numbers were the key to strength. Between 1922 and 1945 the Fascists attempted to translate that belief into policy by introducing a structured programme to increase the population in Italy. This included campaigns to increase the birth rate, the establishment of demographic colonies, and a battle against urbanisation. This book is a detailed examination of the demographic policy of Mussolini's Fascist regime. Based on archival research, it shows how the Fascists used statistics to mould public opinion, as well as to form policy, and demonstrates the ways in which population theory at the time both reflected and informed policy. Carl Ipsen argues that Mussolini's demographic policy can tell us a great deal about the contradictory nature of Fascism itself, and describes the Fascist efforts to mould the Italian population as one of the most telling examples of the failed attempt to create a totalitarian Fascist utopia.

Mussolini believed that numbers were the key to strength. Between 1922 and 1945 the Fascists attempted to translate that belief into policy by introducing a structured programme to increase the population in Italy. This included campaigns to increase the birth rate, the establishment of demographic colonies, and a battle against urbanisation. This book is a detailed examination of the demographic policy of Mussolini's Fascist regime. Based on archival research, it shows how the Fascists used statistics to mould public opinion, as well as to form policy, and demonstrates the ways in which population theory at the time both reflected and informed policy. Carl Ipsen argues that Mussolini's demographic policy can tell us a great deal about the contradictory nature of Fascism itself, and describes the Fascist efforts to mould the Italian population as one of the most telling examples of the failed attempt to create a totalitarian Fascist utopia.

From the time of Malthus, the insufficient supply of food resources has been considered the main constraint of population growth and the main factor in the high mortality prevailing in pre-industrial times. In this essay, the mechanisms of biological, social and cultural nature linking subsistence, mortality and population and determining its short and long term cycles are discussed. The author's analysis examines the existing evidence from the century of the Great Plague to the industrial revolution, interpreting the scanty quantitative information concerning caloric budgets and food supply, prices and wages, changes in body height and epidemiological history, demographic behaviours of the rich and of the poor. The emerging picture sheds doubts on the existence of a long term interrelation between subsistence of nutritional levels and mortality, showing that the level of the latter was determined more by the epidemiological cycles than by the nutritional level of the population.

Dieser Buchtitel ist Teil des Digitalisierungsprojekts Springer Book Archives mit Publikationen, die seit den Anfangen des Verlags von 1842 erschienen sind. Der Verlag stellt mit diesem Archiv Quellen fur die historische wie auch die disziplingeschichtliche Forschung zur Verfugung, die jeweils im historischen Kontext betrachtet werden mussen. Dieser Titel erschien in der Zeit vor 1945 und wird daher in seiner zeittypischen politisch-ideologischen Ausrichtung vom Verlag nicht beworben.